On Saturday, February 10, the G.K. Chesterton Society of Worcester warmly welcomed three representatives from the Friends of Chesterton of Massachusetts to their monthly meeting at Immaculate Conception Church in Worcester, where we presented our hopes for and efforts towards building a Chesterton Academy in Massachusetts. This was an easy audience: they are intimately familiar with G.K. Chesterton, and they understand the importance of a classical education. (Indeed, they live out what classical education is all about: after our presentation, they conducted their regularly-scheduled book-club meeting to discuss Chesterton’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, a real-life example of adult-level Socratic conversation in action!) The group was enthusiastic about the school and pledged their ongoing support through prayer, a monetary donation, and a commitment to continued partnership. Their witness to lifelong, faithful learning rooted in the example of G.K. Chesterton was truly inspiring.
However, none of this was the most remarkable thing about the meeting. The most remarkable thing was this: as I sat in the ordinary, run-of-the mill church basement, I realized that I was being given the gift of seeing the threads of the extraordinary being woven together. The familiar visual of God the Master Weaver quietly came to mind: God, who is continuously weaving the threads of our lives into a tapestry far greater than the Bayeux Tapestry - a tapestry that most of the time is hidden from us because we only see the one strand that we are traveling along. We pray that someday we will witness the beauty and the grandeur of the whole, but most of the time we are oblivious to the intersections of the threads in our lives. However, in His goodness, God sometimes allows us a small glimpse of a small corner of a square of His masterpiece. Saturday night, in the basement of Immaculate Conception Church, God allowed me to catch a glimpse of His tapestry.
Two years ago, the three of us who attended the meeting representing the Friends of Chesterton of Massachusetts did not know each other. One year ago, our relationship could be summed up as the “PTO,” and we felt fairly confident on how the threads were going to be woven over the next few years. Unexpectedly, our threads were severed and frayed. And yet, God picked up those frayed pieces and started weaving anew. What I was reminded of on Saturday is that along the way He is weaving in bits and pieces from all areas of our lives. We were invited to the meeting because of a friend from my days as a homeschooler. Another member of the group on Saturday was a friend from our former school whose daughter currently attends Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of Hope, who gave a moving testimony to the exceptional education and spiritual formation her daughter is receiving there. We were also gifted a large collection of G.K. Chesterton books from a local priest, whom I knew from my days as a young mother with several children crawling all over me at Mass - the particular thread connecting me to him is over 20 years old!
On my ride home, I thought about all the other threads that are being woven together. All of us on the founding board are coming to this with unique and complementary gifts and talents. We come from different areas and backgrounds. Presently, our personal threads are being woven together, at this moment, for this purpose - something I don’t think any of us had contemplated before. At times we may get our threads tangled and in a knot. But if we are patient and trust God I am confident that when we finally see the majesty of God’s tapestry there will be a little corner of it with our school woven into it. Won’t that be incredible?
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