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[Back to index of June 2007 articles] Labor of love and prayer By Virginia Myers “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there is knitting in the midst of them.”
With apologies to the apostle Matthew, this might be the mantra of knitters from parishes all over the Washington area, as more and more form genial groups that sit together to create shawls, blankets, hats and scarves, mindfully knitting their prayers and goodwill into items they will give away in what has come to be known as the “yarn ministry.” With the click-click-click of knitting needles as a sort of musical accompaniment to prayer and fellowship, groups of knitters typically meet once a month, but just as important are the hours spent knitting on their own. The prayerful attention to the work sets it apart from generic crafting – as do the recipients of the finished pieces. Thousands of items – each of which begins with a prayer, is knitted with prayer, and ends with a blessing – are sent to people in crisis or in need of comfort. There are caps for premature babies, and larger caps, sometimes with fanciful braids, given to chemotherapy patients. There are prayer shawls that comfort parishioners after the death of a spouse or child, or during a traumatic move or illness; shawls for cancer patients to use while sitting through chemotherapy; and lap blankets for soldiers and veterans. And there are celebratory items for marriages, baptisms and births. “It gives you peace while you’re doing it, and a way to help people one person at a time,” says Marjie Mack, who founded the yarn ministry at St. James in Lothian, Md. She chose a different passage from Matthew to explain her church’s ministry in a pamphlet: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” In March, Mack organized the second conference on yarn ministries at the Diocese of Maryland’s Bishop Claggett Center, where some 75 women gathered to share their experiences. In addition to keynote speaker Bonnie Hagerman, founder of the non-profit Care Wear that helps knitters and sewers distribute garments for premature infants and hospital patients, there were workshops about knitting for orphans, creating after-school knitting clubs, and forming a “ministry of accompaniment” by knitting with women in prison. Informally, participants learned from one another – picking up tips on easy mitten patterns and inspirational stories about deeply satisfying volunteer work.
“It’s a ministry for both those who make it and those who receive it,” said Sandy Cordingley of Christ, West River, echoing the sentiments of many participants. Knitters include Girl Scout and Brownie troops, high school students working for community service credit, and older people who spend hours at home alone but still want to contribute something valuable. At St. James, Lothian, Linda Stewart remembers a 12-year-old girl knitting eight hats to be donated to newborns while she was recovering from having her wisdom teeth pulled. At large parishes, yarn ministries bring together parishioners who attend different services, and would otherwise never meet. Yarn ministries also bring non-church members to a community of worship. “We can [show] people another way of looking at the yarn and needles in our hands,” said Alice Conover, of St. Margaret’s, Annapolis, who helped a friend through the tragic loss of her best friend’s infant son by encouraging her to knit caps for the babies in the hospital where the child died. Women at St. Margaret’s are joining her effort to knit 197 caps, one for every day of the baby’s life. Some of the recipients’ stories are heart rending, and certainly inspiration to pick up two needles and knit. Karen Porter, co-founder of Children in Common, which supports orphans and adopted children from Eastern Europe, shared this one: a worker in an Eastern European orphanage told her that putting a hand-knit sweater on a child is like giving them a hug from the mother they don’t have. “These are healing to our children,” said another. “They have the energy of the people who make them.” At the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, which receives donated medical-surgical dolls that help explain surgical procedures to young patients, a staffer writes, “It is so much less frightening for children when they can use these dolls to understand and rehearse what will happen while they are in the hospital.” Even the names of some of the recipients inspire the urge to help: the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, for example. Or the items themselves: Care Wear volunteers sew burial gowns for infants, and knit covers for intravenous apparatus that younger patients or older ones with dementia might pull out, if the tubes were not out of sight.
Or these descriptions, simply recorded in a book kept by the Christ Church Prayer Shawl Ministry: a rose-colored shawl given to an aunt dying of lung disease; a camouflage shawl to a soldier on a second tour of Iraq; another given to a 35-year-old mother battling cancer; and a comment from a recipient enduring chemotherapy: “When I wear the shawl I feel happy and at peace – and can feel the kindness, compassion, generosity and prayers of the people whose hands have made and blessed the shawl.” “I always thought you had to do something fantastic to make a difference in this world,” Hagerman told conference participants. But the first time she volunteered, as a high school student bringing Christmas gifts to hospital border babies in 1962, she learned differently. “I’ll never forget it,” she says now. “Never in my life.” The children clung to her, starved for attention, and when she and the other volunteers left one said, “there but for the grace of God.” “Everybody thinks that you have to go out and rebuild the world,” says Michelle Doran, of Christ, West River. “No. We can all teach with our gifts.” As Mack says, “one person at a time.”
[Back to index of June 2007 articles]
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