Tonight, I’d like to just sit and knit. I’m tired out from a whole basket full of church work over the weekend which is now spilling into this week, too. The house is tidied (ish) and the dishes done. The kids are settling down to sleep in their room at the end of the hall. Not asleep yet – I can still hear Beangirl sniffling a little. She’s caught a spring cold and is feeling a little sorry for herself, but then so am I. Tired out and not terribly stoic tonight, I’m afraid. I’ve got emails to sort through, details to think through, calendars to sift through and an overdue book that needs to be read and turned into notes before it has to go back to the library. All good work, but tonight it’s feeling a little much. What I’d like to do is sit next to the Spouse on the sofa with a bright light at my shoulder and knitting needles in my hands, practicing what was recently described in a comment on Karie Westermann’s blog as “the in-round-through-off meditative practice.” It can be very good to have tangible work in your hands. To hold onto something beautiful and let the rhythm of the work ground you and return you to joy.
Today, my work was in meetings. Productive, but full of talk. Likewise, yesterday was a talking kind of day – first with our monthly All-Ages Family worship service, and then after church, at Heart and Soul, a festival afternoon run by the Church of Scotland in conjunction with the General Assembly. The festival happens in the large city park in the centre of Edinburgh, and congregations and other ministries set up tents where they can share stories of their work. This year, I was in the Greyfriars Kirk tent representing Nitekirk, one of my ministry hats. There were other ministries there, too, including SPARK, a church-based festival of worship and the arts, and the Grassmarket Community Project which works with marginalised people, teaching skills and offering new possibilities for community. We all had a good day with lots of people stopping by to chat – some because they had heard of our work, others because our posters caught their eye. It was good to be able to talk about our work – and really interesting to hear how other churches also explore creative and contemplative spirituality. However, after four hours of chatting with passers-by, you get a little talked out. Or at least I do. And while it is interesting and edifying to hear yourself describe your work to many different people over the course of an afternoon, it can begin to feel overly wordy and abstract after a while. Hence the hunger to get on with my knitting.
But one of the recurring and beautiful conversations that fed me was about the wood used in the Grassmarket Community Project’s workshop. Tommy Steele, the workshop supervisor, had brought several small clocks and candle holders to display in our tent alongside photos of large pieces of furniture that the workshop produces. Much of the wood comes from old unwanted church pews made from all kind of different hardwood. Tommy said
that the hardwood trees would have grown for three or four hundred years. And then the wood had been a church pew for maybe two hundred years. So, that’s six hundred years of history that you can hold in your hand, transformed. A beautiful thought. The wood has been shaped and sanded, the dark patina smoothed away so that the wood grain resurfaces and you can clearly see the lines of growth and work, the spaces in between of rest.
This is work that leads you into wonder. You can hold this simple worked wood and imagine the growing tree. And imagine, too, the church where the pew sat, the centuries of families who gathered each Sunday, the prayers of the people. These are also somehow made tangible and present in the renewed grain of the wood.
And while we might wonder what has happened to the church where the pews used to sit and about the people who sat there to pray, it is a bit like wondering about the tree that once grew and the birds who once rested there. In God’s hands, like the rest of us. Because we, too, are tangible work.
