Heirophany, Ontology, and A Wrench

There are, of course, a lot of oddments in an antique store, but among my favorites are the antique tools.

Among these, the gems are the small, wooden handled tools like this H.D. Smith & Co 6 inch crescent wrench.

Today a younger man, about my age, with the shadow of a beard and a black sweater walked into the store. With eyes on fire he bought this wrench.

But what he payed for it or even what he might have been willing to pay have nothing to do with the ultimate value of that wrench, a value that was clear to both of us as we spoke of wrenches and of other things, of icepicks and antique planers. Of the cold outside and of the coffee.

Per the ongoing conversation regarding Eliade on heirophany, I believe in the holiness of that wrench. It is a wrench beyond the reach of "market value." It is a sacred thing.

When, as happened today, the bell above the door jingles and the right customer comes through the door, when a magic word would have done as well as the money, we enact the sacred and the sacred manifests itself. The antique store becomes a kind of tabernacle.

But I believe in the holiness of the wrench because I first believe that the eyes of Christ are the eyes of God, that the descent of the Dove is the reign of the Holy Spirit and that in the arms of every father we feel the Father's love.

Christ does play in ten thousand faces, but I was taught to read him there.

The sacred are the profane, as Eliade says elsewhere, "are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history."

Assume the sacred.