Comfort in a Purl

This morning I've felt lazy. And, oddly enough, lazy often takes me to the porch with a book. But it needs to be a book that feels like it's in a different direction than where I've been going for the past week or month.

So I dug out Knit One, Purl a Prayer today, and took it to the side porch. Did you know I have two porches? Side and back.

On the back porch, I've been working hard, in so many ways. Including writing a book that feels both the same and different from what I've done in the past. Because it's fiction, it took a lot out of me. Having never written fiction before, I had to learn as I went along, and I was presuming to actually teach others how to write fiction, so it had to be good. Pressure, pressure.

Now, I always feel a sense of peace on the back porch, but I knew that had been tainted just a bit, because of all the hard work I've been doing there. So I went to the side porch, and here I am.

As you may remember, I've been aching for solitude this past year. And I've honored that ache, and it still remains.

Yet I know there will come a time. A re-entry. I've been wondering what that might look like, and I still don't have a clear picture. To that, this morning I am comforted by two things from Knit One, Purl a Prayer.

The first is a communal knitting project a woman kept in her home. It wasn't pretty; it was useful. Anyone who came into her home could practice on it, no pressure to be good. Just learn.

And so as I wonder about my solitude and my re-entry, I take this image to heart. It is okay to just knit my way, as if in the home of a generous woman with her communal knitting-piece. Did you know God might have such a piece too, somehow? I think maybe God does. We might not need to know exactly where we are going, to put our hands to growing in this life.

The second thing that comforts me from Knit One is the amazing community that apparently exists around the pastime of knitting. There are groups you can join. It's a little like church without the preaching, as some of these groups offer the chance to have spiritual connections with others not only through sharing a craft and stories but also through giving to the world.

It's almost amusing for me to think about maybe someday joining a knitting group. It's been so long since I've knitted. And maybe I won't join such a group, but I am reminded that community and the chance to give-back can be found in the most unexpected places, if we are seeking a chance to belong and bless. To this end, yes, I might even read Knitting for Peace: Make the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time.

For now, though, I'm just sitting on the side porch. It's quiet here this morning. And, for now, that's the way I'm still knitting-my-way. Taking the quiet into my hands and holding it near.

A Silence of Such Fullness

We think of prayer, often, as words.

And it can be.

But I loved this, from Peggy Rosenthal's Knit One, Purl a Prayer: "[there was] a rich substance in the silence after the monks' chanting of each psalm."

There are silences that are empty. There are silences that are fraught with tension.

But this silence, the kind that Rosenthal describes, was a "pause where the action was."

For me, such silence can come after a living-psalm. Like this past Sunday, when I lay down near the river, and the day felt endless and the water felt forever-deep.

Where do you experience the fullness of a silence? Maybe it is time for some kind of psalm...

Knitting Yourself (or Someone Else) into Silent Peace

"Oh, that's girl stuff—you guys wouldn't be interested. But I do find it contemplative," she said to her husband and their friend Brother Anthony.

Thus opened the moment when Peggy Rosenthal discovered that the Desert Fathers wove baskets while they were at prayer. And, said Brother Anthony, since it was the *process* of weaving the basket that mattered, the Fathers sometimes burned their baskets afterwards.

Peggy finds the process of knitting (a kind of weaving) calming. And, like another woman she heard about, it sometimes helps her "knit herself into the silent peace at the heart of the Divine Presence."

But Peggy doesn't burn the work of her hands. Work has its place too—no less the kind that builds something along the way. This building, it can be touchingly beautiful, as when, she recounts, one Prayer Shawl Ministry group knitted a shawl for a friend facing divorce. The shawl—was it not moments of touch, knitting the hurting woman to other hearts, even as the woman was losing a heart she'd come unraveled from?

I sit here this morning and think that peace is a process. A slow knitting, sometimes of what has come unraveled, sometimes of new yarn, new moments yet to be placed clearly in space and time.

And I think my fingers are their own kind of knitters. Picking up letters and passing them through loops, making shawls for those in need of shelter and warmth.

Knit One, Purl a Prayer

I "met" Peggy Rosenthal when she did a lovely review of Maureen Doallas's Neruda's Memoirs.

Now, reading the preface to Rosenthal's new book, Knit One, Purl a Prayer, I realize that when I first "met" her I had noticed the Jewish name but not *really* noticed. Peggy reminds me in her Preface: Judaism was the faith of her cradle days, though it was practiced mostly on High Holy Days.

As she lays out an invitation to join her on a knitting journey, albeit not asking us to come with yarn in hand, I am struck that she has found a way to be both Christian and Jewish. By this I mean that though she is now Catholic, she embraces the physical as a way to the transcendent. And that reminds me of the jubilance of Jewish festivals, filled with things to touch and taste, as reminders of the spirit in the surface of things. Of course, that is quite Catholic too, and so it seems fitting that this is where she found her place upon conversion.

I am not a knitter, anymore. Though my grandmother once taught me, and if I close my eyes I can remember the click of the needles, the feel of the yarn passing through my fingers. So the memories draw me, and I think... Maybe I will journey a little with Peggy. Listen in as she puts needle to needle, knits physical to spirit...