Knit together

One of my favorite collects is the one for All Saints' Day in which we pray:

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one
communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son
Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints
in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those
ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love
you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy
Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Knitting is a great image of interconnection. In Christ in some mysterious way I am intertwined, interconnected, knit together with God's people living and dead, not just the ones I like or choose but all of them.

I learned to knit from my Aunt Anstes. She'd sit in our living room on her visits back east and knit away. My honorary "aunt" Virginia and her mother, Mrs Nichols, were also constantly knitting. I particularly admired the knitting of socks on multiple needles while carrying lively conversations. I have knitted on and off, since then. Most of what I have learned about knitting I learned from books which always makes me wonder whether I am doing stitches in the mirror image of the way that I should be doing them.

When I was in college, I knitted or crocheted in lectures. I am a person who learns well from what I hear and knitting kept me able to focus on listening. I think that now, in meetings, it also helps me to think before I speak a little more than is natural to my personality type. Sometimes. As a student and young adult, I knitted scarves for less than grateful boyfriends, blankets for other people's babies and my own, Christmas stockings for spouse and children. I also crocheted granny squares into blankets.

When our deacon the Rev. Marylen Stansbery got the Shawl Ministry started, I took up knitting again after a long hiatus. It took me a while to get back into the rythm of knitting, but I liked the idea of keeping my hands busy to still my mind and heart for prayer. I also realized that I had been praying all along, in much of my past knitting, for friends who were pregnant or for their babies. I also like the idea that often several of the prayer shawl ministry people will knit on the same shawl, even in only a row or two. That means two things: one, it is the gift of a praying community and two, prayer shawl ministry is all about process and not product: if we all knit on the same shawl, it is not likely to have consistent stitch tension or look perfect but that is not the point. When we give them to people, we pray that as they are wrapped in the shawl they will know themselves held in God's loving embrace and in the prayers of the congregation These are images of abiding in God's love and being in Christ that mean a lot to me. There is a Shawl Ministry website http://www.shawlministry.com that offers patterns, advice, prayers and much more.

Here is a picture of me with Marylen in the first ever St Mark's Shawl.
I have to admit that I take the shawl with me a lot, sometimes for warmth, sometimes if I am doing something stressful or far from home.

Since the twins went off to college, leaving us with a suddenly empty nest, I've been knitting a lot for them. They are in New England, after all, where it is a lot colder than it is here. And they both have wild and ecclectic dress sense. So they asked for adult versions of the classic Ann Norling Fruit Caps, starting college as a tomato and an eggplant. I sent them the Fiber trends pumpkin hats time for Halloween. Here is Mo in a fabulous pumpkin hat:
Over Christmas, I made each one a kitty helmet hat from Stitch N Bitch. I also made them each two pairs of mittens, one with a flap so they could get their fingers out if they needed to, an alpaca boucle roll brim hat and for Anna a chenille helmet from a Vogue book. Needless to say they are now begging for mercy. These projects are slightly more stimulating than the prayer shawls yet easy enough that they don't require much concentration and they give me someplace to focus my anxiety about Mo and Anna being off on their own far from home.