Matt W Cook

or, Re-raveling a sweater

I used to be a night-shift personal support worker in a group home for disabled adults with histories of aggressive behaviour. On good nights, I had four hours of work for an eight hour shift. On less-than-good nights I came home with torn clothing and the occasional bandage. Not a bad job, all things considered.

I spent a lot of time reading. The Bible, mostly, because any time I’d read something else a voice in the back of my head would remind me that the Bible was better. The Bible was the Source of Truth. The Handbook for Life. I’d already read it cover-to-cover multiple times years before, but I could always find fresh Truth because that’s what I was looking for. Truth sets free.

One night, I realized that I hadn’t really come to terms with Christianity’s most dire doctrine: Hell. I had grown up begrudgingly ‘knowing’ that Eternal Conscious Torment was the only just end to unbelievers. I knew the theological arguments, though they depressed me. Indeed, the only reason I preached on the streets and went to Pakistan was because of this belief: most folks are damned. At some point, a maturing truth-seeker has to stare the truths he’s most uncomfortable with.

I spent two or three nights scouring the scriptures for Hell. There’s quite a few passages that seem to talk about it, but most of them are vague, tucked into parables or colourful metaphors. Mostly, the punishment for not believing in God seems to be death.

The more I read about Hell, the less I found that lined up with the doctrine I had received. More than ten years that night—it’s hard to capture what it was like, suddenly finding cracks in what seemed to be a bedrock doctrine of Christianity. My Evangelical faith could not allow for anything orthodox outside of a very narrow band of prescribed beliefs.

That was the pulled thread that unraveled by Evangelical sweater.

I like that analogy because the end result is the same—you’re suddenly walking around without a shirt. It’s awkward and embarrassing. You don’t really know how to act anymore. And you’re really angry at whoever sold you or made that sweater in the first place. So then you go shopping for a new thing to protect you from the elements, hold all your loose parts together, and look presentable to other non-naked peoples. But of course, nothing fits like that sweater. Everything either itches or is too thin. And you invested A LOT in that sweater. It sucks that it unraveled.

But…you still got all that thread. A whole sweater’s worth. And, I mean, if you’re honest with yourself, you did have a hand in making that sweater in the first place.

So you keep the thread. Organize it a bit, drape it on your shoulders when it’s cold. Eventually a day comes when you realize that the thread somehow became clothing again—or could be clothing if you wanted it to be. It’s not the same sweater it was, but it’s made of the same threads. Maybe some extra that you’ve been picking up along the way. And now you even get to modify things—I mean, it was always a bit constricting in the middle, the old sweater. So, eventually, the new sweater is actually way better than the old one. And it feels like it will last way longer, too.

And the grandest thing: It’s better because it fell apart, not despite.