After the Durham Cathedral visit, and the Daily Bread tapestry, from about 1988-1994 I did several others which were also based on photographs.
The first one, and the one I want to write about here, took my interest because you can sometimes tell a book by looking at its cover! One of the most helpful books I’ve ever read on prayer is by Richard Harries, Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness. The front cover has a vibrant and heavily symbolic stained glass window. Well. I had just completed one and loved it, and loved doing it. So here we go again.
This time I had a book cover and a photocopier that enlarged images. The enlarged image of the front cover was outlined in black felt tip, traced on to the canvas, and away we went again. I was now becoming quite well known in the local stranded cotton stockists. Choosing the colours is always a mixture of what you want, what is available, and that subjective decision making about whether this colour does or doesn’t work.
Because of the subtlety of colour and curved shapes the canvas this time was 24 mesh, the smallest I have ever worked, but necessary to work so many circles and curves on a piece measuring 28×11 cm. Around then I was given an oak Victorian frame, plain and oozing its age, and just right for a piece that would be long and finely detailed.
It took ages, I don’t remember how long but it was started in 1988 and finished by the end of 1989. It has hung in our home all that time, and has faded a bit, and the reflective glass doesn't help the photo! But working this particular tapestry is an important milestone in my journey, for reasons that take some time to tell. But they are too important in my own spiritual journey not to speak, and share.
I am an evangelical ecumenist. By which I mean that those two words are essential in my understanding of what it means for me to live a faithful Christian life that is true to my experience of Christian faith seeking understanding.
This window is the Chapel Window in Bar Hill (Shared) Church, Cambridge. The window itself depicts the ecumenical intersections of the original six congregations using the same building, their unity in diversity, and their growing together in mission as the one Church. The seeds of light at the top, are moving out through the cruciform openness of a flower enfolding a purple heaven which is open to the world.
My own denomination, Scottish Baptist, has always been conflicted about ecumenical relations at the structural levels. In 1987, at the time I was working on this tapestry the churches in Scotland were embarked upon an Inter-Church process aimed at establishing a national ‘ecumenical instrument’ open to all Christian denominations. Scottish Baptists were fully involved in the process and I was one of four denominational representatives. When all the conferences and committees, negotiations and adjustments, prayers and proposals, arguments and agreements were completed, each denomination required the approval of their respective governing bodies, in our case our annual Baptist Assembly.
As one fully involved in all the negotiations, and in the formulation of the final proposal to Assembly, and as the person responsible for seconding the motion on behalf of the Council of the Baptist Union of Scotland, I had much personally invested in the outcome. In the event the Assembly narrowly rejected the proposal and subsequent amendments. Ever since Scottish Baptists have not been involved in Action of Churches Together in Scotland (ACTS) at the national level of ecumenical life in Scotland.
That Assembly and its aftermath was for me personally, the lowest point in almost 50 years as a minister amongst our churches. I had, and have, friends in all the major denominations, people with whom I had prayed, laughed, worked and now and then wept. To make such a statement of principled separation was, and is, deeply inimical to my own spirituality, experience of God, and my understanding of the church within and beyond distinctive denominational principles.
That is the context in which this tapestry came into being. That’s why this stained glass window, an image of ecumenism working, and of unity in diversity put into practice, is so important to me. That’s why the long process of translating it into stitched colour, was for me an intense spiritual as well as artistic challenge. I have remained an ecumenical evangelical, or evangelical ecumenist, through those 50 years of ministry. This tapestry was worked and completed through those difficult events, as hope in defiant mode, as love refusing to give up, as faith in the Christ who prayed that his followers would be one.
As with the Durham tapestry, I had found artistic creativity to be both therapy and theology. Each minute stitch counted and contributed. Each thread has six strands; this was the tapestry when I started separating strands, mixing them, and varying the uses of colour and tone by using two or three different shades of the same base colours.
The variations within one congregation are diverse enough. But add to that the differences between congregations of the same denomination; consider then, the mix of denominational traditions and yes, the Church is a thickly textured and variegated weaving together of multiple strands of difference. Yet when these same strands are woven together, stitched beside each other, this tapestry grows into an image that tells the larger truth – that the Church of Christ is made up of all who come, confess their faith and seek in all our variegated ways to be faithful to Jesus.
Thus it was that during my second major project I discovered that art, in my case tapestry, can be an exegesis of the heart, a medium through which we can express disappointment but also hope, doubt but also faith, sadness but also joy, loss but also, and finally, gift.