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Christmas crafting with Mary: another entry in the dictionary for everyday spirituality

I continue to find enormous enrichment from Rowan Williams Advent reflections, Ponder These Things: Praying With Icons of the Virgin. I’m into a second daily devotional read. And I think it will inform the service of ordination sermon I’m down to preach on December 5. Here’s what I read today:

Mary, one legend says, was brought up in the Temple precincts; and, like the other young ladies living in this rather strange boarding school, she was occupied for a lot of her time in weaving the veil of the sanctuary. When they drew lots, she was assigned the weaving of the purple and the scarlet thread, and was sent home to Nazareth to spin. She takes up the scarlet wool; pauses to go to the well for water and is greeted by the Gabriel as she goes. But she sees no one and returns, anxious and flustered, to the spinning wheel. This time, she takes up the purple – and Gabriel stands before her and announces her future. (60)

While this is creative re-imagination, it does encourage a creative, crafted approach to Christmas and Christian spirituality. It is an invitation to craft, to hand-make Christmas cards, to paint an icon, to bake some Christmas muffins. And in these very acts of domesticity, to expect that encounter with God and an invitation to bear new life, that spirituality can be woven into the fabric of our ordinary lives, that discernment of God’s threads in our life need not be instant, but can be slowly unravelled.

(I’m also adding this to the A-Z dictionary of everyday spirituality. In this case C is for crafts. For more on domestic spirituality, especially in regard to gender, see here.)