I remember. I remember it well. Well.sort of. Well, it's really hazy. Remembering is hard work. Remembering is hard work unless, that is, you innocently reach for a Madeleine-one of those petite French cakes in the shape of a barely three-dimensional scallop shell, dip it into a cup of tea, lift it to your lips, smell it, taste it, and are flooded with an emotion so long stowed away in the attic of your mind that it altogether envelops you. Then begins the irreversible sequence that permits the linking of that taste and that smell with all that once surrounded it.
Thus was the experience of Marcel in the early pages of Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. Five years on the analyst's couch could not have produced such vivid playbacks.
Marcel reflects:
when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
(Proust, Swann's Way, 30-31)
So it is in our search for those elusive passageways that comprise the ever expanding labyrinth of a life. So it is that a simple sensory experience can render a remote curve in that labyrinth as vivid and immediate as this morning's coffee and the events swirling around it.
Tasting, smelling, touching, hearing, seeing and every combination thereof are gifted accomplices as we strive to gather the loose strands of our living into some synthesis that will aid and abet this longing for integration, this spiritual search for our intra-connected web.
Perhaps no other art form invites us to gather the fragments of our lives into a palpable pattern as does quilting. Quilting has been called "memory's art" (Towner-Larsen and Davis, With Sacred Threads, 5) Yet for so many women- and historically quilting has been primarily the province of women-art was just not on their minds. Reflecting on the Amish view of quilting, Sue Bender observes that "the utility of the object, not the reflection of the maker, was what was important.Beauty came by chance." (Towner-Larsen and Davis, 5)
Yet beauty has breathed through this tactile art form for generations. While written accounts of quilts date from the 12th century of the Common Era, Crusaders are said to have "encountered quilting" when they observed Saracen foot soldiers wearing straw-filled, quilted canvas shirts as armor--not exactly assault-proof but visually memorable. The ample bounty accompanying the Crusaders homeward included vivid images of this quilting, which found their way into common sleepwear and under garments.
While quilting defined a style of apparel, the earliest "extant example" of a quilted bedcover is of coarse linen, from the 15th century. A patchwork quilt survives from 17th century England.
(Funk & Wagnalls Multimedia Encyclopedia, www.versaware.reference.lycos.com).
Quilts are a global craft. They have emerged in wondrous form from the Hmong women of Cambodia, the Kuna Indian women of the Caribbean, indigenous women of the Hawaiian Islands, and cultures international. Yet when I see a patchwork quilt or a quilt with appliqued story segments, I think of the otherwise silent sagas that comprise the history of this aspiring democracy.
Patchwork quilts were crafted in abundance by the women of this nation since its earliest days. In the late 19th century, three-quarters of the beds of this nation are said to have been covered by patchwork quilts.
Lucy Larcom, in her account of A New England Girlhood, from the year 1889, wrote of how
"We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought I best to begin mine early.
So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction-[probably one of those ornery New England Unitarians!]. . those little figured bits of cotton clothwere scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them."
(quoted in Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman)
Then in The Keeping Quilt, Patricia Polacco tells the story of the artful work that moved through generations of her family, from the hands of her Great-Gramma Anna and her mother in Russia.
"[Anna's dress was getting too small. After her mother had sewn her a new one, she took her old dress and babushka. Then from a basket of old clothes she took Uncle Vladimir's shirt, Aunt Havalah's nightdress, and an apron of Aunt Natasha's.
'We will make a quilt to help us always remember home,' Anna's mother said. 'It will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night.'"
The quilt was crafted in the spirited community of this Russian family, and down it came, down through the years, down through the generations, across the ocean, to the childhood bedtimes of Patricia Polacco herself:
"At night I would trace my fingers around the edges of each animal on the quilt before I went to sleep. I told my mother stories about the animals on the quilt. She told me whose sleeve had made the horse, whose apron had made the chicken, whose dress had made the flowers, and whose babushka went around the edge of the quilt."
These tactile memories are not all woven of joy and exuberance. Marguerite Ickis recalls the bittersweet words of her great-grandmother:
"It took me more than twenty years, nearly twenty-five, I reckon, in the evenings after supper when the children were all put to bed. My whole life is in that quilt. It scares me sometimes when I look at it. All my joys and all my sorrows are stitched into those little pieces. When I was proud of the boys and when I was downright provoked and angry with them. When the girls annoyed me or when they gave me a warm feeling around my heart. And John, too. He was stitched into that quiltSometimes I loved him and sometimes I sat there hating him as I pieced the patches together. So they are all in that quilt. I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me."
(quoted in Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman)
Pain and grief and anger and bitterness are stitched alongside the warmth and pride and pleasure. -"inch by inch, row by row," sometimes in patterns that spiral or stretch concentrically, or move from darkness to light and back again. Each piece becomes all of a piece, softened by an inner padding that gives the comfort to a comforter.
My own grandmother and her mother before her created quilts of patchwork and applique as Midwestern farm women with little time on their hands for anything other than activity that served the purposes of everyday life. Utility was what mattered; "beauty came by chance." Waste was not an option. Scraps from flower print feedbags found their way into shirts for my uncles and sundresses for my mother and her sister and comforters that warmed the entire family.
My Mother too took up the art, piecing her quilts from the scraps of fabric left over from my childhood dresses and sunsuits. A scant quarter century ago, this country celebrated our Bicentennial. My Mother marked the occasion by crafting a quilt-red, white, and blue of course. And my dear Shana, then a kindergartner, marched off to school, quilt panel in hand, to show off the "quilt that Gram made for our country two hundred years ago."
How apt it is that we do our own piecing on this Memorial Day weekend. Shana, that little storyteller so willing to cast time to the wind, is that same Shana who graduated this Friday from Montclair State University, that same daughter of whom I am so proud. Perhaps one day she and her sisters and I will piece our journeys together over a quilt frame.
Perhaps one day you and I will piece the textured hues of this family of All Souls together over a quilt frame. What stories we could tell, this congregational family of eloquent voices and lives spanning almost two hundred years. The words of our morning song return: "Dear weaver of our lives' design, with skillful fingers gently guide the sturdy threads that will survive the tangle of our days." (SLT, 22)
We remember and we seek to be remembered. A woman known only as Aunt Jane of Kentucky, said it well one hundred years ago:
"I've been a hard worker all my life, but 'most all my work has been the kind that 'perishes with the usin',' as the bible says when I'm dead and gone there ain't anybody goin' to think o' the floors I've swept, and the tables I've scrubbed, and the old clothes I've patched, and the stockin's I've darned But when one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren sees one o' these quilts, they'll think about Aunt Jane, and, wherever I am then, I'll know I ain't forgotten."
(quoted in Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman)
Quilting can be an act of memory making and healing. How many of us have stood before a panel or a multitude of panels that form the heart rending, activist inspired AIDS Memorial Quilt? This extraordinary act of love and faith, known as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, has inspired over 50,000 fabric panels, each memorializing a person lost to AIDS.
In 1985, Cleve Jones, a gay rights activist from San Francisco planned a march to honor San Francisco's Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, recently assassinated, both gay. Jones had asked each marcher to prepare a placard displaying the names of loved ones lost to AIDS. The march was concluded by this assembly of wrestless mourners mounting their placards on the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. At day's end, they stood back and looked and saw. a patchwork quilt. (www.aidsquilt.org The AIDS Memorial Quilt)
Perhaps it is time for love and imagination to infuse our hands in memory of our friends Joe Miller and Chuck Weiss, among others from this congregation who have been lost to the still lethal pandemic known as AIDS.
To remember, to activate, to integrate, to liberate. As art or metaphor, quilting mirrors these inclinations, both individual and communal. How can we forget the quilts produced by our African-American sisters and mothers and grandmothers as strategic patterns of reference during this nation's shameful centuries of slavery? Ozelle McDaniel Williams is a quiltmaker and storyteller from Charleston, South Carolina. She recounts how her ancestors, all slaves, embedded codes into their quilts that modeled "white" patterns-"Wagon Wheels," for example-to impart messages to slaves about when to leave, what to bring, where the safe havens were as they made their way through an intricate system of safe havens known as the Underground Railroad, that provided escape to the North and freedom.
Then there's the more contemporary story of the Freedom Quilting Bee. During the 1960s, a civil rights worker from the north traveled to Wilcox County, Alabama to check out the realities of racial oppression. It was there that his eyes glazed in wonder at the beauty of the quilts crafted by African American women of this locale. Through a series of negotiations with New York business folk, he arranged to auction their quilts in this city. These magnificent quilts were purchased from their makers for about $10 each, then sold at auction for close to $3,000 each. The profits-let's hope all of them-were returned to the women of Possum Bend, Wilcox County, Alabama and formed the fiscal foundation for the Freedom Quilting Bee in Wilcox County. (Towner-Larsen and Davis, 71-3)
Quilting has been the work of survival, of grief, of memory, of liberation, of community-for it is so commonly and wondrously done in the community of other women. And as men are increasingly liberated to pursue their arts of choice, they too gather around the communal frame.
An artful work of form and function emerges from unsuspecting fragments. Quilting mirrors our yearning for wholeness. To place our hands on a quilt, to lie on or under one of those wondrous comforters whose maker we have known or might contemplate through memory's imagination, is to connect with a yearning made palpable. It is to connect with that longing to piece together those otherwise contrary remnants of our lives and realize beauty. Beauty and longing surge in the words of James Agee:
"On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night."
(James Agee, Knoxville: Summer 1915, prologue to A Death in the Family)
Stretching out on fabric that breathes the spirit of all that is near and far is no less an epiphany than reaching for a Madeline, dipping it into a cup of tea, and tasting, smelling, breathing in a time that is no longer lost. May we each touch that which makes us whole. Amen.