The Wool-Cleaners

“Do not refuse the wool-cleaners. If they do beat and trample you, stretch and comb you, this is how your garment becomes radiant.” Abba Evagrius

I am using Tim Vivian’s devotional Becoming Fire for this new liturgical year, which draws on the wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers. This snippet from several days ago has stuck with me. Who are the wool-cleaners in my life? What is stretching me? What is softening me, as a hide is softened by crumpling? Where am I refusing to let them in? It is one frame for an examination of conscience.

I went to confession this weekend, which is one way to invite the wool-cleaners in. There was a line of sorts, a half dozen ahead of me scattered in the pews. We know who’s next, wordlessly holding each other in care, holding the space for each other. I confessed, was shriven by the pastor and went home. 

That evening I was the acolyte at the 5pm Mass, pouring water over the hands of the selfsame pastor as he prayed, “Wash away my iniquities, cleanse me from my sins.” Returning in some way what had been offered to me. The ministry of the church exercised not only by her ordained ministers but by the people of God that we might all “be radiant with joy and our faces free from all shame.” (Psa 34) 

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You can find the new edition of Becoming Fire at Cistercian Press. Photo is of my prayer space with its white, soft sheepskins on my chair - grateful for the literal wool-cleaners as well as the sacramental ones!

Holy kicks

I need new walking shoes, and Keen no longer makes the ones that have taken me more than a thousand miles (yes, they should have been replaced at half that, but....). Searching the interwebs for something suitable, these shoes came up. INRI shoes, Nikes with 60 ml of water from the Jordan (holy water, blessed by a priest). Complete with red wool insoles (to remind you of the previous Pope's Pradas and sorry, I couldn't resist the alliteration), a "papal" seal and a crucifix. Cost? $1425 because the verse in which Jesus walks on the water is Matthew 14:25. (I think they missed a connection when they made 24 pairs, not 12.) They sold out in 1 minute, but you can get them on the resale market.

You could argue the shoes are reliquaries, holding water from the Jordan in which Jesus was baptized, though the actual water poured over his head is long flowed to the sea. Still, over two millennia and assuming good mixing, the probability is high that some of those molecules (perhaps a hundred) are once again in the Jordan and now in the INRI shoes that once poured over Jesus' head. By the same arguments, there might be a thousand molecules of water in my tea that once poured over Jesus's head.  Does this make the shoes a first class relic? My tea?

It's all holy ground we walk on, $1425 holy kicks or not. And I still need to find new walking shoes.