Worship is a patchwork quilt
Worship is a patchwork quilt of people of different shapes, different characters, different sizes, different prejudices, different colours, different enthusiasms, different ages, different moods: all arranged, sometimes higgledy-piggledy, sometimes in arranged groups, sometimes half-higgledy and half-arranged, sometimes crazy.
Worship is a patchwork quilt of patchwork people, joined sometimes by one sewer, sometimes by a principal sewer and assistants. Sometimes worship is a quilting bee.
Worship is a patchwork quilt with quilting stitches which are sung, spoken, silent, and felt.
Worship is a patchwork quilt with quilting lines stitched counterpoint to the pattern of the patchwork; quilting lines which are sometimes arranged according to common themes of sorrow and sorry, or delight and dedication – the lines of common worship. Sometimes a special quilting theme is stitched counterpoint – a topical concern, a human condition, a where/why/how? question. Sometimes quilting lines just happen, just emerge unplanned – light in the first hymn found its unseen echo in the last.
Worship is a patchwork quilt to creep under from the cold of solitariness, fear and partialness, and to experience the quilt’s warmth of companionship, wholeness and love. It is to leave the quilt’s warm cosiness for the openness, opportunity and challenge of the wider world in which we live.
Worship is a patchwork quilt – a whole in which the many become one while keeping their individual identities – a patchwork quilt in the vast inter-dependent patchwork of creation.
Patchwork God bless us now.
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