Teaching St Peter to knit?

There was a question on Twitter yesterday asking people which saint they would like to have dinner with and why.

I am not at all sure about "saints".  The "it would require the patience of a saint" idea is one which rather  amuses me. When someone else said this once my friend N..., a priest, muttered to me, "Most of the saints were very impatient people."

I know very little about saints. My good friend P... (a nun) has occasionally mentioned them to me but I haven't read "The lives of the saints" and she does not expect me to read anything like that. The idea that they are "out there somewhere and perform miracles" is more than I can handle. The idea that the rest of us might learn something from some of their non-miraculous lives is something I think might be useful. There are undoubtedly a lot of people like them who led, indeed still lead, useful lives. We can and perhaps should learn by their example.

But the question was worth answering simply because I know the person who asked it is also a knitter. Many years ago now I made contact with a woman called Elizabeth Zimmermann. She is now considered the "mother of modern knitting". At the time however she had written a book called "A knitters' almanac". I found it in the local library and read it. I liked the way it was written and I liked the subject matter. I could knit but, in my mid-teens, it had not occurred to me that I could do more than alter a knitting pattern slightly. The book disabused me of that notion. It was a "go ahead and try" sort of book where things were "unvented" as well as "invented". 

At that point I stopped using other people's patterns and did my own. It suited my basic laziness. It gave me the freedom to try things out. I still look at other people's patterns but I have not started with the "cast on X stitches" since then. 

"EZ" as she is often known was kind enough to reply to me...more than once. It was intermittent sort of correspondence. Ideas came and went in both directions. She wrote more books of course and set up the now well known "Schoolhouse Press". Her daughter eventually took over and her grandson is also involved. 

When EZ died there were any number of tributes to her and I posted one on line saying that she was "up there in heaven teaching St Peter to knit". Her daughter responded laughing "teaching St Peter to knit indeed!"  It was one of those ridiculous moments which I think/hope made MZ feel a little comforted. 

Asked the question yesterday I tried to imagine it. Anyone brought up in the Christian tradition has almost certainly come across the idea of an elderly man at some "pearly gates" allowing the faithful to enter heaven. What does he do when there is nobody to be let in? Does he sit there and twiddle his thumbs? Does he need to pray when he can talk to his boss on a much more personal level? Or does he perhaps knit? 

There is a purpose to knitting. I wrote the following elsewhere but I will repeat it here. 

To knit is to meditate. Those who don’t knit cannot understand this. They can see the garment but they cannot see the individual stitches. The knits, the purls, and the knit two togethers are not there for them. There is no understanding of what it means to create the actual fabric.

 

When we knit we repair people. We pull them together into garments made one stitch at a time. We cover them inside as well as out with blankets created out of some sort of unrecognised hope and concern for humanity. Stress may tighten our tension or joy loosen it. We might abandon some fabrics for a time, pull them apart or pass them on to others. Knitting can be undone, renewed, reknitted. Each piece is different even when we tell ourselves we are repeating the act. Only the knitter can know what emotions have gone into each piece of the knitters’ art. 

 

We knit to comfort others and ourselves. We knit to mend souls.