Seventy-eight quilts created by the “Piecemakers” group at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Santa Monica are on their way to recipients in need of warmth – with special “ties that bind” provided by Canon Karen Uhler, longtime Episcopal lay leader and a past senior warden of St. John’s Cathedral.
Sewn for distribution by Lutheran World Relief, the quilts were blessed Oct. 19 in a Sunday service featuring the Piecemakers’ colorful handiwork displayed on each pew, the altar, baptismal font, chancel, and balcony rails at St. Paul’s Church, now in its 99th year of ministry in Santa Monica.
Then, like clockwork after the service, parishioners folded the quilts and packed them in 16 boxes for transport to Thousand Oaks and shipping to Minnesota in an annual distribution domestically and around the world.
Last year, the relief organization provided 370,818 quilts from across the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, noting that in the past 25 years, nearly 9.2 million quilts – which would “cover 11 square miles, or half of Manhattan” – have been distributed in 16 nations from Angola to Zambia.
As Santa Monica Piecemakers leader Sylvia Henry noted during the service, each of the 78 quilts includes as many as 120 “ties” – strategically placed knots securing the batting between fabric panels front and back. For the Piecemakers’ quilts this year, this computes to some 9,360 ties, each and every one knotted by Uhler, many completed on the dining room table of her Venice home.
In remarks commending all the Piecemaker members for their work, coordinator Henry, a longtime St. Paul’s parishioner, thanked Uhler in particular for her fast and dedicated work in tying, a specialized skill, which helped the group produce more quilts this year.
Uhler, a retired psychiatric nurse and hospital administrator, said she is glad to assist and greatly enjoys meeting with the Piecemakers each Wednesday at St. Paul’s where her son Jon is a longtime lay leader.
“I do it to provide something new, attractive, and useful to people in need around the world and also value the feeling of community the group shares,” Uhler told the Episcopal News.
Henry and Uhler agree that quilt-making, and particularly the tying, can be a form of prayer, even when offered while watching a televised baseball game. Both women are ardent Dodger fans currently cheering the home team in the World Series as well as year-round.
“There are many ways to pray – and oh-so-many prayers to be both spoken and unspoken,” the Rev. Jim Boline, pastor of St. Paul’s, said in his sermon before blessing the quilts. He added later that Lutherans and Episcopalians quilting together is yet another dimension of the two denominations’ full-communion concordat which also allows for reciprocity among clergy and sharing of ministries.
Uhler, a retired psychiatric nurse and hospital administrator, said she is glad to assist and greatly enjoys meeting with the Piecemakers each Wednesday at St. Paul’s where her son Jon is a longtime lay leader. The ELCA-Episcopal collaboration is yet another expression of two denominations’ full-communion concordat which allows for reciprocity among clergy and sharing of ministry sites.
Henry and Uhler agree that quilt-making, and particularly the tying, can be a form of prayer, sometimes offered while watching a televised baseball game; both women are ardent Dodger fans currently cheering the home team in the World Series as well as year-round.
“There are many ways to pray – and oh-so-many prayers to be both spoken and unspoken,” the Rev. Jim Boline, pastor of St. Paul’s, said in his sermon before blessing the quilts.
“Today we are surrounded by the prayerful creativity of our piecemaking quilters who have stitched prayer into every one of these quilts. You can probably feel that prayer from your bottom up, if you’re sitting on one, or your back. Prayer for the recipients who will also be covered with this quilt. Prayer for the recipients and their situation in life, prayer for their home and their families, prayer for their communities and countries, prayer for those who will transport them and who will deliver them.
“If you want to see what prayer looks like, all you need to do is look around and see the variety of colors, of materials, of patterns, and you begin to understand the beauty of prayer in all its simple profundity and all its profound simplicity.”
Boline added that “Yesterday, in record numbers, people prayed with their feet in protest of the injustices being perpetrated” by federal policy, the focus of the Oct. 18 “No Kings” marches drawing some 7 million participants nationwide.
The blessing service included ELCA hymn 710, “Let Streams of Living Justice,” with this fitting stanza: “Weave our varied gifts together, knot our lives as they are spun; on the loom of time enroll us, till our thread of life is run. O great weaver of our fabric, bind church and world in one; dye our texture with your radiance, light our colors with your sun.”