You see, after a lot of thought about the subject, I feel that the summum bonum is best stated "to love and to be loved". And this falls on every level of life, from the most common to the super spiritual. The Summum Bonum has to be found in the most mundane, because that is where we live every day, but in its purest form it is also the most exceptional and extraordinary epiphany of life. But we can only get glimpses of that, you cannot live there.
So how does this relate to quilting? Well, quilting is what I call a "great good", no caps. It is a way to love and be loved in a daily, mundane way. The more involved you are in the process of creating the quilt, the greater the good (though perhaps the less "perfect" the quilt.) Let me explain what I mean by this.
When one buys a blanket for a loved one, you are loving them with your gift. When you pick out the fabrics and use your time and skill to create a quilt, you are loving in a more personal way, when you take hours to hand quilt and finish a quilt, you are pouring yourself into the gift that you give. All of this is a way to give love. And when you give, suddenly you begin to engage in both giving and receiving love. When the person wraps up in the quilt and warms him or herself, they continue to receive love. When they look at the quilt and think of you, they are giving love back.
Even when you wrap up in your own quilt, you have given and are receiving love from yourself.
I realize I am straying from the normal way to see life here. Imbibing inanimate objects with the power of love is not my intention here. They just are a mundane symbol of the love that is behind them, coming from or to a person. But it is the lover and the loved that have and give the power of love.
But where do we go from here. You see that this "good" is small "g", but there is a "Greatest Good" which is the pattern for all the little good we do day to day. The Greatest Good is the good that God gives us. His love for us, and the fact that he desires our love in return. His Son was sent to act on our behalf because of His love for us. And then he has asked us to love Him and each other, and in turn we also naturally desire love.
So next time you wrap someone in a quilt you made, or feed them a warm and delicious hand made meal, or give them a hand turned pen for writing, or dress a child in a shirt that you washed, or simply give someone a hug, remember that you are participating the the great good...a small reflection of the Greatest Good.
4 comments:
Oh, oh, oh!
I didn't have time to comment fully before now. I was having a discussion with my husband yesterday--yes, the man wrapped lovingly in the quilt from the post above. We were talking about love. I said love is spice. He said, no, love is milk.
Your descriptions here certainly add light to that dialogue. To love and to be loved. Perhaps to love is spice but to be loved is milk. Together, it is the great good, indeed.
Your thoughts about the mundane and giving are very interesting. James Joyce would like your thoughts on these epiphanies. His little descriptions of the mundane and all the depth that lies beneath the surface of daily epiphanies are very like what you are talking about.
I agree with what you say about the Summum Bonum. And that Greatest Good, is so, because and when it infects and wins our every mundane moment and instances of soul.
Dad does get an upset stomach from spice, so I can see why he would not want to see love that way. Although...love does result in an upset stomach sometimes! :)
I would love to be pointed to the right James Joyce to read to get his opinions on this. I have not read any of his work, other than exerpts in high school. I don't know how I avoided Ulysses, but I did. In college, though, we talked about such rites as communion and baptism and how we can let these infrequent highly spiritual moments permeate our daily like until we are in communion with Christ every time we eat and we are thinking about soul cleansing every time we bathe...
That picture has always stuck with me. The idea of making every mundane moment into a sacred one.
I recently finished "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." I talked with Stevie about it yesterday, because, more than anything, it is a coming of age represented by the boy leaving his mother. Near the end, one of the protagonist's (named Stephen by the way) friends tells him the story of a mother, a child, and a crocodile. The child falls into the Nile. The croc gets him. The mother begs the croc to return the child to her. He cautiously agrees, but says, "First you must tell me whether you will eat him or not eat him."
This is the great challenge of parenting. We must love our child so much that we will rush into the jaws of a crocodile for them, but then, we must, sooner or later, let them go. We must promise, crocodiles and sons and daughters, that we will not eat our children.
Ah.h.h, James Joyce. Start your explorations by reading the novella/short story, The Dead. It is in the collection Dubliners.
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