Sacred laundry

“There are many helpful Episcopal Church web sites about getting lipstick off purificators and candle wax off altar cloths but nothing about removing blood stains from albs.” From a 4:20 am text to Crash Kid and his partner.

My soon-to-be daughter in law shot back, “This is written like the opening line to a mystery novel I would want to read!!”

Maybe this is the next book? The current mystery is more practical. How do I get the blood stains and the red wine stains out of my white alb, currently soaking in cold water? Just like in a mystery novel, let’s use a little flashback here…

I was the altar server at the 5pm vigil Mass last night. We had a visiting priest who preached a banger of a homily, and I was trying to be attentive to both those weird “unique to this parish” things for the visitor and to the ways he prefers to preside. So, you know, I was trying to be mindful and attentive to the liturgy. Pride, as we know, goes before a fall. And it surely did.

The gifts were presented, I took the wine with me to the credence table at the back of the altar to collect the cruet with the water. As I turned and took a step I caught my foot in the hem of my alb. Suddenly I realized I was going to fall and there was nothing to stop me but the marble floor. My training in how to fall (thank you UCI Dance and El Gabriel) kicked in and I tucked and rolled. The water cruet flew from my hand and shattered with a tremendous crash. In seconds the altar was swarmed by people. I am mortified, also wet. As they began to help me up I looked at the hem of my alb and saw a bright red stain. Uh-oh.

"Someone is bleeding," I thought. Then a few seconds later,"It's probably me." It was. Off I went with two parishioners who are nurses to the small chapel behind the main altar where we staunched the bleeding. Presumably clean-up went forward, but I was out of play. The presider came back to make sure I was ok, and told me it was going to be a memorable visit. Someone popped back to ask me if the wine had been consecrated. No. Definitely not. Someone else said that the wine was sitting, apparently unspilled and unbroken on the floor. (As it turned out, a great deal had spilled, all over my alb, but I didn't drop it and apparently set it neatly on the floor. Huh.) They got fresh wine anyway. Good. 

We hunted up a first aid kit to bandage things up so I didn't drip on my alb anymore. The pastor came. It's communion, the helpers went out to receive, the ministers came back so I could receive. (Is this technically allowed? Is it covered under communion for the sick? Did I satisfy the Sunday obligation? This is Roman Catholicism, thereby there must be a rule. No one invoked it. There are definitely rules in place that cover what happens if the priest can't go on — see De defectibus.)

I went home, carrying the alb. Math Man took me to the ER. It took four hours and three rounds of X-rays to locate and removed the glass embedded in my hand. There were jokes. Math Man sent Math Guy photos of the damage (to reassure him I was told). "Stigmata!" he chortled. The transport tech wanted to know if I'd been in a bar fight. (It didn't occur to me that I must have reeked of alcohol, all that red wine on shoes and pants, which were at least black. Parkinson's has dulled my sense of smell.) 

There were apologies from the staff that it was taking so long, and thanks for my patience. I didn't tell them that I had once been in that ER and not had to wait. It didn't end well. Waiting is good.  Except that waiting gives the ghosts time to gather. 

This morning I picked up the alb from where I'd left it yesterday and noticed the violet stains everywhere. What? Oh. The wine. Which leads to the question at hand: how do you get both red wine and blood out of a white alb?

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Odd thoughts: 

Is the clean up protocol different if the wine had been consecrated? Short answer. Yes.

There is advice about cleaning blood stains in First Initiation into Carthusian Life (a manual for Carthusian novices, mostly on prayer, but with practical advice on mail and meals and laundry tacked on to the end).  Soak in COLD water and the stains will vanish in short order, it advises (But only in a Carthusian charterhouse, the rest of us might need to summon the imps of Oxiclean.)

Spelling: the sign “waive here” outside ED radiology (to open the door) a place I visited repeatedly; the clinical notes say I fell on the "alter".

"In Residence" - the Shonda Rhimes mystery we've been watching. Lots of flashback. A scene where the White House chef Marvella smashes glasses on the floor, screaming "Broken glass!"

French Sundays

On Sunday, Math Man announced he was taking a breather. Reading a novel, trying a new recipe (gazpacho - it was great) and watching the US Amateur golf (being played right down the road from us). The last few Sundays he has been busy: visitors, conferences, building new bookshelves to house the books coming home from my office. Nothing sounded like a great plan for a rainy Sunday. 

As I had my tea and browsed the news on my tablet, I noticed an article "French Sundays." The author advocated for a day of rest and recreation, based on the practice in France (where the law provides for a day of rest and many things are perforce closed on Sundays). Don't plan on chores, don't plan an elaborate brunch, don't plan much at all, in fact. Embrace the chance to noodle around, pick up a novel or decide at the last minute to take a walk with your partner. Above all, don't look at your work email.

All good ideas, but what really struck me was that this article managed to never once mention or even intimate that the practice was not merely a French curiosity, but had deep roots in religious traditions. Sabbath has been practiced for millennia. Though if it had, then it might have had to wrestle with the fact that the choice of Sunday as the day of rest is primarily Christian, and other faith traditions have made other choices.

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Gazpacho recipe (after Julia Moskin's in NYT Cooking)

Makes enough for two for dinner with leftovers for Math Man's lunch the next day.

1 lb fresh tomatoes, cored and roughly chopped
1/2 bell pepper, seeded and roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled
1/2 cucumber (peeled and roughly chopped)
1/2 small onion (yes,  roughly chopped)
1/3 cup good olive oil, extra to drizzle on top
1 tsp champagne vinegar
salt to taste

Put the vegetables into the blender (we did this in two batches) and blend until very smooth. While the blender is running, add the vinegar and then stream in the olive oil. Taste. The soup should be creamy, not watery. Add a bit more olive oil if it seems watery and then salt to taste. 

Chill in the refrigerator while you chill on the sofa. Serve in a glass, with an optional drizzle of olive oil.

Is my office bugged?

Is my office bugged? Short answer. Yes.

Well literally, yes. Also metaphorically. Or it least it feels that way. My latest column for Nature Chemistry is titled "Bug Bites," about the taste of bugs (and having a taste for bugs). It hatched while at my niece's wedding reception early in the summer. The crew of cousins got onto the topic from a conversation about cilantro (stink bugs taste like cilantro, as it happens), and then suggested I write about it.

As I was drafting the piece, I went downstairs to grab a second cup of tea from the carafe in the kitchen. I carried it upstairs, set it down on the desk, and got back to work. I absently-mindedly picked up the mug and noticed something off with the scent. It wasn't quite as floral as I expected. I peered into the cup to find a (dead) earwig bobbing about. Oh dear. Its alarm cocktail of dimethyl disulfide and dimethyl trisulfide had given my tea a mephitic edge.

I removed the unfortunate earwig, and drank the tea.

It seemed beyond coincidental that my tea should be bugged, was the universe listening in? I still can't figure out where it came from. I had rinsed the carafe with hot water before filling it with tea, and it had been tightly sealed. I had already had one cup of earwig-less tea in the mug. The sugar bowl is covered. Where did it come from? 

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I took a photo of the bugged tea and of the earwig I fished out, but it felt a bit too gross to illustrate this post. (I described it to Math Man over dinner who winced every time I said "mandible".) So the mug is my organic chemistry mug.

Proof

 

My seventh (!) book will be published this fall. A book of reflections for next Lent. The proofs came a couple of weeks ago, and once the manuscript for book eight (eight? eight?) went out the door, I had some time and space to devote to this devotional.

I still proof on paper, circling errors with a red ballpoint, pressing into the surface of the paper, leaving a literal wound to mark wounded text. I read it end to end, cold, then again side by side with the text I submitted. Were those snippets of scripture exactly what was in the lectionary? Quotes from the psalms sometimes are pulled from my memory (and my heart and my soul) as I write, not from any specific text. Better check against the source!

When the latest revision of the US English Catholic Lectionary came out, I didn’t add it to my collection. I have the most recent British one, the previous US one, but mostly I turn to the USCCB site or use Give Us This Day. The ritual books in my parish are stored behind the main altar, in a space reserved for quiet meditation in front of the tabernacle. So one afternoon last week, I laid the proofs on the small wooden altar, pulled the Sunday and daily lectionaries from the shelf, and with the Word before me, and the Word at my right hand, I proofed the pericopes. I could have taken the books and proofs to the small library next door, or to the sacristy, but this space felt right.

I used a book called Stones Before the Lord (about monastic architecture) when I taught a course on the history of contemplation in the West. Proofing on the altar left me feeling like I was laying stones of a different sort before the Lord. Stepping stones from Ash Wednesday to Easter, perhaps, or maybe a staircase cut into a cliff taking you from from a rocky beach on the wind-whipped Scottish coast to a chapel nestled high above. Or living stones, to use the image from the first letter of Peter, pulled from my own prayer. Stones I wanted to be properly cut and laid so they might support people's path though next Lent, and not be  stumbling blocks.

I found a few errors and marked them up, now it's headed back to Liturgical Press.

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Proofs. It's been a week of proofs. I proofed yeast last night to make pizza crusts. I proofed this book. I sorted through proofs of once new quantum mechanical theories, snapping a picture or two to remember the work I had done (and long ago published), then sent them into oblivion (actually the recycling bin!).

Grief’s half-life

I am slowly (glacially?) clearing off shelf space at home, so that some of the books in my office can have a spot. I skim the shelves, looking for books that I can’t imagine reading again (or that I could get from the library should I wish to revisit them). Intermingled with my and Victor’s and the kids’ books are some of Tom’s. Books from college courses, novels. In some ways Tom’s old books were easy to triage. He does not require physical copies of them on this earth, and I have no memories attached to them (we didn’t meet until graduate school). Off they go. 

Tucked into one shelf in the wall of books off the kitchen was a journal I didn’t immediately recognize with a photo of a pair of battered pointe shoes on the cover. I pulled it out and opened it to find letters I had written to Tom after he died. I read two and closed the cover. It seems they are still hot, radioactive, like Marie Curie’s cookbooks.

What, I wonder is grief’s half-life? And how many have elapsed? We say that after 10 half-lives have elapsed the material is safe to handle (less than 0.1% remains). But even then radioactive events are still occurring, randomly spitting out particles and gamma rays.