How have I managed to leave my biggest project so far off this site for so long? It took five months from first conversation to finished item and over 150 people shared their stories and made their mark on it.
We took an old bed sheet, a lot of thread and some keen volunteers and sewed a map of every street in our town. Then we invited all sorts of people to come and tell us their favourite memories of the town, and to put their stitch in the map where it happened. Our youngest participant was 6 and loves the library. The oldest participant was somewhere in their 90s, and told us about a new place to walk that she discovered during Covid. All the stories have been written down and kept. The map itself is chaotic but full of joy. I can’t do better than the BBC in describing what we did and how it happened: Festival Crafters put the Town on the Map. (I certainly wasn’t expecting to be interviewed for the BBC website or for Sunderland Council to send out a 2 photographers and a videographer when I first thought of the idea!)
The initial idea for this project was very tied up with a particular Bible passage that got stuck in my head while I was planning. Jacob, in the book of Genesis, has a mysterious dream one night, while sleeping out in the desert. When he wakes up, he has a strange sense that he’d met with God in his dream. He declares “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I never knew it”
That phrase has been going round in my head, all the way through sewing this project. I felt like I was suddenly seeing a very familiar place with fresh eyes, as if I’d never truly known it before.
At the most basic level, I’m seeing Houghton, the physical town, in a new way. I’m seeing the way that different parts of it connect in new ways. An obvious example would be the way the dual carriage way cuts the whole town in half. I’ve found footpaths and patches of woodland and parks I never knew were there. I’ve been finding myself walking down roads going “we were sewing this street a couple of days ago!”
More than that, certain places are now firmly linked to certain people and their stories in my head. I walk past a particular tree, or a pub, or a park, and a particular person and their story comes to mind. The place is FULL of stories. That’s really obvious, of course, but I’m aware of it in a whole new way. Once more than 150 memories had been added to it, the map looked like it had been generously sprinkled with confetti, or fairy dust!
I’ve been seeing people with new eyes too. I can get into a rut with people and only see one side of them. I suspect most of us do. There’s that guy who tends to rant about politics, but now he’s told me about a view he loves, that always makes him stop and catch his breath. Or that woman who rarely has much to say, but now I’ve seen her bubbling over with words telling me about the mischief she got up to at school. There’s the bloke who always seems negative about everything, but apparently he has a hobby I’d never have guessed at, and his face lights up when he talks about it. Amazing stuff.
I’ve been seeing our community differently too. We live in fractious, divided times. There are issues cause real tension. But I’ve been reminded that there are fundamental things that unite us too. Many of the stories people have told me have been about community, having “somewhere I feel I belong”. The beauty of nature has come up often too and childhood memories of special family times (often Houghton Feast, the fireworks, the lights, or the fair ground organ for many). Those things certainly don’t make the difficult issues go away, or solve them, but it’s been a good to remember what we have in common.
Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.
A Jesuit priest in the early 20th Century – Pierre Theilhard de Chardin wrote “God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle-and my heart and my thoughts.” This whole project has reminded me how God is right there in the middle of my day to day work, in my gifts and my calling. God, right where the needle goes through the fabric, as well as in the more ordinary of conversations and the streets I walk down every day.
Ragbag Mending 