Photo by Father Theophan

BY FATHER THEOPHAN MACKEY
St. Job of Pochaiv Orthodox Church
Los Alamos

A few weeks ago, I was emptying a kiln full of glazed and finished pottery. It’s like Christmas morning for a kid. What you expect isn’t always what you get, but most of the time there are at least a few thrilling surprises. I suppose one can thank the kiln gods for that.

That morning, I had a few pinch pots made by some of the church kids that were finished. They had glazed them all the way to the bottom, and they didn’t have foot rings, so I had placed them on stilts.

When the kiln is fired to glaze temperature, the glazes melt and become fluid. Glazes on vertical, or close to vertical surfaces flow. Some flow more than others but all of them melt. When the kiln and ware cool off, the glaze “freezes” at near 1000° on the way down. If the glaze has flowed into contact with the kiln shelf, surprise! You now have a sculpture! “Pot and Shelf”

To keep this from happening, the potter can stilt the pot that has a glazed bottom or has a runny glaze near its foot. These stilts have tiny, sharp metal prongs that stand vertically and minimal contact with the pot and the fluid glaze. They stick, and need to be knocked off, but the resulting glaze mark is usually small and can be ground down.

These little pinch pots were stuck to the stilts, but most of them popped off pretty easily. One was stubborn, and I did what I shouldn’t have. I forced it. Pulled hard, the stilts gave way, and I over corrected in a split-second and stabbed the sharp stilt into the meat of my left thumb. I yelped and dropped the pot and began to try to staunch the immediate flow of blood.

It hurt like the dickens! But the funny thing was, it kept hurting. For two weeks, no matter how often I would wash and bandage and disinfect it, it just throbbed. It’s amazing how much one uses their left thumb. Each time I did, I was painfully reminded of it.

Then a couple weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table, fussing with my thumb (as had become my most regular past-time). I squeezed it and I saw something move. My wife fetched the tweezers and she removed a miniscule piece of nichrome metal.

There’s something there of life. The smallest thing, if it is not good for us or foreign to our nature, a memory of hurt, an unhealthy habit, and shameful secret, can go unnoticed by those around us.

We can get on with life with this thing, bugging us. Sometimes it’s more annoying, sometimes less. Sometimes we can give up and just accept it as a character flaw or decide to celebrate it and build a persona around it. But if it is truly unhealthy, it will keep us from healing; it will keep us from being whole.

I felt immediate relief once the shard was gone. And within two days the wound wasn’t a distraction at all. As I type this and look at my thumb, I can’t even tell where the injury was. Humans are resilient that way. Not that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but when the damaging instrument is removed, we can heal from almost anything.

What sliver is hurting you?