Many of us know the opening verses of Ecclesiastes 3, thanks to Pete Seeger’s folk song
“Turn, Turn, Turn,” released in 1962. Those verses end with:“A time for love, a time for hate”. Seeger added: “A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late . . .” The song became an anti-war anthem as the Vietnam war dragged on.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 contemplates the everyday ordinariness of life: birth and death, planting and harvesting, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing – affirming God’s presence at all times, in all places. Verse 7 caught my attention: “a time to rend, and a time to sew”.
The rending of garments is a sign of grief, and repairing the “rent” happens only after the season of mourning is ended. The Talmud mandates precise rules concerning this ritual practice, and determines how long the rent remains un-mended, based on the closeness of one’s relationship with the deceased.
This led me to think the implications of “mending” in our spiritual lives. Maybe you remember your mother’s or grandmother’s mending basket, left in a handy place where shirts in need of buttons, or socks needing repair would land on wash day. There they’d remain until a spare minute to pick up needle and wool, to repair the heel or toe of a sock, carefully picking up the dropped stitches and weaving new wool across the breach.
What an apt metaphor for us. These past 18 months have felt as if parts of our lives have been tattered around the edges or ripped wide open. The day-to-day effects of the pandemic have exposed our vulnerabilities. People have lost jobs and loved ones. Hospitals are bursting at the seams, and medical teams are dealing with staff shortages, shrinking resources, and frayed nerves. Legislative hopefuls in our recent elections spoke about “repairing the social fabric” and the dire need to “mend the social safety net.”
If you’ve never mended anything, there’s a 5-minute video online or an article called “How to Mend a Sock in Three Minutes”. You know, you could just order new socks online and have them delivered tomorrow. In our disposable society, mending is a lost art, but whether it’s a sock or broken relationships in need of repair , mending can be a spiritual practice.
In these days of quick fixes, learning these skills makes mending a choice – there is an intentionality to it, a commitment. Think about our human relationships. Conflict happens. Good as we are or try to be, we experience jealousy, greed, anger, fear. Sometimes it may feel easier to walk away rather than commit to mending or to bridging the gaps. Mending as a spiritual practice requires that we ask, “Is this worth fixing?”
We can ask the same about our neighborhood, church or country. As a community, before any steps are taken, we must ask “Is this worth saving?” The word “save” comes from the same Greek word as “salvation”, meaning to heal, to make whole, to mend.
Laura Everett, a United Church of Christ minister in Boston, writes: “God is a mender. God takes what the world considers disposable . . . and looks with patience to repair what is broken in each of us. God sees our tears and tenderly stitches us up. Sometimes that repair feels like an unraveling. Yet, mending is an affirmation of worth.”
September 30th, The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation called for in the TRC’s Calls to Action, # 80 is a day for learning about our history, about what actually happened, recognising, and atoning for the fall-out today. Reconciliation calls for sharing, acknowledging and creating a vision for the future together. It’s a messy, necessary part of decolonization. It is not only a process of mending relationships, but also of creating new ones, built on trust, respect and mutuality.
The mission we share in bringing God’s reconciliation into the world does not belong solely to church leadership but to every member of Christ’s church. As the baptized, we are called to use our vocation toward the realizing of God’s dream.
Louise Erdrich, novelist and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, has authored “Four Souls”, in which she tells the story of Margaret, an Ojibwa woman who decides to make a medicine dress and gathers the materials to sew the garment. Margaret says:
“To sew is to pray.men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman’s eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.”
May we learn the courageous art of mending; repair not only the holes in our own socks but also the tattered patchwork of this life we’re called to share with others, weaving a blanket of hope and reconciliation that covers us all. “A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late . . .”
Photo credit: Kate Laine on Unsplash
