God at the Loom

Weaving, Wounds, and the Pattern of Grace

There’s a word in Ghàidhlig—beairt—a loom. The kind used in the outer isles and highland crofts to make cloth for homes and clothing. But it doesn’t just mean the machine; it holds more. It’s the whole act of weaving—of crafting something durable, useful, and even beautiful from thread. It is both the tool and the rhythm. I heard that word again recently and it struck something in me. I have been living at the edge of things lately—between homes, between parishes, between knowing what I am and waiting to find out who I will become. And all I could think was: this, too, is thread. This is part of the weave.

There is something holy in the process of being woven in, and I think I have spent much of my life standing just outside that loom. I know what it feels like to be a loose thread—useful, maybe, but not yet part of the pattern. In the Church especially, it’s easy to know the ache of not quite fitting. There are gestures and codes and assumptions—about how quickly you should understand, how able you should be, how stable your life should look, how comfortably you should sit in your pew or speak in a group. I have seen it in disabled people treated as disruptions rather than full participants. I have felt it myself in queer spaces of longing, where inclusion is promised but rarely practiced. The welcome is often loud, but the weaving-in is slow.

And yet there is something in the Christian story—especially in Benedictine spirituality and in the sacrament of the Eucharist—that says the thread that doesn’t seem to fit is not the thread that’s wrong. The tapestry might be unfinished. Or worse, it might have been woven without attending to the body of Christ as it really is—bruised, bent, beloved. I don’t want to be welcomed if it means nothing is expected to change. I want to be woven in.

In The Rule of St. Benedict, stability is more than staying put. It’s a practice of refusing to walk away when the loom tightens. It’s consenting to be woven in with those you haven’t chosen, and who haven’t chosen you. And slowly, painfully, a pattern begins to emerge that none of you designed—but one that holds. I’ve found that this vow has more to say to me as a disabled queer person than any grand theological declaration. Because Benedict doesn’t talk about diversity or inclusion. He talks about daily rhythms that reveal your rough edges and invite you not to flee from them. He talks about becoming known, not in grand moments, but in the repeated meeting of eyes and names and needs at the same table. And that is what weaving does. It holds tension. It draws threads that might never have met, and it binds them into something larger. Not by erasing their difference, but by letting that difference speak.

When I kneel at the altar and hear the words—“this is my body, broken for you”—I don’t hear metaphor. I hear the rhythm of the loom again. I hear the tension and pull of Christ drawing us back together, again and again, into a Body that doesn’t just tolerate our brokenness but insists that it belongs. The Eucharist is not a table set for the best and brightest. It is a table that assumes we are fragments and treats us as precious anyway. There is no smooth, consistent surface at the altar rail—just threadbare hands, folded wheelchairs, autism and grief and hunger and halting belief, all stitched together in a liturgy that keeps saying: this is for you. This is for you. This is for you.

And if the Eucharist is thread, then I want to be part of that cloth. Even if my strand pulls strange. Even if I was dyed a different colour. Even if I was knotted before I came. I want a Church that treats weaving as holy work—not just in its liturgy but in its welcome. I want a Church that doesn’t treat disabled people, neurodivergent people, trans people, or exhausted people as pastoral problems to manage, but as threads that might be the key to the whole design.

Sometimes I imagine God with a needle. Not sewing up wounds to hide them, but threading mercy through scar tissue. I imagine God mending the holes the Church has left, not by returning to some old pattern, but by inventing something new—not out of nowhere, but from the very threads that have been discarded.

It’s easy to feel like you’re being pulled apart in this world. But maybe what feels like pulling is actually weaving. Maybe grace is the moment you realise that being stretched between your doubt and your hope, your fear and your faith, your past and your vocation—that stretch is not punishment. It’s formation. It’s tension on the loom. And something is being made.

If you are hanging by a thread today, take heart. You are not unravelling. You are being woven. You are held.