home | contact

Threads

Grandmother Stella would gather leftover crumbs into a tea cloth. She’d stand at the back door overlooking her gardens. And she’d shake that cloth, flinging the crumbs to the birds.

Sheila Mesick’s grandmother cared for the birds that found a home in her yard in Buffalo. Iowa. Says Sheila, whose journey has taken her from fist-shaking anger at God to the peace of a tiny Quaker community to the grace of St. Paul, this church is a bit like her grandmother.

Grandmother Stella paid attention. She acted with grace. Stella is the earliest relational “thread” whose “simple acts in everyday life” left an imprint on Sheila and shaped her character as a thoughtful and creative “spirit being.”

“With those fibrous threads” that run through our lives, says Sheila. “our singular lives cross over and weave through other lives over time. They give us a purpose, not a singular existence.”

Sheila’s parents were hard-working folks in Buffalo. A “silent steadfast presence,” they hammered out a daily living. They didn’t have the luxury of “standing still and looking at things.” But Grandmother Stella: she noticed.

“My grandmother always pointed out things to me.” Rich freshly-plowed fields. Garden rows of irises. The softness of rainwater. The full moon shining on the geraniums. “To this day, I’m mesmerized by the moon,” says Sheila. Her childhood in Buffalo was all about “people interactivity — saying hello to someone on the sidewalk on the way to the post office. It was hands on, not rushed, a different rhythm.”

It was Grandmother Stella who took Sheila to the Buffalo Friends Church. She taught her how to pray. Stella passed along to Sheila her flaring temper, “particularly when people are mistreated.”

And it was Paul Shumaker, Sheila’s first husband, who awoke color and texture in her soul. She lived her life through this “quiet, gentle, artistic, creative, interesting man,” an art teacher who was more than twice Sheila’s age.

But Paul died of brain cancer, just 8Ω years into the marriage. Daughter Stella turned six the day after Paul’s funeral. And Sheila was “angry to the max at God.” Stuck in deep sadness, creating “a shrine” of the house she had shared with Paul, Sheila managed to get that degree in art education that Paul had encouraged. She’s now an art teacher at two Davenport middle schools: Smart and J.B. Young.

Eventually, time did its good work and Sheila started a new life with Chuck Mesick. “Today I’d say it wasn’t so much a matter of time, but grace. Now I know that we live through grace.”

Along the way, Sheila moved through anger, guilt, and apathy in a spiritual journey that led to church doors. In an age of television preachers, she left a church afire with evangelical fervor and faith healing. She found her way back to the Buffalo Friends Church, a community that gradually dwindled to 10 sturdy souls. “I think I will always be a Quaker at heart,” reflects Sheila. “It’s the simplicity, the peace and social concerns.”

And then Sheila “came to St. Paul because I was invited.” Startled by the power of grace, she wept Sunday after Sunday at first. The melodies of Open Spirit worship provide “a healing experience that I can’t put into words. There is so much joy here, and I had so many burdens pushed down and carried for so long. All I could do was weep.”

Some years ago, through happenstance, Sheila reconnected in a hospital parking lot with an old friend. Janey Carlson was weeping. Her husband had been injured in a bicycle accident. Before life support was removed, Sheila found her way to the hospital room. “I took a chance and asked if Janey would be comfortable with all of us holding hands for a word of prayer.”

After her husband’s death, Janey followed the path of grief that Sheila knew so well. “Call it the Spirit of God, but we get certain promptings. I told Janey: I’ve been going to this church and I think you would really like it.”

Janey and Sheila attended ALPHA together. They need each other. They are each threads in the other’s life tapestry. “That’s the crisscross, the interwoven threads that hold us together.”

Bind us together, Lord, bind us together with cords that cannot be broken… Bind us together with love. The lyrics of an old hymn declare the essence of a faith community, where people are held together in God’s love. Reflects Sheila:

“St. Paul chose to stay here in the city and be involved, to be purposeful. I think about my grandmother shaking the crumbs off her tea towel. It’s taking the time, paying attention, and saying that caring is important. We help one another. We have a purpose. We give dignity. These are the basic things needed to live a life.”

Here, in this church, Sheila Mesick has found new threads: people who pay attention to what’s important through simple, everyday acts of love.

Common Threads: Wednesday, July 21

Join Sheila Mesick for an intergenerational art project, based on the threads of relationship that God weaves into our lives. More »

  ::  

"It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion." ~Archbishop William Temple