The Work of Our Hands

A sermon Offered by Susanne Sullivan
Sunday, April 29, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

I grew up sleeping under hand-stitched quilts.  I didn’t give them much thought as a child; there were a dozen or more of them in our household, used as blankets on every bed in the house, every one of them different and colorful and interesting enough that you could spend a long time looking at the bright printed fabrics in their host of complicated repeating patterns. 

The quilts were all made by my mother’s mother, a shadowy grandmother who was a very old lady by the time my sister and I were born, and who lived out in Oregon on the west coast.  I met her only twice in my life, once when I was two years old, the second time when I was five, shortly before her death.  I know her primarily from photographs and a few hazy memories, and from her quilts.

I learned as I grew up, that my mother had been raised on an isolated farm in Oregon, a late-in-life baby whose older brother and sisters were grown and most of them married by the time she was born.  My mother grew up wearing home-made clothes, eating homemade bread, occupying herself with homemade amusements because the farm had neither electricity nor conveniences of any sort – and she couldn’t WAIT to get off that farm, into “town,” into the modern world.  My mother was married in 1946, to a soldier just home from the war.  The wedding was held on her parents’ 46th wedding anniversary, a very pretty joint celebration.  The young couple moved to the east coast right away and never looked back.  For the rest of her life my mother relished store-bought clothes and store-bought food, and store-bought everything else, and I will tell you that she was astounded to discover, when I came along, that I clearly showed a fondness for her mother’s way of life. 

I’m sure that’s the general way of things:  each generation wants to be different from those who came before.  I did, in fact, gravitate powerfully toward the values of an older generation:  I couldn’t wait to learn to cook, to bake bread, to sew my own clothes, and I was teaching myself to assemble simple quilt squares by the time I was a teenager.  The image of my grandmother stitching away at her hundreds of colorful quilts has been in my mind for as long as I can remember, a very nostalgic, pretty image.  Now, I did know that my grandmother quilted out of necessity, that times were hard, warm bedcovers much needed in a house without central heating, and that sewing and quilting were considered acceptable ways for a woman to fill her few unoccupied hours.  They were USEFUL, not frivolous occupations like reading or socializing.

But I also knew that this grandmother didn’t create her huge pile of quilts out of a sense of duty – the quilting was a joy and a pleasure, a skill that she was proud of, that drew a bit of public admiration.  My mother has commented that her parents were quiet, practical folks.  They didn’t argue, or fight, or laugh much either.  When Grandmother was angry or troubled, she retreated to her quilting; when she had something to celebrate she did that through her quilting.  I’m sure it was a creative outlet that gave her both comfort and satisfaction.

She quilted through the 1920’s and 30’s and beyond, during the first great quilting “revival” in our country.   The Depression years gave rise to a great wave of nostalgia for the “good old days” of pioneer times, and patchwork quilting took the country’s women by storm.  Patchwork was an inexpensive way to add some color and comfort to hard lives.  Farm journals and country newspapers featured quilt patterns for many years in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and historians now recognize the distinctive, cheery pastel color schemes that came to be characteristic of 30’s quilts.  One of the quilts on display up here today is a classic 30’s quilt, made up in pretty pinks and greens, in a pattern called the ‘Double Wedding Ring.”    It was made by my grandmother, given to my parents as a wedding present. 

You’ve heard one quote already from “Aunt Jane”, the fictional character who was quoted so widely back then;  I’m not sure how impressed the average UU might be with “Aunt Jane’s”  quilting metaphors to explain predestination and free-will, but I do think she was spot-on in her description of why a homely craft like quilting might appeal to an American housewife.  Here’s another quote:

“I’ve been a hard worker all my life,” she said, setting herself and folding her hands restfully, “but ‘most all my work has been the kind that ‘perishes with the using’, as the Bible says.  That’s the discouraging thing about a woman’s work.  Milly Amos used to say that if a woman was to see all the dishes that she had to wash before she died, piled up before her in one pile, she’d lie down and die right then and there. I’ve always had the name of being a good housekeeper, but when I’m dead and gone there ain’t anybody going to think of the floors I’ve swept, and the tables I’ve scubbed, and the old clothes I’ve patched, and the stockings I’ve darned.  But when one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren sees one of these quilts, they’ll think about Aunt Jane, and wherever I am then, I’ll know I ain’t forgotten.”

This is a sentiment I’ve heard repeated a dozen times or more by women I’ve come to know in the years that I have been a quilter.  The second great quilting revival in this country started in the late 1970’s at about the time of the bicentennial, and I’ve been right in the thick of that one.  My generation has no need to quilt anything out of necessity:  we can buy anything we want, and in today’s terms it’s cheaper to buy than to invest the time and energy it takes to create a hand-made ANYTHING.  So my generation clings to this old-fashioned handcraft for totally different reasons.

When the topic of a possible church service focused on quilts and quilting first came up, at a gathering of church quilters working on a ‘Green Sanctuary’ stole for the minister, the general response was, “Well sure, we like quilts and it’s interesting and all, but what in the world is SPIRITUAL about it?”  So here it is, folks – here’s the message of the service.

To my mind, quilting is just one of a variety of different paths to spiritual wholeness, a path that depends on THE WORK OF OUR HANDS to give meaning and direction to our lives.  The words that follow can be said about most quilters I know, but could also be said for a lot of gardeners, for woodworkers, for craftsmen, artists and ordinary working folks of all sorts in the world.  I expect that the members of the choir find it is their music that gives meaning to their place in the world, and in their case it is their voices rather than their hands that opens the way for them, but the principle is the same. 

Quilting, for me, is a slow, meditative, and often solitary undertaking.  It requires that I work with care and precision; it occupies my hands and gives me time to think.  It doesn’t require any particular talent beyond the willingness to practice a particular skill.  It produces something which is useful in the world, and so I don’t feel the need to apologize for the time I devote to it, and yet it has the ability to create the occasional transcendent experience in my life. 

For example, John and I were married for many years before we finally managed to produce any children, and it was a great sadness that neither his father nor mine lived to see them.  I grieved that neither of these good, warm-hearted, gentle men ever knew their grandchildren.  I worked through that over a number of years by working on a pair of “Grandfathers Quilts” for our twin sons, assembled in part from neckties worn by the two men.  The creating eased the sorrow I felt, and the quilts themselves generated stories and memories that brought some part of the two grandfathers to life for these boys.  I brought one of those quilts with me to put on display today.

In the years when our children were small and I was chronically sleep-deprived, my quilting was my “drug of choice.”  I found it calming, almost soporific in the easy monotony of the work.  I could take it with me to back yards and playgrounds, and later found it filled a lot of otherwise worthless hours sitting in carpools and various waiting rooms.  I didn’t produce a lot of work in those years, but I enjoyed every stitch.

Later, when I could actually get out at night to be with other women, I relished the founding of our town’s local quilting guild, the Nimble Thimblers.  I made wonderful friendships through the guild and began to enjoy the process of group quilting. The guild opened to me the idea of “quilts for a good cause,” charity projects that actually did some good in the world.  Over the years, through this guild, I have made lap robes to cheer up patients in nursing homes, and bed-size quilts that were distributed through Reading’s own Mission of Deeds organization to families who had lost their homes.  One year we made small quilts to cover incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit at the New England Medical Center Hospital in Boston; we knew at the time that the quilts might go home with babies in time, or might be buried with babies who didn’t live to go home.  I made a little quilt for that project that was composed of interlocking geometric shapes in black and gray and white, with a bright, cheerful burst of bright yellow in the upper left corner.  I was thinking of those tiny babies the whole time I worked on it, counting my own blessings and mulling over the troubles that other people endure, and was inspired to quilt some words around the outer border:  “A quilt for the human condition: darkness and light, joy and sorrow, and sunshine in unexpected places.”  I’m told that little quilt hangs now in one of the waiting rooms at the hospital, although I’ve never been there to see it.  I do know that it did me a whole lot more good to make that quilt than it would ever do for any of the families who sit in that waiting room.

Over the last 10 or 12 years I have been delighted to work on an annual church raffle quilt here at UUCR.  The efforts allowed me to get to know people, generated friendships, and have cemented me into the church family!  In the last couple of years I began to collect photographs of the quilts this group has made for the church, and I assembled them into a notebook along with descriptions of the work and notes on the people who worked on each project.  It’s here, on display, and I would encourage you all to take a look at it and see which of them you might remember.  I have always liked best the quilts that were made of a wide variety of different blocks made by different people.

One that I liked was a ‘basket’ quilt, where we made stylized basket blocks and asked church members to “fill” them with stitched images of whatever they thought appropriate.  We ended up with baskets of flowers, of fruits and vegetables, of puppies, of wrapped presents, and of teddybears.   The best one, I thought, was Kim Reef’s:  she took her basket and turned it into a flaming chalice, and we put it right in the center of the quilt.

The one closest to my heart, however, was the one we made a year ago, when Laurel Kluge was in treatment for a recurrence of her breast cancer.  For that quilt we made 48 blocks with a stylized stem and pair of leaves and asked people to create flowers to complete the blocks.  Thirty-two different church members had a hand in that quilt.  Two blocks were made by children.  Two were made by men.  Some were made by people who had never sewn a stitch in their life, and others by experienced sewers.  Laurel Kluge made two of the blocks, and died before the project was completed.  I think it is the most beautiful quilt we have ever made, and it is the clearest example of “fellowship” that I have ever experienced.

The church quilters have produced two different “comfort quilts” over the years, signed by large numbers of church members and designed to be sent on temporary ‘visits’ to members who are ill or troubled.  It has been a while since we have done one, and it is my fondest wish to begin another of these this spring.  If the quilters set up a table in community hall during social hour  after church one Sunday I hope a large number of you will take up a pen and inscribe your own names and wishes for healing on pieces of fabric to be included in the quilt.

Quilting, a plain, simple, old-fashioned handcraft, is one of the ways in which I find my place in the world, comfort and reward myself, and make peace with the troubles I cannot resolve.  The craft has its social and useful moments, but the quilting itself is more like an act of meditation, or perhaps even of prayer.  There were times in my life when I genuinely thought that if I didn’t have my quilting I’d have been in a mental hospital.  There are those who’ve turned quilting into a proper art form, creating quilts that now hang in museums and are worth many thousands of dollars.  There are other people who’ve used quilting to inspire real social change in the world, such as the initiators of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, known as the NAMES project, which currently comprises over 50,000 fabric panels, each memorializing a person lost to AIDS.  The assembled panels would cover many football fields if placed together now.  My own quilting doesn’t compare to any of that, but it gives me peace, and centers me in the world.  Without question, quilting is the most spiritual thing in my life.

©Copyright 2007 Susanne Sullivan
All rights reserved.