Dear Dedicated Decorators:

This coming Saturday we’ll finish festooning the church for the Advent season. The wreath over the center window has been up for a few weeks now, an accommodation to the availability of those who undertake the complexity of assembling the scaffold and attaching the circled garland to the mounting bolts. I’m told that only the brave or the foolish used to ascend a rickety wooden ladder to accomplish the same purpose. If you wish to know these brave souls, just ask around—they are more than willing to recount their heroism, right down to the anxiety-causing wobbles and creaks heard during the ascent.

At my first ordained call, the building that housed the congregation had a square tower over the narthex. Every Advent, a large outdoor wreath was hung near the top of the tower, keeping watch over the eastern front. It required popping through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the balcony and climbing a series of wooden ladders affixed to the tower’s interior walls. On the first level was the old church bell. Rescued from the first building that was destroyed by fire on January 19, 1933, the bell had never been mounted in the new structure. It sat slightly off center in the tower’s interior, discarded and unringable. For a time it provided shelter for pigeons, until the property committee covered the openings in the tower with chicken wire. The tower’s basecamp was littered with the bones of pigeons past, like some fowl graveyard of warning.

The second and final ascent required climbing a long rough-hewn ladder original to construction. It swayed as one ascended, and it was best to climb with a rope, because the wreath was far too big to fit through the trapdoors. Once out the trapdoor to the exterior parapet level of the tower, the rope could be used to raise the wreath up the tower’s exterior wall. The next trick was aligning the wreath’s hook with the spike driven into the east wall of the tower. It was tricky, like a child’s fishing game, but patience was the key. Once hooked, the final challenge was to disengage the rope from the wreath without unhooking it from the tower. Hopefully, the ground-level assistant had tied the loop around the wreath just right, so you needed to only tug at the loose end of the rope to complete the task.

It was in that unlooping procedure that I once leaned too far over the parapet wall. Fortunately, the tower was flanked by two sturdy pine trees, the northern one slowing my fall as I descended to ground slightly faster than preferred. Looking like a pinecone and perhaps explaining my need for knee surgery decades later, I brushed myself off, grateful that the wreath remained in place, proudly surveying the horizon of Advent. One more climb to disentangle the rope, and the season was underway.

No deep spiritual application tied to today’s musing, just a little gratitude for whoever planted the spike in the east wall of the tower, perfectly placed for the wreath. But I’m even more grateful for the one who planted the pine tree fifty years before I needed it. I’ve always held deep appreciation for those saints before us who unknowingly prepared for our stupidity.

Glad to be here this Advent, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pinecone