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The first six years our family lived in this 1940s Cape Cod-style house, I did not want to get the fireplace fixed.
My wife disagreed. But I had reasons for letting the sleeping hearth lie: The fireplace looked like it hadn’t been used for decades. It sat at floor level in our small living room, without a glass door or any other barrier, and it was easy to imagine our young children accidentally crashing and burning. Mostly, though, the making and tending of fires struck me as something an Eagle Scout does, a task that requires handiness and confident opinions about wood varieties (or is that wood “species”?) and iron tools (or steel tools?) — yet another area of life in which I, with my laptop job and very few worldly skills, would feel less traditionally masculine than I’d like to be.
But then one cool evening last fall, we went to our friends’ house for a fire pit hangout. I watched as my buddy Benno and our families’ six total kids worked to start and establish the fire. Later, we sang some Taizé songs with guitars and their fifth grader on violin. The kids roasted marshmallows and hot dogs and threw little magical chemical packets into the fire, which changed the flames’ colors for a while. The fire occupied all of us in different ways for the whole gathering, maybe three hours. The kids were well-behaved because their attention was engaged. I took out my phone less than usual. Maybe I could face my fears and self-doubt and join the fire club.
The following week, I called the owner of a chimney company. As I had suspected, our system was in bad shape and not up to code. He suggested an alternative, a wood-burning insert, a high-efficiency stove that’s easy to light, fits into the fireplace opening and would replace the old system instantly. “And the flames dance like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me more than once, clearly a grown-up pyro kid who had channeled his passion into a constructive career. His team installed one for us a few days later, and the owner came over in the evening to show us how to light a fire. Our kids ran to the basement to get their sleeping bags and spare blankets and made a mountain of fabric in the middle of the living room as the contractor lit the flames.
Since the installation, the stove has worked magic in our family. It’s a focal point of our evenings together, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because the English word “focus” is borrowed from the Latin focus, which literally means “fire in a hearth.” It’s an attention grabber and keeper, an analog senses-engager.
Longtime fireplace aficionados, including my wife, are nodding or saying “no duh” at this point in my reflection. Enjoying a fireplace is not surprising. But one thing that has caught me off guard about the hearth is how effective a memento mori it is. Cleaning it out or getting new logs loaded, I invariably end up with black ash marks on my hands. “Hmm, reminds me of Ash Wednesday,” I thought the first time I noticed this, formerly the only day of the year I’d find ash on my skin.
Now, in the colder months, I’ve found Ash Wednesday moments a few nights a week. That might sound depressing or morbid, but I haven’t found it so. Fire both warms and destroys, just as water both quenches and chokes. Oil that blesses will also clog your arteries. One of the most joyful church services I ever attended was the mournful funeral Mass of a true social justice prophet who died too young of cancer. This is the both/and world the Lord has made, the fireplace reminds me. Let us rejoice and be sad in it.
