This is not a metaphor. I placed my key in the lock and tried to turn it to unlock the back door to my Midwestern home. Instead, the key got stuck. Only with effort did I manage to extricate it again. This happened in the bleak midwinter—and for the rest of this cold winter, we used only the front door to come into the house.
As with a house, so also in our lives. The back door is hidden from the street, a private entrance visible only to the birds, the rabbits, and the skunk we are pretty sure has taken up residency somewhere under the shed. (Guess how I know!) Someone opening that door will enter at his own peril, tripping over shoes piled up, jackets strewn about, pencils and books and occasional loose socks cast off haphazardly in this war zone that gets cleaned up every evening but only accumulates all over again each day. Chaos reigns by the back door in a home with children. The front door, on the other hand, is public, ornate, readily visible to all, a beautiful wreath upon it telling all that this home is loved. The changing of the wreaths with the seasons signals the care and propriety we want to convey, at least publicly. Someone welcomed through the front door comes inside into a momentary illusion of perfect order and respectability—until they behold the rest of the house, of course.
What kind of facade do we put on in front of others, one might ask, in considering the differences between the two doors and the world into which they usher visitors? We prefer to hide, dwelling in our chaos in private, all while projecting composure, a sense of control. So the front door becomes only for guests, for those for whom we put on appearances. Except, this tale of malfunctioning locks is not a metaphor; this story is a statement of fact, a reality that felt increasingly less poetic on cold days when the walk all the way around the house from the parking area behind it to the front door seemed particularly trying in the wind and icy rain. And then the front door lock became wobbly too.
At last, a locksmith came to the house one spring Monday to see if the locks could be repaired. Yes, he said after taking them out and examining them closely. Beautiful locks, these, but much too dry and grimy on the inside. They just needed a lot of TLC—extensive cleaning and greasing, and now they’re good again for another decade or two or three. They don’t make locks like these anymore, he remarked, his smiles reserved chiefly for the locks, the companions with whom he interacts the most in his vocation. He seemed to be whispering to them as he worked.
These locks, we learned, are original to this house, which was built in 1941. An astonishing thought indeed that the locks we use daily without a thought, except when they stop working, have lived through WWII, fifteen different Presidents, and the myriad changes through which this street—and town, and state, and country, and world—have gone since. The company that manufactured these locks went out of business decades ago. But the locks and the rest of the house remain. Silent witnesses of the past are all around us, willing to tell us stories—if only we harken. Except, of course, stories of objects require a different sort of listening than we do when listening to other people. To truly listen to locks requires the love of a locksmith.
We speak in English idiom about the keys to someone’s heart, as if the heart too had doors with a lock to open or close them with simple mechanisms such as these. To some extent this is true. We all seek to be known and understood by others. Those who love us indeed show such understanding both in the day-to-day and on those more exceptional occasions when we seem wobbly ourselves. Brokenness, after all, is not just the purview of locks and material things. The entire story of humanity is one of brokenness that seeped into God’s perfect creation because of sin. Such is the story we have been living ever since, only becoming more aware of our own brokenness with time, all while mourning the brokenness of this world around us, a world where too many things that crack, splinter, shatter, and break can never be repaired. This is an integral part of our children’s development—this learning that beloved toys that break cannot be repaired at times and are destined for the garbage heap. The Velveteen Rabbit could have been burned. My son’s own favorite stuffed rabbit lovey disintegrated. My daughter’s beloved stuffed doll is on its last leg and is unlikely to survive much longer. Worst of all, ours is a world where too many persons are not known and not loved.
But this is not a metaphor. These were broken locks, not broken hearts. Even for these literal locks, though, there was an undisguised affection bound up in the locksmith’s work; his hands tenderly taking the mechanism out of each door, carefully lifting it up, examining it closely, taking it apart, cleaning it with the same sort of unhurried gentleness I once used in washing my babies. His tone in talking about the locks was one of admiration too, a love from which flowed his glee at being able to make the malfunctioning lock work like new again.
I open the back door to walk out of the house this fine spring afternoon, the air warm and sweet-smelling after the rain. Out I go, with my babies—who, of course, are not babies anymore. They are now old enough to know that all things in this world can break, beloved things included. Even the favorite stuffed doll. But they do not yet know that sometimes our hearts break too. They are much too young still to understand this.
With my key, I turn the lock, and it works perfectly to do that which it was ordained to do. This is not a metaphor.
Image Credit: Armand Hubert Simon Leleux, “Locksmiths”
