Cutting into the cloth

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I dream of a crowded restaurant bathroom. It’s where all the action is taking place though I am one of a group about to board a plane for a very important trip.  A group of women is chattering and laughing. I see intriguing group dynamics and I compliment the leader of the group, telling her she is like a character in a movie, but I can’t remember the name of the movie.

Waking, I think of the movie Day Night Day Night, which I watched two nights ago. It had sat for a long time near the top of our Netflix queue. I had been resisting watching it because it’s about a young woman who has volunteered to blow herself up for the sake of an unnamed cause. But the movie was terrific. I liked the girl, pretty and polite. I liked her fellow terrorists, systematic and kind. It was all so matter of fact and real. By the end I didn’t know whether I wanted her mission to succeed or fail because she wanted it so badly. A lot of the action, such as it is in this psychological thriller, takes place in bathrooms.

Against the backdrop of the larger terror of the world and even our own lives (everybody is going to die, the girl says to herself, naming all the ways that could be worse than the one she has chosen), life goes on one bit at a time. And grace, humor, beauty wind through even the worst moments.

I read two blog posts this morning about cloth in the Congo that we all hear about, the eastern Congo of the horrors. They made me a little sad because in neither case does the western writer allow herself to fully participate in the beauty and joy that the cloth represents in that terrible situation.

One writer watches a seamstress sew clothes for her fellow refugees and suddenly wishes for a dress for herself, to wear to a wedding after she gets back home. But she sees the seamstress is busy with a stack of orders and she doesn’t make the request.

The other writer is back home. She has bought cloth in Congo and is wondering what to do with it. She hesitates to cut into it. It reminds her of people she has met, especially a tailor in a refugee camp, stitching colorful cloth on a battered old machine. She thinks of how much she has and how little the refugees have. She already has another dress in the works. She will make that one. Perhaps one new dress is enough. She is not ready to cut into the cloth.

I know what it is to observe the pain of the world and think we, the privileged who do not suffer, must carry our share of that pain. We can’t allow ourselves to embrace happiness and beauty so long as someone else is suffering. Similarly, we can’t enjoy the beauty of the natural world without the gnawing awareness of how humanity is destroying it.

I’m not sure how I make the connection among all these things. The message I get is that I can’t fully participate in someone else’s suffering. We seldom have the full cinematic treatment of what that involves moment-by-moment, as we are given in Day Night Day Night, and when we do it turns out to be far more complex than we can imagine. Being present with it is one thing. Taking it on is something else.

What I can take on is the affirmation, the beauty, and the joy that represent hope and healing. That is what Congo cloth is about for me. That is the solidarity of the cloth, the Sisterhood of the Cloth. I intend to keep cutting into that stack of cloth that is piling up in my closet.

Gathering under the banner