Purgatory

None of the churches I've attended have ever contained the doctrine of purgatory, but today's events certainly served as metaphor for such a state of being, should one exist. It was this day that we went to the storage yard of the towing company where the car was taken after your crash.

We went there to retrieve whatever could be retrieved from the remains of your vehicle. The short trip tired you, and so you are napping now, but for a while this afternoon you mustered the strength to ride to that place where nameless insurance companies rent space for the storage of those cars that can no longer serve their masters but whose final fate is not yet established. Some auction will be the final end of most of them--their parts, their scrap metal salvaged for other uses. But for now, their unique identities are not yet lost, only sequestered away in this hidden yard.

We rode to the gate and then walked the rest of the way to the car. It was like walking across a mosaic-tiled plaza as small shards of bluish glass and red and yellow bits of plastic crunched under our feet. In fact, the whole place was like a weirdly serene courtyard, and I could almost picture a fountain in the center of this gravel space encircled by cars just inside a chain link fence.

As I looked at these remains I thought how much they tell things we'd do well to remember, for there next to an old Buick was a fairly new BMW. And just behind a lustreless Olds was the tail end of a Mercedes, pushed back in a corner, as if its presence in this place could be somewhat kept secret, hidden--it couldn't, and how silly to think it mattered here anyway. Who sees them? What difference can they make in this place? And there were sad signs of other things that could no longer make a difference: a jack lying flat on the ground all alone, for what good could a fresh tire do for any of these wrecks? An oil can lying abandoned on a hood. Why open the hood and put oil in an engine that no longer fires and moves? Might as well go dry.

But strangely, there was beauty here, too. The foul smell of exhaust was missing. In fact, a sweet scent of some spring bloom wafted over the fence, coming out of a nearby wood; and the sound of bird songs was everywhere--all the more obvious because no revving engines served for competition.

Thirty dollars a day the insurance paid for a car to sit in this holding place, so no car stayed here long. All go ultimately to auction where that final value of each part is reckoned. We gathered scant armloads of things still undamaged: the garage door opener and a pair of sunglasses strangely un-bothered as they clung to the sun visor; a briefcase, a duffel bag--things that would bend and give space to those other things that would not bend on impact.

Quietly, we chatted with the man who ran the towing service. We stood there in the bright sun, made brighter as the gravel and grey dust and bits of glass reflected it back toward its origin. We shook his hand, before we left. And yet again, I looked at your broad shoulders, watched you walk a stride that becomes less and less strained and more and more familiar as the pain subsides. Once again, I thanked God that you are not yet in some place so much like this one, but made for mankind.