Creating with a Cloud of Witnesses

In the early days of the pandemic, I started making masks. 

I didn’t go to the fabric store—we were sheltering in place. Instead, I descended into the basement, and emerged with fabric my grandmothers saved for decades. When I ironed the vintage florals, the steam carried the scents of their houses, their closets and attics, and it made me think about my place in the history—my connection to those who went before me, and those who will come after.

Both of my grandmothers sewed; now, in my basement, I have cross-stitch patterns they began and didn’t finish. Floral remnants in long strips only seven inches wide. Pieces cut for a quilt that was never quilted.  A wooden basket that unfolds to reveal compartments filled with buttons, clasps, bits of elastic, pins, thimbles, and needles. When I taught my daughter how to make a mask, she used some 50-year-old underwear elastic she found in this box to make ear straps.

I use a sewing machine the same age as I am, given to me by the great-aunt who originally taught me to sew. She’s near ninety, now, and used to pray when she sewed. I reflect on her long hours of repetitive seams and prayers as I sew. I feel like I’m joining in her tradition when I use the machine.

There is a crafter outside of Chicago who believes that when she finds unfinished pieces of needlework at estate sales, she ought to buy them and finish them. Typically, these are just small cross-stitch and needlepoint pieces, but a couple of years ago at an estate sale, she found an enormous, unfinished embroidery and quilting project that was of a United States map. According to the Washington Post (this story was reported all over the place), she said, “I knew I had to buy it and finish it,” and added that “it would be a huge undertaking and she doesn’t know how to quilt.” She asked on Instagram if anyone wanted to help her complete it, and over a thousand people replied. She chose a hundred and mailed pieces out to them. The quilt was completed about six weeks later. 

As my daughter and I make masks out of fabric handed down from my grandmothers, I think of those hundred people, working together across a great distance of time and space to make something beautiful—to finish something unfinished—as a kind of communion of the saints, as a great cloud of witnesses. I think of it as a kind of picture of what Christians are doing in the church right now, as we continue the work our ancestors started, and as we hope that those who come after us will carry it on until God’s kingdom comes in its fullness to earth.

Of course, we don’t always use our resources to build something beautiful and good.

When God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, and to Mt. Sinai, Moses disappeared into a cloud on the mountaintop for forty days. The people got restless, and they pooled their resources to make a golden calf that they could worship.

When Moses finally came down from the mountaintop carrying a word from God for the people, he saw them worshipping an idol, and he threw God’s law to the ground and destroyed the golden calf. 

Moses asked God to give them another chance, and he went back up on Mt Sinai and received God’s law again.

This time, when he comes down, he gathers the community to listen to God’s law, and he invites them to work together to build a tabernacle—a dwelling place for the Spirit of God. And as their hearts move them, they bring donations of whatever they have—their heirlooms. Their jewelry. Their best linens. The things they’d saved and carried from one land to another. And they bring their talents, too — they sew and dye fabric, they melt precious metals, they hammer and nail. They work together with what they have to make something for God.

As we emerge in a new, post-pandemic world, I think God invites us to bring what we have. Whatever we’ve inherited—from our families, from this nation, from the church—our scraps of fabric and our most treasured possessions—our histories, whether we’re proud of them or not, whether they involve golden-calf worship or not—our faith—and to offer it all to God. 

God invites us to work together with the cloud of witnesses, the communion of the saints who’ve gone before us, to make something beautiful—to find new ways to reveal God’s presence dwelling among us in this particular, fraught, moment in time. To find that our gifts may need to be used in new ways—clothes turned into quilts, unfinished projects divided up and conquered, scraps turned into masks, underwear elastic circling our ears, not our waists—because loving God and loving our neighbors looks a little different now than it used to.

And perhaps when we join together in obedience to God, God will make a path through this wilderness for us, and God will dwell with us as we walk it. 

—Written by Amy Peterson. Used by permission from the author.