The Lectionary of Quilting

OK, so for those of you who don't know, it's time to 'fess up to the fact that in my other life, I'm a preacher. Well, part of the time. I used to do more preaching when I was serving in a church. In my current denominational role I preach on occasion. But as I was getting ready for my next quilt project tonight I found myself reflecting on a long-term debate that moves through the circles of the ordained.

There are those who are "lectionary preachers" and those who are not. The lectionary is a three-year cycle of Scriptures assigned to each week of the year. The basic idea is that if you preach through the lectionary, in three years the congregation would have heard most of the Bible. It ties in closely with the seasons of church life, and there are Christian education curricula also based on the lectionary so that there's the possibility of the entire congregaton, "cradle to grave", learning about the same Bible passages on any given Sunday thus hopefully producing feisty and educated conversation at home following church.

Well, that's the ideal, anyway.

Those who aren't lectionary preachers prefer to choose their own sermon series, perhaps walking through a particular book of the Bible over a period of time, or exploring a topic, and so forth. Non-lectionary preachers tend to look at the lectionary as restrictive, not connected enough to the life of the congregation; they also feel that it leads to pastoral laziness as the Scripture is handed to you each week. While I was in my seminary training, I actually spent a bit of time in each of these schools of thought--for awhile, pro-lectionary, for awhile anti-lectionary, back and forth as I continued to explore who I was as a clergy-person in training.

Post seminary when I was preaching consistently, although I did sometimes do my own sermon series and chose Scriptures and sermon topics due to events happening in the life of the congregation at a certain time, I more frequently tended to be a lectionary preacher. Preaching from the lectionary forced me to work with Scripture passages I might not otherwise choose. You know, the tough ones. The confusing ones. The ones we sort of wish weren't in the Bible in the first place. If I were to just always choose my own passages every week, I'd probably lean towards my favorite books of the Bible, or at very least those passages with which I was comfortable, that I felt like I knew what I was talking about, and so forth. And eventually, my congregation would probably get pretty bored and my own preaching skills would lose their edge.

Switch gears.

Tonight I was pressing fabrics getting ready for a class I'm taking in a couple of nights. It's a "strip club" class (and yes, I catch the irony talking about being in a strip club in the same blog entry I've addressed my preaching life). In other words, it's a class that uses 2 1/2" strips to create a quilt. I had tried to find fabrics myself but had very limited time to search so I ended up taking the easy way out. The quilt store where I'm taking the class had prepared some jelly rolls (collections of 2 1/2" strips wound into a roll) specifically for the class. It has the exact number we need, and they're all Asian fabrics as the pattern we're using is entitled "Orient Express". It felt so much like cheating, and I was concerned about having a quilt that looked like everyone else's in the class, so I'd tried not to take that route. But in the long run, the time crunch won out and I ran down to the quilt store a few days ago, nabbed the required jelly roll, chose a couple of accent fabrics, and was good to go.

I'm pressing the strips tonight, thinking, "how in the world are these going to work together?" You see, the jelly roll is true scrappy. The only common thread is that they're Asian or can pass as such. There's no rhyme or reason to the colors or patterns. I kept catching myself glancing over at my stash in hopes that somehow a nice coordinated set of Asian fabrics, just the right amount for this project, would miraculously appear.

Nope, it's going to be scrappy. And immediately the difficulty of this class struck me. The pattern is easy, the technique is easy, and buying someone else's pre-made jelly roll is easy. But I'm going to have to deal with fabrics I'm not comfortable with; I'm going to have to struggle through making a block look good given that nothing seems to relate to anything else. I'm going to have to work through the seeming disconnectedness and figure out how to make it all hang together.

That's not the way I usually function. I like to make things coordinate. I like colors to play nicely together and I like to see a natural progression from one part to another. I even like how well the "suprise fabric" plays into and lifts up everything else. But for this class I can only deal with what I've been handed and see what happens. Much like the lectionary. And just like I found myself finding depths in Scripture that I'd not really understood before as I had to work my way through it using the lectionary, I imagine I'll learn that scrappy really is beautiful--that I can really do it myself. I'm starting to look at my stash a little differently, thinking "if I cut a strip off of that one, and that other one there, and there's that gorgeous one over there that I've never known what to do with..." and imagining what my next scrap quilt might look like.

So learning and growing involves challenging ourselves with stuff we normally don't like. Things we typically avoid. The hard things. The confusing things. The things we wish weren't in there in the first place. And finding the beauty within.

(Maybe I'll post a picture of the completed quilt top from this class later on and we'll see if I did find the beauty within!)