Almost forty years ago I attended a conference sponsored by an enthusiastic movement flourishing in ecumenical Christian circles at the time. One of the workshop speakers was a Southern Baptist minister who had helped found a large network of Christian communities identifying themselves as “non-denominational” churches. It was quite an experience for me, a young (early 20s) Roman Catholic from Massachusetts, to hear from a truly southern Southern Baptist.

But he shared a story that struck home. It has repeatedly come to mind as I’ve lived my life since then, filled as it has been with all the unexpected turns, disappointments, sorrows, struggles, failures and joys that are the stuff of human experience.

This Baptist speaker’s mother had taken him frequently to southern “Quilting Bees” where local women would gather to display their quilts and work together on new ones. These experiences began when he was a toddler.

He recalled crawling to the quilting frames where, from his vantage point from beneath the frames, he could only see strands of thread and fabric and splashes of color hanging down between the wooden slats. He vividly recounted what it was like on that one special day when he was finally able to pull himself up on the side of the wooden frame and behold the beautiful design from above.

It was an epiphany moment. What he had perceived from beneath as disconnected colors and meaningless threads was revealed as an extraordinary tapestry. The quilter was an artist with a beautiful design in mind from the beginning.

That story opened a deeper understanding of how the Lord works in our lives. From above, there is a pattern being woven by God out of the fabric of our everyday lives. From below, this often appears in the form of meaningless, disconnected strands of thread and cloth. As we grow in faith and cooperate with the grace through which God heals our fractured freedom, we are empowered to pull ourselves upright through our choices. Living faith mediates the mystery of God’s loving plan and opens our spiritual eyes to behold the Divine Design.

Life is often confusing — and pain is part of the program. As I have aged, I’ve become more honest about all of this. In spite of our best efforts, things do not always go the way we had hoped. Questions emerge at an ever deeper center, a core; questions such as, “How does this all make sense?”

The speaker shared another insight drawn from quilting. The quilter begins at the center with a patch of cloth that becomes the reference point from which he or she weaves the entire pattern of the quilt. From that center the design emanates, and to it the design returns. It is also to that center that the eye is drawn when the whole quilt is seen from above.

For the Christian, the center from which the Divine Design proceeds is the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is the central patch of cloth from which the pattern proceeds and to which it returns. However, seeing this pattern requires our ongoing conversion and the renewed vision that comes through living faith. The Holy Spirit gives us the strength to pull ourselves up by grasping the wood of the Cross of Jesus. There we see that the threads all form a pattern woven by love.

A Deacon of the not-yet-divided 4^th century church named Ephrem was called the “Harp of the Holy Spirit” for his hymns. He wrote of Jesus on the cross:

He who was also the carpenter’s glorious son set up his cross above deaths’ all-consuming jaws, and led the human race into the dwelling place of life. Since a tree had brought about the downfall of mankind, it was upon a tree that mankind crossed over to the realm of life.

Bitter was the branch that had once been grafted upon that ancient tree, but sweet the young shoot that has now been grafted in, the shoot in which we are meant to recognize the Lord whom no creature can resist. We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death, like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living.

We give glory to you who put on the body of a single mortal man and made it the source of life for every other mortal man. You are incontestably alive. Your murderers sowed your living body in the earth as farmers’ sow grain, but it sprang up and yielded an abundant harvest of men raised from the dead. Come then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love and our lives.

Ephrem understood the connection between the Cross and the Divine Design. Do we? Each of us will experience disappointment. We will suffer, make wrong choices, fail and fall. We will experience the consequences. The sheer weight of “the stuff of life” can sometimes reduce us to figuratively crawling.

There is a Divine Design, however. The way to stand back upright and discern the pattern is by allowing the Holy Spirit to awaken living faith in Jesus Christ.  As we pull ourselves up on the frame of His Cross we come to see that what once seemed to be mere strands and strips of cloth with no apparent pattern, are actually a part of this loving design being woven from the center.

In Jesus Christ we find the fullness of God’s plan. In Him, through Him and with Him we are in the process of being recreated. So too is the whole universe.

He is the center from which the pattern emanates and to which it will all return. There really is a Divine Design.