The Tile My Grandfather Laid

There are about three hundred of them and he knows which four his grandfather laid last, because they are slightly out of true.

The old man did the whole courtyard in the year his first son was born. He was a joiner by trade and had no business laying tile, and by the far corner he had clearly run short and had to piece something together, and the result is a small area near the water tap where the pattern does not quite resolve.

Everybody in that family knows about the corner. It is a joke. It has been a joke for fifty years.

His grandfather has been gone since he was nineteen.

And there is a thing he does that he has never mentioned to his wife, who he tells everything.

When he comes out first thing, before anybody else is up, in the summer when the tiles are still cool, he stands on that corner with bare feet for a moment. Not deliberately at first. It became deliberate somewhere around the third year and he could not tell you when.

And in June, standing there, with the light just starting to come over the wall, he found his eyes were wet, and the thing that had done it was a piece of fired clay laid badly by a man who was not a tiler.

And he was embarrassed. Genuinely embarrassed, standing alone in his own courtyard at six in the morning.

Because what is that? What is a grown man doing standing on a tile? And he does not know whether the thing that moves him is his grandfather, or the courtyard, or the clay, or something else that he does not have a word for and has never tried to find one for.

The ground was holy because of who was standing on it

Let me deal with the embarrassment first, because it is doing more work than it deserves.

You were alone. There was nobody in that courtyard at six in the morning and nobody has ever seen you do it, and the embarrassment is not social. It is a man in his forties finding out that he is more porous than he thought and not knowing what to do with the information.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: a place can carry the presence of God without ever becoming God, and that is not a fine distinction, it is the plainest thing in Scripture. That is not my careful handling of a strange June morning, it is what stands written in Exodus at the bush, and the same Holy Spirit who was in that fire has been on a corner near your water tap at six in the morning.

Read what is said to Moses, and notice what makes the ground what it is.

Do not come any closer, God said. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.Exodus 3:5

The ground is holy. He says so plainly, and He tells the man to take his shoes off because of it, and that is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a patch of ordinary earth into that.

And the ground is holy for exactly one reason, which the passage makes obvious: God is there. Not a property of the soil. Not something in the sand that would still be in the sand next week. The place is charged because of who is standing in it, and Moses is not told to worship the ground, he is told to take his shoes off.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a word for what you feel: standing on that corner is not confusion and it is not an error of category, because the written word says a place can be holy ground on account of a Presence, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been meeting you there since about the third year.

Now let me answer the question you have actually been asking, which is what the thing is.

It is not the clay. You know that already, and the fact that you know it is why you have been embarrassed rather than merely moved, and nothing written puts power in fired earth, and the Holy Spirit has never asked anybody to pretend otherwise.

It is that the corner is the one place in your life where three things sit on top of each other: a man who loved you and is gone, the ordinary work of hands, and the plain fact that all of it was given. You cannot look at it and think about only one of those, and there is no available sentence that holds all three, so what comes instead is wet eyes at six in the morning.

That is not a malfunction. What is written says every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man feel the whole weight of a given thing all at once, and He does it through objects constantly because objects hold what sentences will not.

And here is the guard, and it is the whole of what this article will say about it: through, not at. Nobody here is telling you what to do about that corner, and nobody is telling you not to stand there. What the written word rules out is stopping at the clay, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man's attention along the line rather than leaving it on the floor.