It’s been a decade since I left the priesthood, but the real transformation didn’t begin until I held a chainsaw in my trembling hands. There’s something brutally honest about a machine that could just as easily carve through oak as it could through your femur – a kind of mechanical truth serum that strips away pretenses. For years, I’d lived what many would call a charmed life: meals prepared by a private chef, laundry handled by devoted nuns, every domestic need anticipated before I could form the request. Yet each morning when I knelt to pray in that spotless room, the polished floorboards reflected back a man who’d built his vocation on sand.
The more I listened for divine guidance, the clearer the message became – not in thunderous revelations but in the quiet persistence of an uncomfortable truth. “You’ve been living someone else’s authenticity,” the silence whispered as incense curled around my doubts. My crisis wasn’t about faith itself, but about the particular vessel I’d chosen to carry it. The structured rhythms of clerical life had become a gilded cage, its routines so perfectly arranged they left no room for the messy, necessary work of becoming.
What no seminary prepared me for was the particular terror of freedom. When the Vatican granted my dispensation and I exchanged the rectory for a modest home with a mortgage, I discovered how thoroughly institutionalized I’d become. At forty-nine, I could parse Thomas Aquinas in Latin but couldn’t decipher the manual for our new dishwasher. My wife – patient saint that she is – watched as I approached domestic life with the same methodical intensity I’d once reserved for homily preparation, turning grocery shopping into theological inquiry and diaper changes into liturgical ritual.
Then came the pines. A ragged line of dying sentinels along our property line, their brittle branches creaking like old floorboards in the wind. Every storm threatened to send them crashing through our children’s bedroom windows. The solution should have been simple: remove the hazard. But for a man who’d spent thirty years in a world where problems were solved with paperwork and prayer, the prospect of physical intervention felt as daunting as Moses parting the Red Sea.
In my garage sat relics of a life I’d never quite lived – a toolbox gifted for my eighteenth birthday, its contents still gleaming with factory oil; a Honda mower purchased in a fit of suburban rebellion against the electric model of my youth. These were props in a play about competence, symbols of a masculinity I’d theoretically endorsed but never embodied. Now they stared back at me, silent jurors in the trial of my adequacy.
The chainsaw became more than a tool in that season – it transformed into a sacrament of transition, its two-stroke engine coughing to life like the hesitant first words of a new language. Learning to wield it taught me what thirty years of theological study never could: that faith without action is just philosophy with better lighting, that sometimes redemption smells like gasoline and freshly cut pine.
What surprised me wasn’t the physical challenge – though felling my first tree left muscles aching I didn’t know I possessed – but how the mechanical process mirrored my spiritual journey. The way a cold engine requires just the right choke setting parallels how we need different approaches at various life stages. That moment when the chain bites into wood echoes the relief of finally acting on long-deferred decisions. Even the necessary maintenance – cleaning air filters, sharpening blades – became metaphors for the ongoing work of self-care we too often neglect.
Ten years later, when people ask about my transition from clerical life, I rarely mention the canonical processes or paperwork. Instead, I tell them about the trees. About how leaving one life for another isn’t a single decision but a daily practice, like keeping your chainsaw’s guide bar properly tensioned. That the most dangerous thing in life isn’t the risks we take but the prisons we build from our own unused potential. And that sometimes, the most spiritual act isn’t kneeling in prayer but mustering the courage to pull the starter cord on whatever challenge stands before you.
The Gilded Cage
For twelve years, my world operated on a rhythm as precise as the liturgical calendar. Meals appeared at appointed hours, prepared by a chef who knew my preference for slightly undercooked vegetables. Nuns in crisp habits changed my linens every Tuesday, their quiet efficiency leaving no trace except the faint scent of lavender starch. My cassock was always pressed, my books alphabetized, my days structured between prayer and pastoral duties. This was the life of a diocesan priest in our particular community – more faculty club than Franciscan austerity.
On paper, it was enviable. No mortgage payments, no grocery bills, no arguments over whose turn it was to take out the trash. The diocese handled car repairs, health insurance, even my annual retreat expenses. Yet this very comfort became the bars of my cage. Without the friction of daily survival – the burnt toast mornings, the clogged drain crises, the mundane negotiations of shared space – something essential atrophied. My hands stayed soft. My decisions grew theoretical. I could debate transubstantiation for hours but hadn’t balanced a checkbook since seminary.
The crisis came gradually, during those solitary nights in the rectory’s overlarge bedroom. Kneeling on the hardwood floor (the discomfort a small penance), I’d listen to the silence. Not the rich silence of contemplation, but the hollow kind that echoes in well-kept cages. The prayers started returning as questions: When did you last feel truly needed? Not as a functionary performing sacraments, but as a man fully alive?
There was no thunderous revelation, just a quiet unraveling. Preparing Sunday homilies began to feel like intellectual performance art. The more I studied theology, the more I recognized how skillfully I’d used it to avoid simpler truths. Like how my eyes lingered a beat too long on the young mothers guiding toddlers’ hands during the Sign of Peace. Or the way my stomach clenched when baptizing infants, their perfect fingernails curling around my stole.
Church law calls it dubia circa vocationem – doubts about one’s calling. Mine manifested in increasingly vivid dreams: carrying a crying child through a burning building, teaching a boy to cast a fishing line, arguing with a dark-haired woman about whose parents we’d visit for Christmas. I’d wake gasping, the dreams’ emotional residue more real than the chalice in my hands later that morning at Mass.
The turning point came during an otherwise routine confession. A construction worker, his nails still rimmed with drywall compound, spoke of struggling to provide for his family after a layoff. “But when I tuck my kids in,” he said, voice cracking, “and they ask if the Tooth Fairy’s affected by inflation too – that’s when I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” The raw honesty of that moment undid me. Here was a man living his vocation in blistered hands and sleepless nights, while I… I was a well-dressed custodian of mysteries.
That night I wrote two letters: one to my bishop requesting laicization, another to a woman I’d met at a parish food drive who’d once casually mentioned her favorite whiskey. The first followed canonical procedure. The second? Let’s just say the Holy Spirit moves in mysterious ways – sometimes through single malt scotch.
Looking back, I recognize the signs earlier – the restless energy during parish council meetings, the way I’d volunteer for hospital visits just to feel useful in unscripted moments. But understanding comes easier in hindsight. At the time, leaving felt less like a decision and more like finally exhaling after years of held breath.
What no formation manual prepared me for was the sheer physicality of freedom. There’s a particular weight to your first set of car keys that aren’t diocesan property, a startling intimacy in sharing a bathroom shelf. I traded the rectory’s spotless solitude for a fixer-upper with temperamental plumbing and a backyard full of dying pines. The chainsaw came later. First, I had to learn how to be a man who owned his own hammer.
The Dying Pines and a Father’s Duty
The row of dying pines stood like silent accusers along our property line. I’d noticed their gradual decay for months – the browning needles, the brittle branches that snapped in mild breezes. But it wasn’t until my three-year-old chased a ball beneath their skeletal shadows that the danger became undeniable. A single creaking limb could have changed everything.
My garage told the story of my unpreparedness. There sat the toolbox my father gave me when I turned eighteen, its contents barely touched in three decades. Beside it, the shiny Honda mower I’d bought with almost childish glee – my personal rebellion against the electric model that had frustrated me throughout adolescence. These were the tools of a man learning to take charge of his surroundings, but they were laughably inadequate for the task at hand.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. For years as a priest, I’d counseled others about facing difficult truths. Now here I stood, a husband and father, paralyzed by something as mundane as tree removal. The theological training that once guided me through existential crises offered no manual for chainsaw operation.
What struck me most wasn’t the physical danger of the trees themselves, but what they revealed about my transition. The priesthood had provided structure – not just spiritually, but practically. Maintenance requests went to the diocese. Landscaping concerns were handled by volunteers. Now every creaking branch, every overgrown shrub was mine to address. The weight of that responsibility felt heavier than any theological treatise I’d carried in seminary.
That toolbox became an uncomfortable metaphor. The pristine condition of its contents spoke volumes about my sheltered existence. The few scratches on its surface came not from use, but from decades of being shuffled between storage spaces. Meanwhile, my new lawnmower represented the first tangible step toward owning my domestic responsibilities – purchased not out of necessity (our yard was modest), but as a psychological declaration: I would no longer be a bystander in my own life.
The pines forced a reckoning. I could hire an arborist, spending money we barely had to solve a problem I was capable of handling. Or I could confront the uncomfortable truth: my hesitation wasn’t about the trees at all. It was about admitting how much I still needed to learn – not about God or scripture, but about being an ordinary man tending to ordinary things.
Standing there that afternoon, watching my children play obliviously beneath the dying trees, I realized something fundamental. The transition from clerical life wasn’t just about changing my address or marital status. It was about developing the courage to face problems without institutional buffers – to get dirt under my fingernails and sawdust in my hair. To accept that sometimes being a good father means doing scary, unfamiliar things.
That night, I didn’t open a theology text or prayer book. Instead, I found myself staring at chainsaw reviews online, equal parts terrified and exhilarated by what came next.
The Illusion of Preparedness
For weeks, I consumed chainsaw content like a man preparing for doctoral exams. STIHL’s official safety videos played on loop during breakfast – their cheerful actors demonstrating proper stance with the enthusiasm of game show hosts. By lunch, I’d switched to arborist vlogs where bearded men in cargo pants dropped trees with reckless precision, their chainsaws screaming through trunks thicker than my childhood dresser. Dinner brought technical breakdowns: carburetor adjustments, chain tensioning diagrams, fuel mixture ratios scrolling across my screen like sacred texts.
I could recite OSHA’s chainsaw safety guidelines verbatim. The kickback zone diagrams were etched behind my eyelids. I knew to look for bar oil leakage and inspect the chain brake before every use. My notebook brimmed with technical terms: ‘barber chair effect,’ ‘bore cutting,’ ‘Dutchman notch.’ Yet when I stood in my garage staring at those dying pines, my hands remembered nothing.
There’s a peculiar arrogance in over-preparation. You mistake mental accumulation for actual capability. Watching a hundred felling videos gave me the vocabulary to describe a plunge cut, but not the muscle memory to execute one. I’d become fluent in chainsaw theory yet remained utterly illiterate in its practice. The gap between knowing and doing yawned wider with each tutorial I bookmarked.
YouTube comments sections became my confessional. ‘First-time owner here,’ I’d type, then promptly delete. The forums teemed with similar souls – men who could debate chain pitch specifications for hours but hadn’t yet pulled the starter cord. We formed a silent brotherhood of the theoretically proficient, exchanging links like talismans against actual effort. The more I learned about chainsaws, the more reasons I found to delay using one.
My favorite videos featured catastrophic failures – trees splitting unpredictably, chainsaws bucking like wild horses. These cautionary tales became my excuse arsenal. ‘See?’ I’d tell myself, pausing on a particularly gruesome kickback incident. ‘This is why we research more.’ The algorithm, sensing my fear, fed me increasingly dire safety warnings until I half-believed merely touching a chainsaw would summon the Grim Reaper.
Meanwhile, those pines kept dying. Their needles browned like old newspaper clippings. Each windstorm sent brittle branches crashing onto our playset. My wife stopped commenting on them, but I caught her glancing upward whenever the children played outside. The unspoken accusation hung heavier than any unstable limb: knowledge without action isn’t wisdom – it’s cowardice dressed in research papers.
What finally broke the cycle wasn’t another tutorial, but a hardware store receipt blowing across my desk. The date glared at me – three weeks prior, when I’d gone to ‘just look’ at chainsaws. The ink had faded, just like my resolve. That’s when I understood: preparation had become my avoidance ritual. Every watched video was another minute not spent facing those trees, not confronting my fear of failure beyond the screen’s safe confines.
The manuals never mention this paradox: the more you study danger, the more dangerous inaction becomes. My children didn’t need a father who could lecture on chain brake systems – they needed one who’d actually stop a tree from crushing their swing set. There would always be one more video to watch, one more technique to master in theory. But life, like felling, demands we act before we feel perfectly ready.
That night, I closed all thirty-seven browser tabs. The sudden silence felt like stepping out of a buzzing lecture hall into crisp morning air. My hands itched – not for more mouse clicks, but for the vibration of a throttle grip, for the scent of fresh-cut pine instead of pixelated simulations. The real education wouldn’t happen on YouTube, but in the uneven terrain of my backyard, where no pause button existed.
Funny how we’ll spend hours learning about tools but avoid the real work of using them. Maybe because knowledge feels like progress without the messy part where we might fail. But chainsaws – like life transitions – don’t respect theoretical mastery. They only respond to hands willing to pull the cord and accept whatever comes after.
The Gift of Gil
The hardware store smelled like sawdust and machine oil—a scent that immediately made me feel out of place. My palms were sweating as I approached the power tools section, trying to look like a man who belonged there. That’s when Gil found me.
He was in his sixties, with grease under his fingernails and a name tag that said “45 Years of Service.” When I mumbled something about needing a chainsaw, he didn’t laugh at my obvious inexperience. Instead, he wiped his hands on his red apron and said, “Let’s get you sorted.”
What followed wasn’t just a sales transaction, but the kind of hands-on education no YouTube tutorial could provide. Gil walked me through the differences between 18-inch and 20-inch bars while actually holding the saws. “Feel this balance,” he said, placing my hands on the equipment. The weight distribution suddenly made sense in a way no spec sheet ever could.
When I hesitantly asked about two-stroke engines (a term I’d only learned from videos), Gil didn’t just explain—he demonstrated. Right there in the aisle, he popped open a display model and pointed to each component. “This little bastard here,” he tapped the carburetor, “that’s where most beginners flood the engine.”
The real moment of truth came when he handed me the starter cord. “Go on,” he urged, “get the feel of it.” That first tentative pull taught me more about resistance and recoil than hours of watching professionals make it look easy. Gil adjusted my grip without condescension—thumb wrapped securely, stance widened. “You’ll want to remember that when there’s a live chain involved,” he said with a wink.
By the time we reached the checkout, they’d not only filled the tank with premixed fuel but showed me how to check the chain tension. The cashier even threw in a free sharpening file. “Come back when you’ve dropped your first tree,” Gil said as I left. It struck me that in my former life, no one had ever sent me off with that particular blessing.
Walking to the car with my new Stihl MS 250, I realized something fundamental had shifted. This wasn’t just about acquiring a tool—it was about accepting guidance from someone who spoke the language of practical wisdom. The clerics had taught me to parse scripture, but Gil taught me to listen to an engine’s cough and know whether it needed more choke. Both were sacred knowledge in their own way.
That night, I found myself studying the owner’s manual at the kitchen table, my wife smiling as she wiped baby food from our toddler’s hair. “You look different,” she observed. She was right. For the first time since leaving the priesthood, I wasn’t just preparing—I was becoming.
The First Cut
The chainsaw felt heavier than I expected when I finally lifted it toward the first pine tree. My palms were sweating inside the thick gloves, and the safety goggles kept fogging up with each nervous breath. For weeks I’d prepared for this moment – watching tutorials, memorizing cutting angles, even dreaming about proper limbing techniques. But none of that mattered now with the actual tree looming before me.
I adjusted my stance the way Gil at Ace Hardware had shown me, planting my boots firmly in the soft earth. The morning smelled of gasoline and pine resin, an oddly comforting combination. My thumb hovered over the throttle trigger as I mentally rehearsed the steps: Set the choke. Pull the starter cord. Don’t overthink it.
That last part proved hardest. Leaving the priesthood hadn’t prepared me for this kind of vulnerability. In clerical life, every action followed centuries of established ritual. But here in my suburban backyard, there were no rubrics for felling trees – just raw physics and my own shaky judgment.
The first pull yielded nothing but a sputtering cough from the engine. Same with the second. On the third attempt, the saw roared to life with a violence that nearly made me drop it. The vibrations traveled up my arms as the chain blurred into motion, its teeth hungry for wood. I suddenly understood why they call it a “kickback” zone.
Approaching the trunk, I noticed things YouTube never mentioned – how sawdust sprays in golden arcs, how the engine pitch changes when biting into denser growth rings. My initial notch cut felt clumsy, but the second cut met it cleanly. Then came the moment of truth: the back cut that would send thirty feet of pine timber earthward.
When the tree began its groaning descent, time seemed to slow. I backpedaled as instructed, watching the crown clear our fence by inches before crashing down with a ground-shaking thud. The stillness afterward was profound – just my heartbeat and the two-stroke engine’s idle putter.
Something unexpected happened in that moment. As I stared at the fresh stump with its concentric growth rings exposed, it struck me that risk and growth really do share the same anatomy. Each ring represented a year the tree spent reaching skyward despite storms, droughts, and now ultimately, my chainsaw. The parallel to my own life transition was impossible to ignore.
Felling that first tree taught me more about authentic living than a decade of theological study. There’s an irreplaceable education that comes only when theory meets practice, when manuals give way to muscle memory. The priesthood had taught me to contemplate the divine; the chainsaw taught me to trust my hands. Both were spiritual in their own way.
By afternoon’s end, three more pines lay in orderly sections along the property line. My technique improved with each cut, though the nervous thrill never quite faded – nor should it, really. After all, a healthy respect for danger keeps us alert to life’s subtleties, whether we’re handling a snarling chainsaw or navigating the uncertainties of a major life change.
The saw finally quieted as dusk painted the remaining trees amber. Wiping sweat and sawdust from my face, I realized this was the first tangible evidence I could reshape my world – not through prayer or study, but with my own calloused hands. Some transitions happen gradually, like leaves changing color. Others require the decisive cut of a sharp chain. Mine needed both.
The Engine’s Whisper
The two-stroke engine of my chainsaw taught me more about life than I ever learned from theological textbooks. There’s a brutal honesty in its operation — no computer chips masking inefficiencies, no dashboard lights pretending everything’s fine when it’s not. Just fuel, air, and the consequences of your actions.
Modern cars spoiled us with their push-button starts. That little act of convenience hides layers of complexity most drivers never comprehend. But a chainsaw? It demands participation. On cold mornings, you prime it just enough to coax the engine awake without flooding it. In summer heat, you ease off the choke sooner. There’s no universal formula — only the developing intuition between human and machine.
I remember the first time I successfully started it without consulting the manual. The way the engine sputtered to life felt like a small miracle, not because it was technically difficult, but because I’d finally stopped treating it as a problem to be solved and started feeling it as an extension of my own hands. That moment mirrored my transition from priesthood — no amount of theological study could prepare me for the visceral reality of changing diapers at 3 AM or negotiating a mortgage.
The chainsaw’s simplicity is deceptive. At its core, just fifty moving parts compared to a car engine’s thousands. Yet mastering those few components requires more attention than any luxury sedan. Life works the same way. We complicate existence with endless options and safety nets, thinking more choices mean better outcomes. But sometimes growth comes from limiting alternatives — like having only one tree-felling technique that’ll keep your children’s swing set intact.
Two-stroke engines don’t tolerate hesitation. Half-throttle risks gumming up the works with unburned fuel. You commit fully or not at all. I recognized that rhythm from my seminary days — the paralysis of overanalyzing prayer intentions while the soup kitchen needed volunteers. Now I hear it when procrastinating difficult conversations by researching ‘communication techniques’ instead of simply picking up the phone.
Maintenance became my meditation. Cleaning the air filter each evening, I’d replay the day’s cuts — which angles worked, where I’d misjudged the grain. The saw’s condition never lied. Streaks of unburned oil on the housing meant I’d run it too rich. Scorched marks near the exhaust signaled lean mixture. Immediate, unfiltered feedback we rarely get in human relationships.
Perhaps that’s why the chainsaw became my therapist after leaving the priesthood. Its demands were clear: pay attention now, adjust immediately, accept the consequences. No abstract moral theology, just cause and effect written in wood chips and exhaust fumes. When the engine stalled mid-cut, I couldn’t debate its motivations — only check the spark plug and try again.
Now when I mentor men navigating major life transitions, I watch their eyes glaze over at another self-help book recommendation. That’s when I take them to my garage. ‘Start this saw,’ I challenge. Their fumbling attempts mirror their life struggles — too much theory, not enough muscle memory. But when the engine finally roars to life in their hands, something shifts. They’ve crossed the invisible threshold from thinking about doing to simply doing.
We’ve made life too much like modern cars — sanitized, over-engineered, isolating us from the mechanisms that make things work. My chainsaw reconnected me to the fundamental truth: whether facing a towering pine or a towering life change, action precedes confidence, not the other way around. The two-stroke gospel according to STIHL — faith without works is dead.
The Last Pull
The chainsaw cord was stiff in my hands that first morning, the engine cold and unyielding. I remember counting to three, then yanking with all the hesitation of a man trying to start both a machine and a new life simultaneously. That metallic cough before ignition became my personal trumpet call – not the polished fanfare of seminary processions, but the sputtering anthem of real beginnings.
Ten years removed from the priesthood, I’ve come to measure progress differently. No longer in sacraments administered or homilies delivered, but in calloused palms and solved problems. The trees I’ve felled since that first trembling attempt stand as peculiar altars, each stump a monument to action over contemplation. There’s sacredness in this too – not in the chainsaw’s roar, but in the silence that follows when you realize you’ve just done something you feared.
Life’s transitions rarely announce themselves with clarity. Mine came disguised as a row of dying pines threatening my children’s safety, forcing me to trade theological certainty for two-stroke engine ratios. The parallels still startle me: both vocations require faith in unseen mixtures – whether gasoline and air, or grace and human effort. Both demand you pull hard before anything ignites.
What surprises me most isn’t how much I’ve changed, but how the essential struggle remains. Even now, with sawdust permanently ground into my work boots, I sometimes catch myself overthinking fresh challenges. The old clerical habit of seeking perfect understanding before acting dies hard. But the trees taught me this: some knowledge only comes through the doing, the way a saw’s kickback teaches grip strength no manual could explain.
Perhaps that’s the final lesson hiding in the garage beside my STIHL. Every meaningful beginning requires that terrible, wonderful moment when preparation ends and action begins. Whether leaving a vocation or starting one, whether facing a dying tree or a dying dream – eventually you must grab the cord and pull.
So here’s my question to you, fellow traveler: What’s your chainsaw moment? That problem looming at your property line, that decision needing more courage than research? The world is full of people who’ve watched every tutorial; what it needs are more who dare to make the first cut. Not perfectly, not fearlessly – just authentically.
Because here’s what no YouTube video will tell you: The most dangerous thing in life isn’t a chainsaw’s teeth or a falling tree. It’s leaving your cord unpulled.
