The fourth Beatitude panel is finished as far as it can go with tent stitch – I’m working within the discipline of only using this one stitch on all nine panels except for embroidered detail to be completed when the nine panels are done.
This panel is based on “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This was inevitably more challenging, because of the attempt at a personal level to convey the long shadow of mourning against that promise of future comfort.
At one point in Lament for a son, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s remarkable book about the death of his son, he wrote words which many of us have discovered to be both true to life as it now is, and, yes, comforting in the light of God’s promised future:
“The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God’s new day, who ache with all their being for that day’s coming, and who break out into tears when confronted by its absence…Those who mourn are the ones who realize that in God’s realm of peace there is neither death nor tears, and who ache when they see someone crying tears over death. The mourners are aching visionaries.”
The Pleiades constellation, also called the Seven Sisters, is mentioned three times in the Bible. Each time it is to highlight the power and providence of God the Creator. Likewise in Psalm 8.1-2 “LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens.” Then there’s that parentheses in the creation story in Genesis 1.16: “Oh, and by the way, He made the stars also!”
The lights in the panel come from Pleiades, and the first intimations of dawn and the new day, the light of God’s promises shining towards us to where we are now.
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