Sitting before the Fire

Photo by Hayden Scott on Unsplash

Sitting before the fire, listening to it crackle, to the popping of the moisture in the logs, is one of my favorite pastimes. I have been fortunate that both houses we have lived in here in the Inland Northwest have contained a fireplace. The one I have now is in our semi-finished basement. There’s no insulation down there and so a fire is practically necessary on these colder days. But sitting in front of it, reading, listening to music, I am struck by the centrality that fire plays in our lives, and how we have in so many ways side-lined or hidden it.

Fire, the element of destruction, was once so central to our experience of reality that myths were written to explain how we got it. And those myths were almost always connected with technological advancement. Fire was so holy of an object, terrible and wonderful, that I am not surprised that there is no story in the Old Testament to explain how we got it. The Old Testament is filled with stories about how the Hebrew people came about, about why there are multiple languages, multiple ethnicities, rivalries between people groups and more, but just as the first creation account refuses to name the Sun and the Moon so they will not be worshipped, we see too no reference to the origin of fire, only its use, primarily in sacrifice, in redemption.

Moving on, however, there was once a time where every house would have fireplace, and not just one in the basement, as in my house now or in my parents’ house when I was growing up, but in the kitchen, in the very heart of the home. That fire, the hearth fire, was the source of warmth for the home as well as the source of sustenance, the place where food was made. Later we reduced the size of our hearth fires but increased their effectiveness by placing them in ovens which would not suck in cold air from the room, but rather from the flue, and would allow us to regulate the hear either for warming a room or for cooking our food. But now so few homes have fire at their hearts.

I understand why. It’s more efficient to use gas to heat our homes through forced air. Electric stoves and ovens allow for my precise heating and cost less to maintain than either their wood-burning or gas brethren (I assume all stoves and ovens are male in the same way all boats are female). But I fear by removing fire, visible fire, from our homes, we have lost something else. What, I am not sure I can say, but let me try.

Sitting before the fire in my basement, legs up in a chair, I can distract myself for a moment and stare at the fire. I can watch the ribbons of flame dance. And I have to tend to it. It will not survive on its own, not forever. I must keep feeding it even as it works on me. But even a dying flame seems almost to be trying to convey something to me. Samuel Taylor Coleridge understood this when he wrote in his poem, “Frost at Midnight”,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

It is as though it is showing to me myself or perhaps some augur of the future, not far flung but coming soon. For the medievals, the reason fire flickers upward is because it is seeking its home with the invisible ring of fire that surrounds the earth, closer to the celestial world of perfection. As I watch the flames dance, I think about my soul’s desire to rise above, not so much this world or materiality as such, but the way I have mired myself in it. The fire needs the matter (actually the gas) of the wood to keep itself lit, but then it rises up. Perhaps I too need to learn my right relationship to the world around me, to feed on that which is good for sending me upward to the stars and ultimately to my true home.

But then the fire dies, or else I must snuff it out for some other duty in the house or out of it calls to me. But perhaps one day I will be able to fly with it up to the “undiscovered country” and find there the true source of light and heat, the One who will never go out. Until then, I will return to my fire as often as I can. I hope you will do the same.