Regular readers here will know that one of my interests is designing and working tapestry. Over the years I've completed around 20 original pieces, some of them as gifts to special people on special days.
More recently I've been experimenting with the use of tapestry as a form of visual exegesis. During the design and working of a particular tapestry, I 'dwell' within a text, reading it regularly and absorbing what the words seem to be saying, especially before working the next phase. Colour, image, shape and form are each allowed to emerge in an evolving design.
Most times there is no inner idea of the finished work, and often the design changes as I go along. At some point the design of the piece, which began as an undeveloped attraction to the text, and grew in the working, takes on a final form and is worked from a roughly sketched outline.
The current piece (detail below) is based on Julian of Norwich, and in particular, two of her most famous passages from The Revelations of Divine Love. Her parable of the hazelnut has long been a favourite of anthologists; and any who have read her Revelations will immediately recall the simplicity and theological profundity of her vision of her own hand, and in it "a tiny thing the size of a hazelnut."
"And in this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came to me, "It is all that is made". I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, "It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God.
In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it."
Out of that everyday ordinary miracle of a kernel in its protective shell, Julian drew a wondering sense of the immensity of God's creative and sustaining love, and a corresponding awareness of how small, fragile and dependent is the whole of creation. But that whole and entire Creation is held in the hand of one whose love pervades and sustains all and everything that is, including every 'dear soul'.
The second theme, which follows logically and theologically from her vision of God's love sustaining in existence all that God has made, is Julian's famous cry of hope:"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Invariably quoted out of context, it reads like saccharine optimism, life's artificial sweetener. And when fitted within the universe of her revelations, it is a powerful cry of eschatological hope which, given her historical context of tragic and terrifying events, sounds even more like a classic denial and evasion of reality.
Not so. Few writers have faced up to the swathes of suffering that swirl around human life with more realism and look-the-world-in-the-face honesty. But she refuses to make sin the defining reality of the universe; indeed her faith in the cross as the source of redemptive and renewing power is a red thread woven throughout her Revelations. As James Denney, (another of my theological guides) once said to a Victorian Free Church of Scotland congregation in Greenock:
"What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is. It is before the foundation of the world; nay the very foundations of the world are laid in it....You wish to know the final truth about God? Here it is, eternal love bearing sin." (The Way Everlasting, p.24-5)
I doubt there is a better summary of Julian's vision, notwithstanding Denney had no patience for either mysticism or metaphysics. But here's the thing. Where these two theologians of the cross intersect is precisely in their assertion that the love of God is cruciform and Christlike. And they agree on the most fundamental of truths, that it is that same Divine love which is the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of who and what God is.
"All shall be well is therefore a cry of the heart, but of the heart that has been broken by sin and suffering, and is now remade in hope of a New Creation. Julian writes in graphic detail about the lacerated head of the crucified Christ, the drops of blood on thorns, each one evidence of a love that bears all sin and speaks a love which draws from an everlasting and infinite mercy.
So the current tapestry which is being stitched around these two texts, the hazelnut and the credo "all shall be well", will try to show the beauty and form of the world, encapsulated in the hazelnut as "all that exists". And all that vast universe of 'all that is', including our own jewel like planet, the size of a hazelnut, is for Julian interwoven with the Passion of God in Christ. The Divine love is redemptive, renewing and restoring, and is traced by a red thread of redemptive love running through and around a God loved Creation.
A third voice to finish. Maria Von Trapp wrote a number of inspirational books. In one of them she reflected on life as a tapestry. She too sensed that the mystery of life finds its best understanding in the colour red, traceable in the fundaments of the universe, and in our own lives.
“It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.”
When this tapestry is finished, there will be red thread.
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