Week Twenty-Five of Ordinary time - Christ the king

by Sayde Laine Anderson

In the passing days of the ordinary, and the unordinary, we have met the end of the Liturgical year. 

Each day, holding its distinct mystery, begins to blur together when looking back. It has been a disorienting season. Yet, in this time I've uncovered a grace in the everyday sacredness of making.

Throughout the season of Ordinary Time, my energy and focus has centered on the daily practice of making. Recently, I was given a book by a friend, titled, Why We Make Things and Why it Matters, by Peter Korn. Reading his life story, belonging to a generation of furniture makers and slowly discovering his passion for the lost art of woodworking, has given me a much needed hope for the life of a maker. His story has encouraged me to wonder how art and craft might help us to live a more meaningful and responsive life of faith. Perhaps in our material acts of creativity, working with the "stuff" of this world, we can know our earth and it's maker, our God, more fully.

Lately, I’ve found myself sitting on the floor of my makeshift studio/room cutting piles of small linen squares. Cutting fabric (and doing it well) takes a long time and makes my arms really tired. With a woven fabric like linen, when the grain (the direction of the warp and weft threads used in weaving the fabric) is off, so is the pattern. Making a quilt is a project that you begin one day and might finish in a few days or a few years. It requires you to do some planning, to let things take a long time, to breathe deeply and fall into the work, to see the blocks pile up one by one, to make some hand-stitches, and to keep warm when all is said and done. 

Quilting, for me, has become a practice of sabbath. A daily sabbath of sorts. A place of finding rest in the Lord while I work. I don’t think this practice of sabbath should lend itself towards the furniture maker, freelance illustrator, or creative—it is for those making food for their families each day, for those taking care of folks in the hospitals, for those creating curriculum to teach virtually, and for those who find themselves without work. Each day we are making—our beds, our eggs, our livelihood—as a creative act participating in the wider story of creation and redemption. 

The making of our daily lives is the slow work, as Wendell Berry writes, to “practice resurrection.” The cycle of making and unmaking, the fall and redemption, the living and the dying. 

As we leave Ordinary Time, it is only fitting to conclude the season with a Sabbath poem by Wendell Berry, 

1985, II

“A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood

Who gave our rest a haven.

Now fallen, they are given

To Labor and distress. 

These times we know much evil, little good

To steady us in faith

And comfort when our losses press

Hard on us, and we choose, 

In panic or despair or both, 

To keep what we will lose. 

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

Broken, and so we must

Love where we cannot trust, 

Trust where we cannot know, 

And must await the wayward-coming grace

That joins living and dead,

Taking us where we would not go--

Into the boundless dark. 

When what was made had been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.”