Resilience, Healing Beauty & Joy

Like many women during the 1920s, including during The Great Depression, my Great Grandma Boyer quilted and made dresses from fabric sold to farmers as

seed, feed, and flour sacks.

Obviously those farm supplier and milling companies knew both the pragmatics of

multi-purpose resusables and how to increase sales.

Yet I also wonder if they unknowingly (or knowingly)

sensed the human soul's longing, especially in hard times, for creativity and making of healing beauty.

How we are hard wired as souls-- to survive as souls--

through any and all outlets of creativity and healing beauty.

That whole line by Dostoevsky I scribble on the inside flap of my prayerbooks:How in the end we are saved by beauty.

It wasn't until experiencing dawn the other day while all cozy inside my ancestor's "Grandmother's Flower Garden" patterned quilt

during morning prayer on the back deck that I realized something:

The same ancestor whose hands made the beauty I was wrapped in

was the same woman my 87 yr old Mom just told about:

how my Great Grandma Boyer used to hide in a closet with her children

which included my Grandpa Ivan when he was a wee boy

before being sent away to become a farm hand (too many mouths to feed).

How she hid her children and herself

from her husband when he'd come home violently drunk.  

How many times have I spread out the quilt upon a church floor,

and Prairiewoods Franciscan eco-spirituality retreat center,

 with my singing bowls upon them for the making of Sacred, prayerful healing sound and vibration to sooth the bodies, minds, and souls of others?

The art of her hand making each stitch which now houses and marks Sacred space from which flows beauty to help others rest and heal.

And I, i did not know about her own making of beauty amid hard times.

I do not believe God causes adversity in order to grow our souls.

I do believe what what that dreamer Joseph in the Bible, with his coat of many colors, said when confronting his brothers decades after they had left him for dead.

What he said to them before helping save them and countless others

amid famine in Egypt:

'While you intended what happened to me back then as harm,

God and I are gonna use it for doing good.'

The God Power as the creating and re-creating life force in everything,

including our own souls,

transforming and using the old hurts and broken places.

The energy of creativity, beauty, and love wins.

As one of my spiritual mentor's in soul to soul communication, Mavis Pittilla, once

asks (I'm paraphrasing

):What traumas have you gone through that your soul is using, or can use, on behalf of humanity?

The birth of joy as you turn the corner, and change your life

--another miracle taking place--as you become even more aware

 of the task God is now assigning to you.

With it, The Great Tapestry of Humanity that has come together to serve one another. Great Spirit in and between us, keeping us all together.

Keeping us from being islands.

You are part of The Presence with purpose through which God eminates great love.

For we are servants, you and I.

And if we can understand that, it will change the world.

With love and deep bow,

Catherine