Severe pain creates tunnel vision, stripping us of peripheral perception and all the truth that lies beyond the constriction.
As I currently endure a season of blinding post-cancer pain, I am sometimes aware of its conclusions:
“This won’t end.”
“You’re not strong enough.”
“God has turned a callous back to you.”
Answering the pain
So God answered with kindness: he gave me something from my closet to hang onto—a place holder in the pain—a reminder that what is now will not be what is then. I will heal, and he’ll talk me through it until I get there. So he proposed this:
“I want you to get your smoking pipe out of the closet.”
So I did; then cleaned and oiled its exquisite briarwood bowl. But the wood remains unlit. As yet unkindled. It’s not time. There’s a pacing to this.
My Peterson Aran Pipe/ “Author”
As I attend to divine timing, I clench the dormant pipe in my teeth while I work; admiring the Birdseye grain in the wood, holding an anchor in my hand.
The Sacred Slow: Pipe Smoking
Though my health precludes me from igniting my amber-grained Peterson of Ireland pipe, there is often a therapy in the practice: a slowing of breath and body. Every veteran pipe smoker knows this. If you smoke too quickly and don’t submit to the slow pace, the pipe will get too hot and your sweet aromatic tobacco will taste like chimney ash.
And I suspect that my quite seldom use of the pipe had little to do with any decline in health; precisely because in order to draw the embers properly, one must give in to the sacred slowness.
Pipe smoking is an embodied calming, a meditative fugue that deters anxious scanning and toxic overwhelm. My guess is that it acts like a balm to sooth the sympathetic nervous system—braking, slowing—much like the smoker canister a beekeeper uses to pacify the hive.
A forward anchor of hope
But for the moment, the pipe’s flame will remain unlit until God says, “Now.” I will let this wooden vessel of fire—that will soon again cast light upon my face—serve as a forward anchor of hope. At once present, yet drawing me into the promised future.