The Coats Dorcas Made

They have begun to think that what they do does not weigh anything.

It is a strange feeling and hard to explain to somebody who has not had it. It is not that the work is bad. It is that it seems to have no mass. It goes out and it dissolves. Compare it, they say, to somebody who builds a wall: at the end of the day there is a wall, and you can put your hand on it, and it will be there in thirty years whether anybody thinks about it or not.

What they make has no equivalent of the wall.

They have tried to argue themselves out of this and the argument does not land, because the argument is abstract and the feeling is physical. You cannot talk somebody out of a feeling about mass by telling them their work is valuable in principle.

And the effect of it, over about two years, has been a slow flattening. They still do it well. But there is no weight in the doing, and a person who works without weight for long enough starts to feel weightless themselves.

They said it once, to a friend, at the end of a long day: I would like to see it all in one place. Just once. Everything I have made, in a room.

You may know that wish. Not for recognition. For mass. For some way of putting your hand on the thing.

A room full of what she made

Here is a scene, and I want you to see the room rather than the miracle.

Then Peter arose and went with them. When he was come, they brought him into the upper chamber: and all the widows stood by him weeping, and shewing the coats and garments which Dorcas made, while she was with them.Acts 9:39

Look at what is in that room. Not a summary of her life. Not a description of the kind of woman she was.

Coats. Held up. In the hands of the people who were wearing them.

And she had never seen this. That is the thing that stops me every time I read it. The room where everything she made was gathered in one place, with the people it went to standing in it, happened when she was not there. She made those coats one at a time, over years, and each one went out of her hands and away, and she never once saw them all together.

You are making something that has mass, and the mass is real whether or not you ever get to stand in the room. Acts 9:39 gathers what one woman made into a single room she never saw, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about your work rather than a nice story about hers.

Now let me take the feeling seriously, because you were right that arguments do not touch it.

The wall exists. Your thing dissolves. That is a true observation about the visible world and I am not going to tell you it is wrong. What is not true is the step underneath: that a thing which dissolves from your view has therefore no weight anywhere.

Dorcas's coats had enormous weight and she experienced almost none of it. The weight was distributed, one garment at a time, across years, into people she saw individually and never all at once.

You are not weightless, and the flattening you feel is about where you are standing rather than about what you have made. The written word puts the whole gathered weight of a life into one room the maker never entered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person believe in mass they cannot put a hand on.

The honest half. You are not going to get the room. Not on this side. I am not going to promise you a moment where somebody shows you everything and you finally feel it, because that is not how this works and you would know I was making it up.

And I am not going to tell you your work is secretly world changing. Dorcas made coats. They were coats.

There is a part only you can do, and it is an act of imagination rather than a feeling. You picture the room. You put in it what you have actually made, at its real size, no bigger. And you say one sentence over it.