8.21.16
Theology of Snacks//Pretzels
Element: live weaving during worship experience
Designers: SPO, LD, RD
Notes: As a creative, I’m constantly exploring new mediums - I wouldn’t quite say obsessively, but potentially compulsively - and I love that Journey gives me an outlet to put those to use somewhere other than my craft closet. This technique came from a macrame necklace design that ps-imadethis.tumblr.com posted a few years back, and which my friend IR and I experimented with on laid-back weekends in Jacksonville, with pastry in the oven and Doctor Who in the background. We played with yarn, bamboo thread, twine, and ribbon to see what would come together, and learned the technique by wrapping yards of the stuff around and through our fingertips.
For this worship element, I modified the technique a bit, incorporating a repurposed metal door hanger for a loom and weaving the yarn around the prongs. Blue yarn was woven loosely and untied at one end; white yarn was woven tightly over the loom and tied off completely; and multicolored yarn was woven with a consistent tension and tied in at either end. As each piece was completed, LD took the pieces from the loom and placed them on the altar.
A reading on enmeshed families introduced the element, followed by a reading on fiercely independent child rearing, after which I took all three pieces and laid them out for a visual demonstration of the concepts presented.
Enmeshment leads us to rely too heavily on others for our identity, I explained, while unraveling the blue piece. It prevents us from evolving into our genuine selves by entangling us too intricately with those around us.
Independence, at its most extreme, winds us up too tightly to accept the help of any outside influences, and as I ripped the white woven piece in half, I couldn’t help quoting Bilbo Baggins’ line about feeling like butter scraped over too much bread.
The key to relational health is interdependence - a balance of growth and support which allows us to explore ourselves and our world from a place of reciprocal emotional safety. It’s not perfect, I reflected while displaying the multicolored weaving, but it offers us the invaluable gift of vulnerability.
Driving to JIFC on Sunday morning, it was impressed on me that health isn’t a choice we make once; it’s a choice we make over and over again. Like following Christ, it’s an opportunity that presents itself with every decision we make - strengthening or severing our connection to Spirit with every neural pathway we choose to reinforce. It’s not often perfect, but it’s valuable and complex and has the potential to weave itself together into something beautiful.