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Thought for the Week

Clifton College's Chaplain, Kim Taplin, brings us his 'Thought for the Week'

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Tapestry

American singer/songwriter Carole King’s Tapestry (1971) remains one of the best-loved albums in the history of pop and rock music. In the title song, King wrote:

On 28th February 1944, Corrie ten Boom and her family were arrested at their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. They had been hiding Jews from the Nazis. The Ten Booms were transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, where Corrie’s sister died. Why did God allow this to happen? Why do bad things happen to good people?

Later in her life, Corrie ten Boom demonstrated her understanding of her experiences using a piece of purple cloth, which she kept in a large purse. She would unfold the cloth to reveal hundreds of seemingly-random, knotted strings. The tangled mess on the underside of the tapestry was in stark contrast to the beautiful image on the upper side – a crown of gold with multi-coloured jewels. “We only see the underside,” she would say, “Whilst, from above, God sees a masterpiece!”

She passionately believed that, one day, our vision would become clear, and that we would be able to perceive our lives from God’s perspective. We would understand that it is only because of the difficult times in our lives that we can appreciate the good. She would recite:

Humanity, as created in the image of God, is called to work with God in crafting the beauty and the ambiguity of our divinely-ordained destiny. In his Letters to a Young Poet, German language poet and novelist, Rainer Maria Rilke, remarked, “Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others.”

Weave well.

17 November 2008

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