The Wind Blows Wherever It Pleases

Margaret[1] and I had a proper visit last week – not a quick hello, but a nice long sit-down.

Margaret, a resident in the long-term care home where I am the pastor, recently celebrated her 90^th birthday. In her working days, she was a nurse, but we rarely talk about that. We talk about the people she loves (some of them still living), about books and poetry (she is an avid reader), about death and the process of dying (she is not afraid). Last week Tuesday, we also talked about her needlework. Some of her work is on her walls, some of it is in churches – as she was once commissioned to create threaded scenes and patterns to adorn the cushions of kneeling benches and other pieces of chancel furniture.  

Some of you may remember the counted cross stitch piece I finished (and blogged about) a couple of years ago. I still haven’t framed it. It’s folded up in a canvas bag, sitting in a drawer of my desk at the long term care home. In the midst of Margaret’s and my conversation, I ran to get it as I thought she might like to see it. “I’ll be right back!” I called over my shoulder. “I’ll be right here!” she called back in her loud and pleasant voice.

I brought it to her and she ran her long fingers over the stitches.

“Oh, this is just beautiful. Just wonderful.” Margaret looked up and to the left as she accessed her memory. She recalled conversations she had with friends who were working on their own designs and patterns. “They would ask me whether to put a stitch here or there and I would say, ‘If the wind caught the thread and blew on it, where would it land?’” She paused, as if listening for their answer. “’Then put the stitch there.’”

I quickly made sure Margaret knew that my work came from a pattern – this wasn’t my original design. (In fact, part of the therapeutic value of the project for me came from following a pattern – mindless, yet careful grid-following.)

But I was drawn to her advice. I asked her to repeat it. “If the wind caught the thread and blew on it, where would it land?” Pause. “Then put the stitch there.”

I thought about other thread and needle artists who create original pieces in this windblown way. Hillegonda Visser, my friend Andrea’s mom, paints with thread (that’s what it’s called! Thread painting!). She separates thicker threads into pieces and rejoins them with other colors. Then she puts thread to cloth with varied strokes and textures “to recreate a memory,” Andrea told me.

In the wake of Margaret’s advice and with reflection on Hillegonda’s work, I find myself thinking about how my life is like a thread. My life is a thread that is accustomed to following patterns and rules, but has – in recent years – had to depend more on the wind of the Spirit (John 3:18). If the wind caught me and blew on me, where would I land? Put the stitch there.

Margaret loves not only the artistry of needle and thread, but also that of words. In our proper visit last week she quoted Tennyson to me – a piece of his poem, “Morte d’Arthur,” that she had memorized in high school. Her voice wove waves of sound through her room: “The old order changeth, yielding place to now, / And God fulfills himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

The wind blows wherever it pleases (John 3:18). God fulfills Godself in many ways.

All of these threads re-joined and textured for me earlier this week when I read the words of another poetic writer, Marilyn McEntyre. In her book, Word by Word: a Daily Spiritual Practice, she pulls apart the thick threads of words into seven pieces – one piece for each day of the week. This week, she’s parsing “follow.” On Sunday: “Follow … the rules.”

I immediately want to modify this suggestion. Follow the rules if they’re good. If they apply. Unless they keep you from following a higher law. Until they’re no longer life-giving. But remember that grace matters more. Following the rules has gotten a lot of people into deep trouble: people who were just following orders, just doing their job, just not questioning.

Following the rules matters when you’re learning to love what the law protects. When you’re learning a skill—painting, piano-playing, tennis, creative writing, scientific experimentation—rules keep your lines straight and your colors from running. They get the ball to the other side of the net, the sheet music to sound, and the sentence to make sense. They keep the experiment from blowing up—sometimes literally.

But just beyond the rules lies a play space where rules can be bent and even broken, the moves restyled, the tools put to new purposes, the intuitive leaps honored. If you go there before you’ve walked the path through the forest of rules, you’re likely to be disappointed or hurt or, worse, do damage. If you go there disciplined by the rules, your play will be productive and your efforts richly enjoyable. (p. 137)

Though I don’t think I’ll be painting or playing with thread any time soon, I know that for myself (and for many of us, in a variety of ways) the old order is changing. There are customs – some of them even “good” – that have corrupted the world. It is time for us to yield place to now – to yield to the Spirit who is catching and blowing the threads of our lives and leading us to places of life-giving play, intuition, love and joy.

Let’s put our stitches there.

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[1] Not her real name, but story used with her permission.