Reborn in a barn

Homegrown religion

By Max Alexander

God is never far from my corner of Maine, which is nothing new, much less new age; my neighbors are simply religious, not spiritual. They don’t connect, they worship. Toward the end of the year they worship more often, and not just because of Christmas. Every new winter brings a seasonal sadness to these parts, and religion helps in ways that folks just don’t seem to need in summer when there’s hay to cut and blueberries to rake until late at night.

And so it goes in our own life. My wife Sarah recently found a small Episcopal church in Jefferson that she likes, so I came along one Sunday — curious but skeptical. I grew up Catholic, which I consider to be more an ethnicity than a set of beliefs. Even though I rarely attend Mass and could never support the Church’s ban on women priests, I still consider myself a Catholic and feel uncomfortable in churches with no weeping sculptures. Protestant services, like those stark Protestant churches, seem like stripped-down versions of the real thing to me. This Episcopal rite (the first I’d ever seen) was closer to home as the priest at least wore purple, but I still couldn’t help feeling it was Catholic Lite.

“I’m not sure I could support a church that basically exists because Henry the Eighth wanted to get divorced,” I said on the drive home. “And that part where they call themselves Catholic; does the Pope know they’re doing that?”

“It is Catholic,” said Sarah. “It’s just not Roman Catholic.”

“Hey, whatever. Do they believe in the trans-substantiation?”

“Yes. But they don’t have confession.”

“That’s outrageous.”

“I thought you hated confession.”

“Of course I hate confession; I’m Catholic, aren’t I?”

It seemed clear that clarity would not come from the Church of England. It came, instead, about a week later, in a place I least expected: Allen Ginsburg’s barn.

While working on a magazine story about midcoast Maine food purveyors, I found myself talking barns with Allen, co-owner of a Belfast grainery called Fiddler’s Green Farm. A former and sometime carpenter, Allen runs his grain mill in a modified post-and-beam barn that he built himself.

Building a barn is near the top of the priority list on our own farm. The original barn had long since burned, rotted, or sagged into the earth; a few glacial foundation boulders are the only archeological reminders that a massive outbuilding once commanded the clearing behind the house. We had hoped to find a farm with a big old barn, but it wasn’t so easy. There were plenty of romantic ruins, but we needed a barn that wasn’t falling down. We want to raise sheep, store hay and tractors, maybe someday have horses. Bringing a sagging ruin back to life can cost more than building a new barn. So when we finally found what we thought was the right house, but no barn, we resigned ourselves to a major future building project.

“Major” is how several contractors described my ideal barn, with rough estimates coming in at around $50,000. Lacking that much cash but desperate to build a big barn, I was hoping a veteran do-it-yourselfer like Allen could give me some advice on how to do it more cheaply.

“Say Max, you don’t happen to have a lot of tall pines on your property, do you?” he asked.

“I sure do.” While much of my land was cut hard 20 years ago, I have 10 acres across the road with a good stand of 80-foot and higher white pines and hemlock.

“Then why don’t you do what I did? Build your barn from your own trees. That’s what everybody used to do, before they invented Georgia-Pacific. I know guys near you who can cut the trees, mill the wood, and yard it right on your land. It’ll be rough-cut wood, but hey, it’s a barn. They’ll charge maybe 25 cents a board foot. You’ll save thousands in lumber.”

I saw immediately that it wasn’t just about saving money. Here was an opportunity to say no thanks to the lumber companies, with their monoculture “forests” of perfect trees. Here was a chance to keep capital in my community by using local craftsmen and materials. With apologies to the hippie generation, here was a chance to grow my own.

Back home I pulled out my forest management plan and verified that as much as 25,000 board feet of sawtimber could be responsibly cut on that acreage — more than twice what I would need for a 30-by-40 foot barn. I was beginning to see my barn clearly for the first time. I could see myself lift the latch and heave open the creaking door. I imagined the smell of hay as the silent vastness engulfed me. I pictured the dusty ribbons of sunlight piercing the cracks in the siding, wrapping around rough-hewn beams and splitting the darkness into geometric voids.

A recent study found that 70 percent of Americans believe they can be spiritually “connected” without going to church, and I suppose I’m one of them. But the more I think about it, incense and hay don’t smell too much different. Big barns are a lot like cathedrals, even if they don’t have statues of saints in agony. Both put a roof over impossibly large spaces and make you feel small, but deeply connected to that which is larger. Would a barn built from my own woods groan in the wind like the tall pines are doing now?

To say I’m getting a religion of my own is to say the obvious. But first I have to do something even harder than going to confession. I have to build my church.

Max Alexander lives in Washington, Maine. He can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.