LIVING LARGE

The human spirit is a fickled energy. Sometimes it wants to curl up into a ball and hide from itself and the world. We like to build tiny houses so that the soul doesn’t have too much room to wander around and get lost. We want to play our cards close to the chest. 

And there are other times when we want to run outside and dance in the rain. The spirit feels confined by the predictable and the routine. We are sure that there must be more and our heart will burst if we can’t stretch our souls to embrace the whole world. 

How do we free the spirit to fly?  How do we face our fear of falling and climb to heights we have not experienced before? 

I wish I knew. I am sure it is different for each of us. For me, it helps to accept myself as fickled and learn to embrace the place I am. When I am tired, when there has been too much stimulus and too many changes all at once, I try to give myself permission to draw in. I try to be conscious of the my boundaries and the need to draw them with a darker pencil. I try to accept this is a time to live small, to steward my energy and protect my soul. 

And then when I get restless, when the space begins to feel suffocating, I start testing my spirit. How large does it want to live? What tickles my fancy? Is there a play we can go see?  How about a movie? A concert? Friends to invite over? Day trips to explore unfamiliar places? Longer trips to far away places? Service to provide? 

Since the days we have to live are relatively few, and the world we have been given is excessively large, I want to live large as many days as I can. I need tiny spaces to rest and gain strength, but the fantastic world is my dream.  

Gees Bend Quilts

They took the shirt tails, the pockets, the overalls tired from sweating in the cotton fields, they took the faded feed sacks sewed for little girl's dresses, the fragments of materials gleaned from the Sears Roebuck company project to make shams for pillows--they took the scraps, the leftovers--cloth too washed to wear but too precious to burn--they took it and cut it, spread it out and tied it together with the calloused hands of love to make covers for their baby's bed, warmth for their children's feet, safety against the cold which blew through the slats which made their homes. These women, African descent, these women, strong with determination, these women, daughters of slaves, created quilts which now hang on the pristine walls of the IMA. And thousands of us wander in awe as we stare at the olive green, the black, the red, the gingham, the corduroy, the art that their scrap collections have created.

What a story!! Women, a part of a community of share croppers, cut off from voting by the stopping of a ferry between Gees Bend and Camden, Alabama, kept on keeping on, persistent in their collection of pieces of lived life, recycling them into covers for their children, and now they are world renowned artists with their grace and beauty filling museums around the world.

Isn't this something of what it's like to preach sermons? Don't we do the same thing, persistently collect scraps of lived life, pieces of left-over sweat and laughter, work and play, scraps too tired to breathe but too precious to burn, and we lay them out, piece by piece, looking for patterns, and when we see something that might contribute to the quilt that could warm a tired and frigid soul, we tie it together with the thread of language, hoping to salvage the sacred and make it a blessing for those who cuddle under it.

Those are the best sermons--the best blankets--the most moving and blessed words. They are not the events of heroes, held up and reminders to the weary and wounded that they are inadequate and useless unless they become heroes themselves, but they are the scraps of moments of ordinary, overworked and under appreciated people who persistently press on in their living faithful love in community. They are the moments that clothe each of our lives that get cut from the fabric of our daily life, laid beside the moments of other cloth, different but sacred, of the gifts of other scared but sacred hands, loving daily life.

Women, weary with work sew visions of beauty from leftover living. Preachers, speaking in a word weary world, create covers of hope from scraps of life. And we who wander thorough the halls of museums and sermons are blessed and warmed.