Seeing the video of George Floyd’s murder shocks a community of New Hampshire quilters into action. They organize nine churches to stitch his last words into quilts. Their encounter with his pain, extended over the weeks of creating the beautiful panels, becomes a prayer as they share the completed quilts with the world.
About
mark koyama
George Floyd’s dying words appeared in the body of an email I received from a group promoting police reform. In George Floyd’s desperation, I recognized the narrative frame I needed. The reckoning we all need.
I made my pitch to trusted mentors, and then to my parishioners: The Sacred Ally Quilt Project, a collaboration of churches across New Hampshire, quilting the last words of George Floyd.
My word was “claustrophobic.” I spent a long time with this frightening word. Fear of small places. Fear of confinement. Fear that we may never be free of this suffocating racial hatred. Fear that, left to our own depravity, we may never be redeemed.
George Floyd’s pain won’t go away. We respect it, walk gingerly around it as one would walk around a grave. We honor his pain with this stitching, this prayer of thread. And yet, always, we suspect that we don’t fully get it, these words, this sidewalk paroxysm of American brutality. The weight of 400 years of racial hatred coalescing on a kneecap. This, then, is the narrative of our quilts. This is our encounter with beauty and pain.
mark koyama
“It does not proclaim answers or pretend to closure. Like all art, it points beyond itself to the gift and burden of being human: the guilt, the shame, the pain; the possibilities of grace, of beauty, of healing.”
Chris Owen
the subjects
Mark koyama
Rev. Mark Koyama grew up in South East Asia and New Zealand before coming to live in the United States in 1980. He was educated at Bates College, Union Theological Seminary (MA 1992), University of Massachusetts Amherst (MFA 2010) and Yale Divinity School (MDiv 2015). Mark teaches literature and religious studies at Northfield Mount Hermon School, and is the settled pastor at the United Church of Jaffrey, in Jaffrey New Hampshire.
