I've spent the last couple of months working on a tapestry in which three Greek words – sophia, agape and charis – are woven into a pattern of vivid contrasting colours. In recent years I've been developing a form of contemplative action while doing tapestry. I mainly work in stranded cotton and with a canvas gage of 22 to 28 per inch.
To spend hours stitching a word like Agape and blending colours of red and purple around it is very different from tracing the use of agape in the New Testament, and exploring the semantic domain and extra canonical occurences which give contextual texture. That too is a contemplative and prayerful study – "bury your head in a lexicon and raise it in the presence of God" – as the great Gospels scholar B H Streeter once urged his students.
But to study a word by forming it in stitches has its own value as contemplative activity, prayerful action, meditative reflection on the inner meaning and outer beauty of a word. Image and colour, shape and form, the creative intention of the artist, bring a different kind of attentiveness no less imaginative, disciplined and valid as an attentive listening and gazing into the reality to which the word points – Agape, Love.
The vivid and dark tone, the contrast and complement of colour, with shades merging or clashing, and shapes emerging and forming rather than fixed and formal, creates a visual exegesis of what this word means, at least to the artist. Stitching a tapestry involves combining thousands of small repetitive acts of precise purpose, each completed with careful attention to what surrounds it, yet each stitch an essential word composed into the evolving story. Every stitch demands the practised co-ordination of hand and eye, the quiet and patient discipline that enables a needlepoint to find the right square, coming back through unsighted, to complete the stitch, and with a choice of 46,080 on a 10 by 8, 24 per inch canvas.
I found myself the other morning doing 20 minutes stitching, while listening to Classic FM, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto slow movement, with a mug of half drunk tea, and paying particular attention to the choice of colours for the surrounding border. Was it the music that took my mind to the First Letter of John, and agape as the test of Christian life, because the agape of God is as James Denney said, "the last reality of the universe"? Maybe so – I have a friend who insists that Mozart composed the music scores for heaven, and I'm not inclined to disagree.
Or was it the colours themselves – blue for wisdom, red for love, green for grace – and golden yellows as the backgound, colours and ideas which invite the kind of reverie in which memorised text, significant experiences, and vivid visuals coalesce in the hermeneutics of love and longing which I for one, dare to call prayer?
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