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- Faith is Like a Quilt: The More You Contemplate It, The More Mysterious It Becomes
One of the goals of the American Waldensian Society is to help Waldensians as well as those who consider themselves to have been influenced by Waldensians to learn from each other. That’s why the AWS weekly email is sometimes devoted to sharing reflections about what we believe and how we can live out what we believe in our daily lives.
Today’s American Waldensian Society e-blast invites us all to think more deeply about our faith. It was written by the Rev. Dr. Rachel Matthews who is a co-pastor at the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, North Carolina.
If you have visited our house, you will have seen a quilt hanging on the wall. It is my great-grandmother’s quilt. As I understand it to be her last fully stitched quilt, made sometime in the 1930s. My grandmother received it when my great-grandmother died. My father received it when my grandmother died. My mother saved it until Matt and I set up house in Arkansas. Then I had a sleeve put on its backing so we could hang it on our wall. The quilt came down from our wall in 1995 when we moved to Virginia and it was saved in a box until I sent it to my youngest brother and his wife to see if they could hang it on a wall in their house. I recently got it back to hang again on our wall.
Her quilt is pieced out of hexagons, six-sided pieces about an inch and a half in diameter. The hexagons become six-petaled flowers with a solid hexagon center. The flowers become diamonds which are outlined with a white border. The edges of the quilt are scalloped with the border of the diamond/hexagon flowers. Yet, as your eye falls down the edge of the quilt you realize there is something not quite right, a single hexagon, out of place, disrupting the symmetry of the edge. My great-grandmother had made the quilt like many Native American rug makers make their rugs; she stitched in an imperfection “to let the evil spirits out.”
The material she used was whatever scraps of cloth she had saved. Many of the scraps have a variety of flower patterns, but an equal number are solid. The colors are bright and bold, such a contrast to the primarily pastel and brown landscape colors I know she saw in Wyoming. I wonder sometimes what she must have looked like wearing these colorful flower patterns she salvaged from old dresses or flour sacks. Were all these pieces of material hers? Were some worn by the men in her household? Which of her nine children had dresses or shirts made from these pieces? Were the curtains in her house so colorful and bold? Any pictures I have seen from the time period are black and white. Who taught her how to quilt? Who taught her how to design her patterns? So many mysteries…
Faith is like a quilt. The more you contemplate it, the more mysterious it becomes. We might ask, where does faith come from? What makes up faith? The letter to the Hebrews says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” How do you find it? How
do you know it’s there? James says, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead….Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” The works of faith have common patterns, but each work is unique, each has its own history and markings.
Paul´s prayer to the Ephesians (Eph.3:14-22) is a work of faith, a Faith quilt, as it were. The prayer shows Paul´s openness and trust in God the Creator who is in relationship with his Son Jesus Christ and to all of creation, all families of the earth, us. It is this way that our faith has commonality. We share it with others who have an openness and trust in God, Father of Jesus Christ, Creator of us all. And, paradoxically, it is this same God who opens us to our faith in the first place. Christ dwelling in our innermost being roots and grounds us in love. The boundaries of this love, the breadth, length, height and depth are beyond our imagination. Our faith transforms us and allows us to accomplish more than we can ever imagine.
Paul says, “I pray that out of Christ´s glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord´s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
I invite you to envision your faith as if it were a quilt. What are the patterns that emerge? Are any imperfections obvious? What are the stories behind these patterns of mystery, openness, love, transformation, each whose center is God? We can see these patterns evident in the heroes and heroines of our faith tradition. Who are your favorites? Who might guide you in your faith? As school starts and the Fall creeps upon us revealing its own quilt of patterned colors, I pray that in all the comings and goings you will live open to God’s Spirit, may it dwell within you. Live as though your feet were growing in the richness of the love of God in Jesus Christ and your hands were flowing fountains of the same love. Live with imagination and creativity not accepting the boundaries blocking us from receiving the blessings God has for us. Live transformed by the fullness of God which seeks to fill you and move you to a new life that transforms all who meet you.
Rachel Matthews earned her M Div. degree at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Rachel also earned a Masters in Christian Education at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education as well as a Doctor of Ministry in Pastoral Counseling and Psychotherapy at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. Rachel has served congregations for thirty-five years and, with her husband Matt, began service as a co-pastor at the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in July 2024.