BLACKSMITHING QUIETLY AND OUT LOUD
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
There was a long moment during the afternoon hour when I knew that dozens of people were gathered inside the church, lamenting, repenting, and recommitting, as we put it, to ending gun violence. I was with them, part of the vigil, yet in the moment separate. While they sang and kept silence inside, I was outside the doors with the forge, tending the steel from a gun brought in that morning to a buyback held in the parish parking lot. I could not hear them, but they told me later that they heard the sound of the hammer syncopating their prayer, that they incorporated my physical devotions into the work of their body.
We had arranged it this way so that the buyback would receive an appendix of transformation. I fashioned a quick and rudimentary garden tool as they were gathering for the Vigil, made from the feeder barrel of a shotgun, then ushered them indoors, assuring them that they would return to the fire at the end of the liturgy. Alone with the forge and another metal tube, I found myself working with the metal, wondering what it wanted to be, which way it liked to bend. I am far from mastering it yet. That work is still unfinished, just as prayer is never done, but I think that it is on its way to becoming some representation of the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2).
I had not necessarily intended to get into blacksmithing. I did want to do something more than “thoughts and prayers” when it came to addressing the epidemic of gun violence that has spread virulently through our national and Episcopal consciousness and conscience. The Guns to Gardens: National Buyback Day provided an avenue for symbolic and practical engagement with the problem, and with the promises of the prophets to pound swords into ploughshares. When my initial overtures to find a friendly blacksmith failed, I found myself drawn to take up the hammer myself. Perhaps there was a little bravado involved, and a dash of intrigue – the art of the fire and iron, earth elements, certainly has its mystic appeal. I knew that I would be opening a new channel for prayer, for failure, for inspiration.
There is something, too, about the crucible of the forge that is almost sacramental in its ability to change the outward shape of something that comes from the core of creation so that it reflects grace instead of corruption. It is not unpriestly.
Blacksmithing traces its biblical genealogy to the early chapters of Genesis, in which the descendant of Cain “made all kinds of bronze and iron tools” (Genesis 4:22). One might reasonably wonder, did he make them to further or to atone for his ancestor’s violence? That is, did he turn out weapons, or garden tools?
The smiths had the privilege and honor of working on the ark of the covenant, its altar and its tent (Exodus 31:1-5); yet they were also implicated in the creation of idols. Isaiah describes the worthless and vain toil of the idol-forger: “The ironsmith fashions it and works it over the coals, shaping it with hammers, and forging it with his strong arm; he becomes hungry and his strength fails, he drinks no water and is faint” (Isaiah 44:12). During the vigil, I had to ask our Deacon to bring me water, and anything can become an idol if the worshipper chooses it as sacred: a gun, a garden tool, fire, the performance of art.
In the Rule of St. Benedict, the artisans of the monastery (including, presumably, the blacksmith), “are to practice their craft with all humility, but only with the abbot’s permission. If one of them becomes puffed up by his skillfulness in his craft, and feels that he is conferring something on the monastery, he is to be removed from practicing his craft and not allowed to resume it unless, after manifesting his humility, he is so ordered by the abbot.” (1)
I have discovered, practicing blacksmithing as a personal devotion over the past few months, the need for constant discernment, not only of the creative process involved with the metal—what will this become?—but the observation of how it is molding me – what am I becoming? Am I becoming prideful, turning my so-called skill into an occasion for sin? Am I staying true to my call, God’s call to beat swords into ploughshares?
I reached out to a more experienced and wiser smith, Bishop James Curry, retired Connecticut Bishop Suffragan. Like me, he came to the forge through the Guns to Gardens movement, and in particular Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin’s Beating Guns tour. (2) Mike Martin is a Mennonite pastor and blacksmith who makes garden tools out of guns that are surrendered at church events, or even shipped to him at his forge in Colorado.
As Bishop Curry noted on our call, there is no way in this case of separating the forge from the biblical world. God made promises of peace, swords into ploughshares, millennia ago through the prophets, and God’s promises hold. The rhythm and physicality of hammer on gun metal create, conjure up an atmosphere of prayer, he said. Of course, prayer is a process of transformation, God working on us and in us, and at his forge, Bishop Curry sees the symbolic and literal transfiguration of gun metal into a tool for life. When he began dismantling his first gun, he found himself reciting the Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now let thy servant go in peace…”
The positioning of the blacksmith at that nexus of transformation has led to a mixed reputation through the ages. As mentioned, in the Bible they are employed to honor God, and implicated in the casting of idols. Warren Tormey, who teaches Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature at Middle Tennessee State University, has explored the representation of blacksmiths in literature and the common imagination:
“Blacksmiths stand ominously between demonic and biblical realms, practicing dark arts but also forging metals into purer and more appropriate forms, just as God forged souls into more optimal states of being…Essential to a community’s survival, he resides at its margins where he fabricates both the tools of everyday utility and the icons that express social power. …[H]e is both a crucial enabler of sustenance…and a potential threat to social cohesion.” (3)
The ability of transformative forging to upend the cultural norms and economic strata of our gun culture and profitable gun industry is part of the guns to gardens movement. The recasting of weapons of war into tools for people to grow their own food is revolutionary. Then again, as someone with the wherewithal to purchase and fuel my own forge, I have again my own discernment to do. Perhaps some part of my engagement with the physical work of the forge--the hammer strikes, the reverberations of the anvil, the assault upon the ears as the tools engage with the remnants of weaponry, the weariness of muscles ill-used--perhaps it is a penance.
The position of the blacksmith in the cultural imagination, as Tormey notes, is necessary to the functioning of the village, and yet is set apart, and somewhat suspect; again, I find the harmonics of priesthood in his position. An introvert called into a rather public position, I am used to pendulating between private and public prayer. A friend reminds me, “the personal is political.” If prayer is indeed transformative, we should expect that conversion to be visible in our outward as well as our inward lives.
Bishop Curry and I spoke of the essential relationship between the private devotions of the forge, in preparation and practice, and the public nature of its work, which is always intended to go back out into the world. The relationships that are forged in the gathering of guns and their reimagination is an essential part of the process. The personal stories that come with the steel and are reflected upon in the fire are not our own. Private devotions become another means of forging and strengthening community.
Thus my private practice on my little forge in my garage at home was always designed to find its way to the doors of the church. Tormey, on the development of the character of the blacksmith through medieval literature, writes that, “he becomes more overtly disconcerting to the Christian world, his forge recalling the underworld realms of demons in its fiery clamor.” (4)
At the Vigil, the clamor of the forge addressed the demons of gun violence that have us under fire. The Christians inside were predisposed to be disconcerted by them, as our prayers should disconcert us enough to force a transformation, repentance, a change.
Outside, alone with the forge, and silent except for the hammer, I contemplated the God who breaks the bow and shatters the spear; who burns our shields with fire (Psalm 46:9), who melts my conscience, who holds my hand as it is raised.
“Be still,” the psalm continues, “and know that I am God.”
The Rule of St Benedict in English, Timothy Fry, OSB, editor (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1981), Chapter 57 “The Artisans of the Monastery”, i-iii.
Shane Claiborne & Michael Martin, Beating Guns: Hope for People Who are Weary of Violence (Brazos Press, 2019)
Warren Tormey, “Magical (and Maligned) Metalworkers: Understanding Representations of Early and High Medieval Blacksmiths”, in, The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology. Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time: The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology. (Germany: De Gruyter, 2017), 112, accessed online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320562318_Magical_and_Maligned_Metalworkers_Understanding_Representations_of_Early_and_High_Medieval_Blacksmiths_The_Occult_in_Pre-Modern_Sciences_Medicine_Literature_Religion_and_Astrology
Tormey, 147
