I've been designing and working tapestries for a long time now. My first serious attempt was maybe 30 years ago. There was a long chunk of time in the period since then - 15 years, when I had other things to do and came back to doing tapestry again maybe 12 years ago. I'll do another post soon with some of the older ones that I still have around.
For now, I'm intrigued yet again at how appropriate and theologically sensible are the sayings that surround working tapestry as a parable, metaphor, or narrative imagining of how the presence and activity of God is woven through the texture of our days and years. It's a commonplace to compare the back of the canvas with the front, with the intended encouragement that the messiness has a pattern; be patient and wait until the work is complete. God weaves the varied strands and colours of our lives into a unique pattern that cannot be achieved any other way. You know the kind of thing.
Here is a quotation that is a classic example of trust in the providence of God, and persevering trust despite only seeing the underside of the tapestry:
“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.” ― Maria von Trapp
As one who designs tapestries, I know that improvisation and ad hoc decisions mean that the finished work can vary considerably from what was first conceived and planned. I must also say that I have done several tapestries, beginning with an idea, and starting from the centre allowing the shapes and colours to develop in what feels like a random process of choosing to do what I feel like, what I think might work, and that can reflect the mood at the time as much as anything else. The point is, each tapestry is a creative process, an evolving concept in which the final form becomes clear quite late on in the process.
Years ago I learned a verse that has stayed with me and has in turns reassured, disturbed and even annoyed me. But I keep coming back to it. The lines come from the poem 'Regret' by Jean Ingelow:
This life is one, and in its warp and woof
there runs a thread of gold that glitters fair,
and sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet
where there are sombre colours.
I bring the words of Maria von Trapp and Jean Ingelow together in this activity involving needle, stranded cotton and canvas in a work of art that becomes the visible consequence of inner thought, prayer and imagination - these three. The current tapestry is one articulation in colour and form of Revelation 21.9-21, John's vision of the New Jerusalem. His description is a verbal symphony, geometry set to music, an imagined place of universal welcome, a home for a broken and now redeemed Creation, illumined by the Love dwelling at its precise centre. To take in any literal sense John's words of how the Ineffable might appear to eyes dazzled by the light of eternal truth, divine goodness and love in purest holiness and redemptive purpose, is as wonderfully futile as standing beneath Niagara with a bucket hoping to capture and contain the essence of a power that annihilates all presumption and preconceptions.
Yet John wrote to be read, and understood, and with pastoral purpose and spiritual imagination about what he saw when he saw heaven opened. And near the end of the drama, there is the crowning vision of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, with its twelve gates where all who would might enter, and no one was denied. It is a vision of redeeming love, eternal purpose, and is intended to comfort, strengthen and give hope to those who can make no sense of the underside of the tapestry that is their life. So in this tapestry, without intending it there is the messy underside and the changing and evolving pattern that emerges from the continuing work of the needle-worker.
The second photo is the upside of the tapestry - but at a quite early stage. When it's finished I'll post again and try to explain a bit more what I think I'm playing at! Theology is often more free when not confined to words, even if, as in John's Revelation, words with all their limitations are all he has to describe the indescribable and communicate the incomprehensible. John's geometric precision conveys the exactitude and detail of a city whose builder and maker is God. Incidentally there are several pieces of music I have listened to while doing this work - that will be another post perhaps.
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