I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Sharon Dawn Johnson’s reflection Body and Beading As Sacred Texts.
Reading and Listening
“You need to create your own recipe.” The orthopaedic doctor’s counsel follows the news that my fractured tibia has healed. After seven weeks of wheelchair confinement—mostly indoors—and almost total dependence on others, I no longer need to wear the bendable brace nor avoid weight-bearing. Amidst a surge of emotions, outdoor walking floats to the top of my multi-ingredient list.
The walker and I make our first five-minute solo trip outdoors three days later. Afterward, I revise my recipe while icing my painfully swollen knee, leg and foot. “Take it slow, very slow and steady, aim for small, incremental steps,” whispers my body. “Use your walking supports—and no false heroics pushing through the pain.” Priority reading of my body’s messages is teaching me to listen and cooperate/obey; never mind my head’s fantasy ingredients list.
Drifting into sleep, a wise desert Amma emerges from the sands of time, beckoning memories of our family’s three years in Oxford, already forty years ago.
Sister Margaret Mary, an Anglican nun, begins to share about lectio divina—an unknown term at the time—as the living room hushes where we mothers and others gather for weekly bible study and support. Sr Meg attends our evangelical Anglican church instead of a ‘high’ one with more ‘smells and bells.’ We’re familiar with her nondescript mid-blue garment and her sandalled feet, socked or sockless according to the season.
We lean toward her, expectant, as she unfolds the ancient four-fold process of reading and listening to scripture—lectio, oratio, meditatio, contemplatio—now familiar to monastics everywhere. My heart warms to this form of prayer—so intimate, so relational, so Mystery-filled.
These days, I’m learning lectio divina lessons from my own body. I lean into the Abbey’s ‘S’ words that unfold Sr Meg’s terms: settling and shimmering; savouring and stirring; summoning and serving; slowing/stilling and silence. Ancient recipe, fresh language.
Beading Highly Unlikely Triangles
“Now is the time to give me your attention, while your leg injury heals.” I respond to the insistent call from Highly Unlikely Triangles, a bead-weaving pattern designed by Gwen Fisher. Listening to my body applies equally to my artistry. In the pattern’s beautiful twists and turns I see Rublev’s Trinity icon, where the icon’s endlessly circulating relationships includes a visual opening that welcomes me to join their dance.
Arg-h-h-h! What’s the problem? I master the two-colour stitching of cubic right-angle weave. I can even turn the first right corner using the colour-variation sequence. And there the first of many puzzles start. I don’t follow the shortcut thread path; I can’t easily interpret the unfamiliar graphs that orient the second and third corners so that their turns form natural twists. I question the pattern’s “advanced beginner” skill assessment as my threadbare patience frays.
My slow-paced bedtime reading of Practice of the Presence in Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s fresh translation offers joy to accompany some experimental practicing. She honours Brother Lawrence’s Presence-oriented devotion to “participating daily in a loving, threefold deity.” The translation uses the pronouns themself-they-theirs to refer to the Trinity’s indissoluble three-in-oneness. While beading, praying, listening, I chew on themself-ness.
After twenty-five hours (no kidding) of beading experiments, including asking the designer for clarification, I join beam one’s ends to complete a triangle. Then I discover a dead-end twist when adding gap-filling beads. (Sig-h-h!) That means the up turn sequence at corner three still isn’t in the right place!
That dead-end mistake triggers a gut-emphatic click of comprehension. When stitched correctly, the pattern becomes an infinity loop—without visible beginning or end. After saving several samples as priceless lessons in visio divina (sacred seeing), I start again from the beginning…
Looping Thread Paths
“Every time I push my leg beyond its limits, I get set back before an advance occurs. There’s a looping forward, then backward, then forward again that reminds me—this very moment—of my current beading stitch.”
While texting a beloved friend, my mind’s eye and fingers jointly decide to inform me about the shared rhythms and looping movements taking place in my body and my beading. It marks a 180-degree shift away from tattered old patterns and age-ragged interpretations of what constitutes progress.
No more interpretive mis-readings such as ‘going around in circles’, ‘spinning your wheels’, or taking ‘one step forward, two back’.
The right-angle weave’s thread-looping movements connect all the beads together to make an overall support structure both strong and flexible. This beaded flexibility makes possible the 3-D infinity loop of Highly Unlikely Triangles, inspired by Penrose’s impossible triangle.
Of necessity, I’ve been experimenting with the spiritually embodied simplicity of Br Lawrence’s tender-hearted encouragement to practice the Presence daily. Thanks to the recursive practices and processes that endlessly join me to Love and return me to daily living, I’m becoming more comfortable with that looping pathway. It’s one that fits with the actual pattern of our lives.
The triangles I’m beading serve as miniature icons, looping forms of visio divina that offer tactile comfort to my fingertip tracings—while I learn by heart the attentive lectio divina reading and listening that heals my body.
The healing recipe I use now continues to adapt its ingredients to the looping revisions that my body and beading call forth.
Sharon Dawn Johnson, of Ottawa, Canada, delights in the verbal, visual, and tactile interplays in her writing and bead/ fibre artistry. The delight nourishes and sustains her creative and contemplative practices.
