After the Storm

Sometimes, dear Readers, the eternal things are to be found in the present moment, and in unexpected ways. But grace is like that. So here I am retelling a story I told a few years ago, with gratitude to God and to a most unlikely messenger of his.

And Jesus did not say, but I can imagine that someone inspired by his words might have said, that there was a man with five silver oaks that the hurricane had blown down on his property, in four separate places barely missing the house and the power line, and he was out among them the next day, with a handsaw, trying to clear away some of the smaller limbs, though the trunks of the trees were three feet thick, and each of the trees weighed four thousand pounds.

And a man came by in his truck, a perfect stranger, who said, “Hello there, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack with that handsaw! Let me at ’em with my chainsaw.” For the stranger said that God had sent him. This was as a penance for his sins, he said, because he had stopped by the property some months ago, and he peeked in the windows to see what was going on.

For the property was once the glebe house for the pastor of the parish church across the road. “My grandfather built that church in 1954,” said the stranger. It is a church no longer, though. The Canadian Catholic diocese — Antigonish, in Nova Scotia — had closed it and two of the other churches on our island, leaving two of five, for the time being. The steeple still stands, though the new owners will probably have it down. They are turning the building into apartments.