Pausing…

…for prayer, grieving and giving thanks

Dear Friends,

I’m pressing pause on my usual weekly substack post.

Many of you know why.

This week our beloved friend and colleague, our Sister-in-Christ, Rev Dr Deacon Michelle Cook, died following a tragic accident in which she sustained catastrophic head injuries.

Today, as many churches around the world claim this day to pray for those who have died, we pray for Michelle.  We pray and grieve and we give thanks for a life of love and gifted service. And we also tell our stories, for our God is a story-telling God who invites us into a community of sacred memory.

Here is mine.

Back in the 1990’s the Uniting Church in Australia held a competition called  “A Place at the Table” to select a work of art that would depict women at the Last Supper. Some time later an image of  the winning painting by Margaret Ackland was printed on a tapestry canvas and was made available, together with all the different coloured threads needed for its completion.  I bought a kit but soon realised that I’d neither the time nor the skill to undertake the work. So I gave it to Michelle.

Over the next few years, at all the church meetings that we were part of together (and there were many) Michelle sat with her head bowed and sewed. Except of course when she had something urgent to say!

On the last day of my ministry placement Michelle came into my office with our friend and ministry colleague,  Rev Dr Paul Walton. Together they presented me with the finished and beautifully framed tapestry.

I cried.

I couldn’t help it.

I couldn’t believe that someone who had spent so many hours over so many months working to complete a piece of such beauty and significance would open wide her hands and simply give it away.

This morning I participated in Holy Communion with the small Christian community where I live.  I listened again to the story of the Last Supper; to the way Jesus spoke of his imminent death as the gift of his body and blood. I heard again the promise that in sharing the bread and wine we ‘re-member’. We not only remember the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as something that happened in the past: we participate in the  joy of the ongoing reality of God’s generous Presence with us, right now and in the life to come.

I thought about Michelle’s gift of the tapestry of the Last Supper mounted on the wall of my studio. And I remembered that later today, Michelle’s generosity (and that of her grieving family) would be expressed yet again, only this time through the gift to others of her own body through organ donation.

I’m back home. It’s late in the day.  Time to head to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Is it too impossible to imagine that it was Michelle I just now glimpsed, shining out from the circle of women and men gathered around the Table?

The Last Supper by Margaret Ackland, 1993.