Story and Theology of our Wagon Wheel
We found a dusty and dirty old wagon wheel in a barn at the Mountain that used to stand where our House of Peace now rests. Having taken time to form it somewhat like a “southern cross” or a Christic mondala, we cleaned up the wagon wheel and Dan Riley took time to paint it in bright color oils so that it might portray its meaning for us. Like wheels off of wagons, and other vehicles now well over 150 years ago, this one was fashioned by hand, shaped by someone who made it, forming each spoke and each part with great care. Each piece fits, as handwork especially does, one piece beside another. Over the years different ones of us would take time rubbing our hands over each spoke, which “appeared” to be like the one beside it and yet – your hand could tell you – that they had been carved and formed, shaped and put in place not by a machine, but by someone’s hand. Great attention must have been spent on each one so that together, on an axle with other wheels, the wagon could make its way down a rough country road bearing its burden, bearing others.
When the Students for the Mountain were beginning and gaining understanding of themselves, one early coordinator was reaching for a metaphor one night to help the other students realize who they were in mission with one another for the Mountain. Possibly he had been in the barn earlier in the day and had seen the wheel, for he said that the Students for the Mountain are, “like a wagon wheel.” “Each of us,” he went onto say, “is shaped and placed in our own position in the wheel to work together.” Each one is shaped and fitted (gifted) by our “Maker,” our creator God, who has formed us to bear and carry one another. We have been shaped to help carry and hold things up, to move everything along the road of life. Over the years we have reflected on it and remember the fact that a wheel is not a wheel – it is only complete and will work, as it should – when all of us work with the gifts we have been given to carry whatever we have been called to bear. Christ is the center, the hub and axle around which and from which we, “though many are one” in caring what we are to care with Him.
“In him we live and move and have our being,” the Acts of the Apostles tells us. Early Christians used metaphors also to help each other see how they were each uniquely gifted, profoundly and especially made and formed as members of Christ’s body, centered in Him and moving out into the world doing the work of the Good News. We look to early Christians and the Sacred Scripture and we see in our wagon wheel over our fireplace, the fiery son of Christ, which illumines the world and enflames us with the fire of the Holy Spirit that will renew the world.
As we sit before the wheel over our fireplace, we hear our stories told by one another, each of us “spokes” or spokespersons, wonderfully and individually made and making our difference today.
Mentioned elsewhere in this book “collaboration,” a willingness and ability to work with one another with our gifts, sharing a ministry and mission with Jesus Christ, we rejoice that we have been placed together to make a difference for others. St. Irenaeus says something similar in the metaphor about clay:
“It is not you that shapes God, it is God that shapes you.
If then you are the work of God,
Await the hand of the
Artist who does all things in do season.
Offer God your heart, soft and tractable
And keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay moist,
Lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of God’s own fingers!”
