God the first seamstress...
God is the first seamstress, in the garden.
The first humans, God’s first creations of dust and divine breath, are hiding. Not in a playful way, like a child’s hide-and-seek. But in a painful way - they have encountered the first whispers of shame and think that hiding from the one who loves them will protect them.
God knows this isn’t so. God draws them out of their hiding, and reminds them they are created in the image of the divine, reminds them of love and grace.
Their laughter returns and the humans have learned new questions and God wants them to always remember this moment, this first return, this first time that learning something new led to confusion and fear and then to a deeper grasp of grace. So as the humans ponder their new knowledge and where it will lead them, God begins to sew.
With animal skin and skill God crafts a covering that will keep the children warm as they leave their home, a covering that will return them to this moment: “Do you remember the first time we put on clothes? It was when we learned how big God’s love is.”
They wear their coverings and forever clothing holds the possibility of divine grace.
Then, God chooses to become like the ones created. And a created one clothes the God who arrives as a baby, swaddling Jesus again and again and again. Countless times in the haze of new motherhood, and then, entirely too quickly, the mother who carried divinity in her womb grumbles with mothers in every time and place at how quickly her child outgrows one garment and then another. She shakes her head in affection and exhaustion as she mends a tear. She sews again and again, mothering God, until one day she doesn’t need to sew for her child anymore because his burial shroud is sewn shut before hers is.
Stitches forever hold the possibility of divine grace and mothers everywhere lift their needles like God always did, mending this rip where they skinned a knee, letting that seam out where their sleeves were too short.
A mother finds a job at the alterations department at Sears, sewing to make ends meet when the farm had lean years, and finding garments in the $1 bin that just needed a little love and work and grace so they would fit her son as he completed his residency - a doctor! She bursts with pride and carefully completes each stitch so his $1 jacket will look as fine as one that cost 100 times that much.
She beams each time she sees him in that coat - his only winter coat for such a long time. Grown now, but still her child! She’s proud of all that he has become - and grateful, too, that he still wears things she carefully pieces together.
The years pass but a mother is always a mother and the phone call no mother wants, that every mother dreads, comes. An accident. No, he’s not dead. But it’s really, really bad.
Her tall, strong, strapping son, now strapped into a wheelchair.
His wardrobe has changed - no longer his office attire, no longer the casual but polished pressed slacks and polo of an accomplished retiree, he’s in sweatpants and loose t-shirts. There will be no more holes in the knees for her to mend for this boy who burst with adventure his whole life.
He still longs to sit outside, though, and now he gets so cold, the injury having stolen so many things, including his body’s ability to regulate temperature.
So she sews. Like God in the garden, like Mary for little Jesus, though her fingers don’t move as quickly as they once did and her eyes strain to see what was once so clear, she sews. She carefully selects, cuts, and places squares of flannel from old shirts. Button-downs he can no longer wear become the warmest, kindest blanket to lay over his legs as he sits - always sitting - gazing toward the trees and stars.
He remembers when cold was a felt thing and now he can only assume his toes must be frozen, but can feel nothing but the pain of remembering. She pulls the flannel blanket tighter, and the son sees how divine a mother’s love is, was and will always be.
Covered in her grace, he finds courage within. One adventure remains.
As he breathes his last, she tearfully joins too many mothers who endure the impossible loss.
God the first seamstress cries with her, the divine heart cracking open once again in shared grief.
God walked among us and God also watched their child walk - like every mother, every parent in every place and time, the child is the parent’s own heart walking outside their body.
Well, God didn’t have a body, but watched the embodied One walk inside humanity which is a very dangerous place - gorgeous, but also dangerous.
God held their breath while the Incarnated One breathed and when they breathed their last, God wondered why they ever sewed that first covering.
What did it protect anyone from?
God wept in grief as their child was laid in the tomb. If only they could tear the shroud and rise again!
God’s heartbeat joined with the heartbeat of every parent who has ever grieved a child.
God weeps and the mother also weeps and God watches, astonished, as she clutches a garment her son once wore, its stitches a storyboard of mending her child once needed.
I couldn’t protect him. But I would do it again and again, she sobs.
Yes, God cries with her. The garments I stitched weren’t a shield. They were a reminder. Each time creation’s first children got cold and pulled the animal skins a bit tighter around them, they remembered when God covered them with kind laughter and abounding grace and gentle questions in response to their big ones.
From the beginning of time, brave mothers have stitched and pieced peace and love together, daring to love children they can’t protect, their hearts sometimes, often, breaking, but love persists. For God so loved the world, God gave their beloved, only begotten child, so that every child may know love and grace, and every mother may know they don’t mother alone.
I am indebted to Cole Arthur Riley and her incredible book “This Here Flesh” for the image of God as a seamstress in the Garden.
