In Austria I was fascinated by a tradition unknown to me. Every year at Ash Wednesday a Lent Tapestry is hung in the church, and there it will hang during the seven weeks of Lent.
When I found out about this tapestry tradition Dagmar had to take me around to every church where she knew there was a tapestry, and I could have stood there for hours just reading the stories told through images.
The Fastentuch in Dagmars local church, only a stone's throw from Dagmar's farm, is from 1555. It is made of 39 different pictures and is huge - almost 5 x 7,5 meters.
The Lent Tapestries are from a time when most people could not read and the images was used to tell the stories of the Bible.
Lent is a time for silence, prayers and reflections. I make my own Lental Tapestry. Not with colourful wool treads but with Bible stories woven with a purple feltpen in a small orange and purple silken notebook.
My first weaving is the story of the rainbow:
And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.
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I will reflect more upon the rainbow, our main sign of hope for the earth later.
Photos: a modern Austrian Lent Tapestry, two Austrian churches near Dagmar.
