Knitting has emerged as a spiritual practice—one that opens a way to meditation. Few Lutheran Christians or other Protestants use beads in worship or in private prayer and meditation. So, knitting needles may be our first experience of the rhythmic movement that leads to quiet, to awareness, to observance.
Linda Skolnik, co-author of The Knitting Way and a Jew, is drawn to the wisdom of Thomas Moore, who wrote in Care of the Soul: “Observance is a word from ritual and religion. It means to watch out for, but also to keep and honor, as in the observance of a holiday.”
Skolnik believes that sitting with needles and yarn, knitting row-after-row, day-in and day-out is a way to make observance part of our spiritual lives. Call it meditating or observing or simply knitting alone, the experience of a daily meeting with yarn and needles can, indeed, ready us for glimpses of the Divine.
This excerpt is from the 2011 Women of the ELCA resource “Knitting as a Spiritual Practice,” written by Kathleen Kastilahn. Today we commemorate Ansgar, Bishop of Hamburg, missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865.
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