FEATURE
Winning ways The first sponsored place on the Royal School of Needlework Certificate course has been awarded to James Sharpe. Lucy Shaw reports
James Sharpe: passion for beauty
R
eaders of Mass of Ages will be familiar with the work of the Guild of St Clare, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Our main purpose is to repair and make the liturgical vestments necessary for the celebration of the traditional liturgy of the Catholic Church, and central to our charism is education: learning and passing on the skills necessary for this work. As our workload expands, so our need for people with the knowledge and experience to assist us increases, and it was this need which inspired our new scheme: sponsoring a student on the Royal School of Needlework Certificate course. We launched the scheme in March this year, and were delighted with the number and quality of the applications: it was heartening to see such gifted candidates with so much dedication to cherishing the Church's patrimony. Making our choice under these circumstances was therefore not easy. We are delighted to announce, however, that our first sponsored place on the RSN Certificate course has been awarded to James Sharpe. James is a specialist social worker in Hackney who converted to Catholicism
40
A design by James based on Celtic knotwork four years ago. He has been a student of the arts since childhood, and studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge. He was drawn into the faith through the beauty of the Latin liturgy and theology, traditional Gregorian chant and Benedictine spirituality (he is a regular visitor to Belmont Abbey). He is interested in many traditional crafts including iconography, calligraphy, illumination, geometry and printing and has dedicated a great deal of time to learning about them. James's passion for beauty and his understanding of its central importance to the mission of the Church greatly impressed and moved the interviewing panel. As he himself expresses it, "the highest good of art is to point to and glorify God". James describes his progression from the appreciation of art and design, to practising them as a spiritual exercise in itself. This philosophy is at the heart of the work of the Guild of St Clare, and is the reason we are never happy with a bodged repair: in even the most humdrum of our tasks, we try to capture the spirit of those anonymous medieval craftsmen whose devotion to the Faith created such soaring testimonials to the greatness of God.
James's relatively recent interest in embroidery, and his ambition to work eventually in creating and repairing traditional church vestments, led him to apply for the Guild of St Clare sponsorship scheme with a view to pursuing this skill to a professional level. We feel very fortunate to have him on board and very much look forward to having the benefit of his interest and expertise at future Guild of St Clare events.
A design by Sarah Homfray, stitched by James Sharpe
AUTUMN 2019