God is Seamstress
I received an email today that a former student of mine, incarcerated in Nashville, was denied parole. She will not be eligible again for consideration until 2027.
Minutes later I joined a call with one of my Israeli colleagues who lives 30km north of the Gaza border. “My windows shake with every bombing,” she said. “What must it be like for the humans on the other side of the border?”
We cannot write or pray or weep our way out of such absurdities, though I continuously move in and out of all three.
Sometimes in moments such as these I only engage God as the object of my anger, and I rage. Other times, I summon the image of God as Seamstress, and it opens up a space for me just as the weight of being human in this world threatens to swallow me whole.
I wrote about this image in my book, God Is, and I’m sharing the entire chapter below in case it might help open a space for you too.
God Is Seamstress
When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers. —Henri Nouwen
Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God. —Ram Das
See, I am making all things new. —Revelation 21:5
In an upstairs bonus room just north of Nashville, my friend Diedre sits at her sewing machine. She’s making a quilt for Christmas, with red and green cloth strips lying in tidy piles. She’s been at this piece for months; she’s been in her sewing room for decades.
Her first project was in a high school home economics class: a blush pink jacket with a matching pencil skirt. At nineteen she married Franklin, was pregnant soon after, and with the sewing machine she received as a wedding gift, she began stitching together maternity clothes for her expanding body. Soon she was creating clothes for her first daughter, and then another.
With every season, new pieces were needed: play clothes for the girls that they quickly grew out of; prom dresses in perfect 1980s style with metallic teal print and a mound of fabric at the shoulders; a lace wedding dress with hand-stitched beadwork; custom Halloween costumes for her grandkids; a baby blanket for her first great-grandchild.
When her twenty-year-old grandson comes home for the week- end from college with a tear in his favorite pants, she sits once again at her sewing machine, sewing a strip of cloth to join together frayed fabric. I admire her, admire her commitment to this craft that has been both necessity and hobby, labor and delight. Her hands have held fabric and pieced together thread to clothe her family for generations.
Long before Diedre tried her hand at sewing, she was a little girl in a chaotic home. Her parents had survived the Great Depression and recalled with pain the rations, the hunger. Her father was sent to fight in World War II, his own mother serving on the draft board that called his number. He didn’t talk much about his experiences in war, though their effect was clear.
Two decades later, after serving in Vietnam, he came home and didn’t leave his room for two years. He drank heavily. He erupted in anger at a moment’s notice. He threw dinner plates at the wall. And he beat his wife. When Diedre’s older brother would step in to protect his mom, father and son would fight in the living room until finally, when he was sixteen, her brother won the fight. Her dad sat dazed and bloody. Her brother crawled into the corner and sobbed.
Diedre’s mother worked full time and had to provide for four children, knowing her husband could never be counted on to bring his paycheck home. She was a harsh woman, never a soft place to land. She pitted the children against one another and stirred tensions like a boiling pot. When Diedre graduated high school, the first one in her family to do so, no one attended the ceremony.
By the age of four, Diedre had already developed a way to cope in the midst of the chaos. As soon as the shouting and violence would erupt, she’d slip down the hallway and hide in her room. It was the only place she felt a measure of safety. As long as she could remain hidden, she could stay under the radar and avoid the worst of things. When the dust eventually settled and there was a lull in the storm, she would extend her head out the bedroom door, checking left and right to see if it was finally safe to come out.
She left home at seventeen, trekking from Kansas to New York, Florida to Washington, but she never stopped hiding. Even after marrying Franklin and starting a new life, a new family, she methodically withheld parts of herself in order to feel safe.
Decades into a successful career, she still wouldn’t speak up when a supervisor’s decisions impacted her well-being. At home, she withdrew into her sewing room when she needed to feel safe and be alone. When surrounded by other people, she could retreat internally, hiding inside a walled-off space within where she could hide in safety. A four-year-old’s coping mechanism became a way of life.
Humans have been hiding since the very beginning. The third chapter of Genesis tells a story of Adam and Eve, the first two humans made by God and placed in a garden perfectly suited for their flourishing. As I heard it growing up, the story goes that these two humans disobeyed God, thus rendering the entire human race inherently sinful from that moment forward. This is why, when my girls first learned to say no and began exclaiming it like a badge of honor, people said things like, “Look at that sin nature at work, even at such a young age.”
Christians say a lot of weird things, some of which is in fact beautiful and true and some of which drives me nuts. File the toddlers-with-a-sinful-nature label in the latter category for me, please. I’m not saying toddlers aren’t crazy, or that they aren’t hell bent on destroying the shred of sanity you managed to retain after the newborn phase. I’m saying that what some categorize as sin is sometimes better understood as a natural, normal, adaptive, and even healthy developmental process.
But hammers see nails everywhere, and ever since the fourth century when St. Augustine told us that the human condition is rooted in “original sin,” we’ve gone on believing that humans are born sinful. I don’t wax romantic when it comes to humanity’s capacity for atrocity. I was seven when I read The Diary of Anne Frank and visited Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. The last century alone saw more persons killed in war than in the combined nineteen before that. Despite our beloved notions of progress, we’ve been moving in the direction of the A-bomb, genocide, and ecological disaster, not away from them. It’s not much of a stretch to see why many view Genesis 3 as explaining humanity’s so-called fall and subsequent penchant for sin.
It’s just that as I’ve sat with women experiencing incarceration inside prisons, as I’ve sat with women who have survived rape and assault, as I look at my own life, I’ve discovered a different telling of the story that squares with embodied reality in a way the traditional telling never has.
Adam and Eve are described as the first humans, placed in an idyllic garden with lush vegetation and ample sources of fresh water. Born of dust, they exist in a harmonious state with nature. They are like children, fresh to the world and full of wonder at its possibilities. It’s this vulnerability that the serpent exploits. Readers familiar with the story know to expect the worst from this talking snake, but not Eve. Her assumptions about others, about the world, are good. Trust is assumed and freely given.
The serpent finds the woman and begins to expose her innocence to foul air. Cunningly, he poses questions that throw her mind into confusion and cast doubt on what she’s previously known. Her desires are called into question, and she wonders what it is she wants and doesn’t want. She loses trust in her own sensibilities, in her notions of God and self. Ultimately, the man and the woman eat the fruit held before them, and in an instant, everything changes. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7a).
This is an earth-shattering experience for the two humans, a we-can-never-go-back-to-before moment, a line drawn in the sand between what was and what is now. Suddenly their eyes are open to see everything differently, including themselves. And what they notice first is their nakedness. They’ve always been naked but somehow, it didn’t matter, it didn’t factor in. It’s not that they feel differently about their nakedness now, it’s that until this single moment in time they never knew to feel anything about it at all. It just was. This new awareness is devastating, their first encounter with shame. They frantically gather fig leaves and piece together crude garments to cover themselves and limit their exposure. And when God calls out for them—like my friend Diedre, like every human who has come after them—they hide.
A remarkable amount of energy has been spent debating whether this story, these texts, offer historical, scientific accounts. People want to know if it really happened. What is far more interesting to me is the indisputable reality that this story happens. It is the story of every human being who has entered the world in pure vulnerability and innocence, exploited by people and systems and powers, deceived by others with lustful, greedy motivations who themselves began in vulnerability and innocence.
To be a human being is to experience trauma, the kind that throws open the world in a new and haunting relief where we see ourselves through the lens of shame. Trauma takes every manner of overt and subtle form. Sometimes we can find the point on the map where the road suddenly diverged; sometimes it’s in our bodies and we search without clear direction for its origin.
Regardless of trauma’s form, our response often resembles that of the first humans, hurriedly gathering fig leaves to hide ourselves behind. With thread and needle we crudely piece together a garment of mechanisms that allow us to cope with the pain, the fear, the ache. We seek out a place to hide in bottles and pills and bars and bedrooms, in degrees and accolades and podiums and microphones, in sex and adventure and pleasure and thrill, in obscurity and silence and withdrawal and isolation.
You can fashion a suit of fig leaves in just about any style, but no trend can escape the brutal truth that the very clothing we hide behind is the very clothing that becomes our new trauma. Fig leaves contain a chemical compound that reacts with human skin, causing irritation, redness, blisters, swollen tissue, infection, and severe burns. Experienced gardeners know to handle them with exceptional care. But to the average eye, the leaves’ danger is invisible. The thoughts and behaviors and habits we form to cope with our pain become themselves a new form of pain, and the cycle of trauma continues.
When the first humans feel shame, when they long for the innocence now lost, they do the best they can with what they have. They sew loincloths from fig leaves, and they hide. This could have been the end of the story, humanity forever cursed to navigate the cycles of trauma, pain, hiding, and shame.
But God the Seamstress won’t allow it. She walks through the garden calling out for the humans until she finds them.
“We were afraid because we’re naked, so we hid,” they say.
“Who told you that you were naked?” she asks (Gen. 3:10–11).
She gets to work making new clothes for the humans, ones that wrap their bodies lovingly with care rather than inflict wounds on their tender flesh. And with thread and needle in hand she sets out to begin a new tapestry that will lead to their healing, and to the healing of the universe.
A year ago, I sat in a classroom inside the Tennessee Prison for Women, teaching an undergraduate course in spiritual disciplines. Half of the women were “inside students,” incarcerated in the prison, and the other half were “outside students,” traditional undergrads who visited the prison once a week for class. On the one hand, there were obvious differences between the two groups, but on the other hand, their stories often bore remarkable resemblance.
Eighty percent of the students had endured sexual abuse, and every one of them could recall the moment they first became aware of their nakedness. Wounded humans are capable of inflicting unimaginable wounds on others. We respond from a place of pain and fear, lashing out with words and fists and weapons that scorch the earth around us. Sometimes we save the worst for ourselves, harming our own bodies before someone else has the chance to.
For the inside students, their reactions to pain and trauma were the kind that land one behind bars: theft, assault, drug use, murder. For the outside students, their reactions created an internal prison: eating disorders, perfectionism, workaholism, withdrawal. To sit among these women and share our stories, our wounds, our shame was to know without question that our trauma can become a dangerous weapon.
One winter afternoon as I sat in a cold cinder block room, prepared to speak on behalf of a student seeking parole, the cycle of trauma was so painfully clear it was all I could do to not weep. Years prior my student had shot her husband in attempted murder. But long before she pulled the trigger, she was the victim.
Her home was abusive and violent. She was groomed by an uncle who sexually assaulted her on a regular basis. And she left home at an early age, adamant that she never again would find herself so vulnerable. When she met her husband, he was battling his own demons, having served in a war that demanded he fight and kill. When the two married, their collective trauma fused to create a volatile home. He shouted and threatened her, mocking her belief that she might deserve something better. They had two sons together, raising them the best they knew how as they grappled with their own troubled childhood.
Finally, having endured enough of her husband’s taunts and manipulation, she devised a plan to kill him. The bullet left him paralyzed, left their sons without a mother, left her aging mother-in-law to manage caring for everyone. I listened as the family wept, detailing the difficulties they had endured. I listened to my student’s husband, bound to a wheelchair, acknowledging his harmful behavior that drove his wife to madness. I listened as my student pleaded with the parole board to grant her request so she wouldn’t have to miss another day of her sons’ lives. And I listened to the parole board, video conferencing in from another location, debating the fate of this family.
When the hearing was over, I walked to my car feeling a consuming heaviness. “My God, what does healing look like here?” I wondered. “And are we insane to ever believe it’s possible?”
If we were to peel back the curtain and see into the layers of the world’s gravest injustices, the world’s most complex conflicts, it would look something like the tangled web of trauma I witnessed that day inside the prison. We would see the violent wars and death-dealing weapons and dehumanizing systems and structural oppression and crippling poverty and environmental devastation, yes. But we would also see the traumatized individuals sewing death and destruction into the fabric of the universe as they battle their deepest wounds, keeping the whole, hellish cycle in motion.
It’s all so overwhelming that honestly, the fact that any of us gets out of bed in the morning feels miraculous. Some days, I struggle to believe that it could ever be otherwise, that this impossible mess is all we have and that it may very well lead to the entire world’s demise.
But when I choose not to look away from the pain but instead look at the very heart of it, I see God the Seamstress in her sewing room, taking the pieces of violence and scraps of oppression and fragments of suffering and sewing them together in a new tapestry, the fabric of the universe made new. What to my eyes looks like an irreparable mess, a colossal shitstorm of hurt and pain and violence and death, to her eyes looks different. She somehow believes that healing is possible, and she sets out to make it so.
Some days, this dogged belief that the universe is moving toward ultimate healing is the only thing that keeps me going. Other days it feels like the most foolish of dreams. But whatever belief looks like for me on any given day, it seems to me that humans have a choice: we can keep pulling at the seams and tearing at the fabric, or we can pick up a needle and thread and learn how to sew.
In northern Iraq sits a refugee village housing Syrian families who fled a civil war, now raging for more than a decade. They sought shelter in a land torn apart by its own crises, the result of imported war and homegrown terrorism. When my colleagues at Preemptive Love began working in this camp, they listened to the families’ stories of lives turned upside down by violence and conflict. They heard about life before the war, how these refugees had once raised their families and farmed lush fields and invested in their communities.
Now here the families sat, in a one-room tent with a few basic necessities, trying to imagine how a better world could ever be. My colleagues are the kind of people who have an enormous capacity to imagine that better world and a resolute commitment to building it. The efforts began small in a nearby town where Yazidi women, targeted mercilessly by ISIS, learned how to make soap.
Soon a similar program sprang up with Israeli and Palestinian women working in a co-op sewing peace dolls—symbols of their persistent belief that despite all the evidence to the contrary, a different world is possible.
Our team drew on the successes of these programs, how they helped women brutalized by war and rape and loss become agents in their own lives once again. They taught women how to make candles and invited women with sewing and crocheting skills to join the circle. The program grew and the women began to come alive, but pouring hot wax and working with sharp needles in the middle of their cramped tents proved dangerous for their families. So the team set out to renovate a vacant building on site, turning it from a neglected room full of spiders and scorpions into a stunning space streaming with light where women makers can ply their crafts together.
They gather each day to create goods that are sold in the international market, earning them a fair wage and desperately needed income. They sew tea towels, knit children’s toys, throw pottery, form bars of soap, and make candles. Their children play in the room next door, a safe place to experience some of the innocence and wonder that war stole from them. And each afternoon, the women take time for tea and talk about their lives with one another, remembering the past and imagining a future.
We can respond in a million ways to deep trauma. We can succumb to grief. We can pretend everything’s fine. We can seek vengeance. We can isolate and hide. We can lash out. We can self-harm. We can chase egoic pursuits. We can put our hand to the wheel and spin it with all we’ve got, keeping the horrific cycle in nauseating motion. All of these responses make sense and none of us is above them.
But somehow, despite all the odds, we have a capacity for something else: an ability to lean into our deepest pain, acknowledge the suffering we’ve endured and the suffering we’ve perpetuated, and set out to write a different ending to the story. We can take the needle and thread in our hands, gather the frayed fabric, and get to work creating something new. We can pull up a chair in God’s sewing room, listening as she tells us about the first clothes she ever made and how she’s been coming to her sewing room ever since.
My friend Diedre is doing this kind of work. Like the four-year- old girl standing in her bedroom doorway, peeking into the hallway to discern whether it was safe to come out, safe to be vulnerable and exposed, she’s begun tiptoeing out of hiding. She’s thanked her fig leaves for helping her survive, and she’s sewing garments suitable for her new season. She’s pursuing training on how to hold space for people, how to listen well and ask thoughtful questions and help others feel safe in ways she never did. She’s inviting other women to join her in her upstairs sewing room, not to work with fabric but to share their stories. She’s creating space for women to bring their souls into free speech, even as she risks doing the same. Surrounded by quilts and pattern books, Diedre is discovering the utter holiness of this space.
Maybe, when the quilt of the universe is complete, when the threads have been stitched together to hold us all in and bind the tears in the fabric, we will gather in God’s sewing room. We’ll talk about our stories as we find them woven into the tapestry, interconnected with everyone else’s. We’ll remember our ways of hiding, numbing out, self-medicating, how we tore holes in the fabric of others’ lives as we sought to make sense of the tears in our own.
And the God who is Seamstress will gather the quilt in her hands—the hands that have faithfully tended to it from the very beginning—and she’ll wrap us up in healing.