May 30, 2012

Just as the sun is about to dawn, I complete my walk having passed along North Church field; that “shore” that looks out into eternity and into the very heart of God. Coming back from my intimate encounter with infinity to the brick and mortar reality of New Melleray Abbey, the first room I enter is the laundry. The laundry room in my house is not like the laundry room in a family's house. It is actually the size of a small post office and features, besides a few ordinary washers and dryers, three very large industrial size washing machines which a small adult could climb into. It is a functional and not especially attractive place, but I like the way this room smells. It is the place where cleansing agents like detergent and bleach are mixed with hot water filling the air in the room with the distinctive scent of things renewed and made clean. Here the towels and linens from our twenty room guest house are laundered each Monday. Here, the white house robes and black scapulars of the monks, their work clothes, our table napkins, (yes, reflecting our European roots, we still use linen table napkins), and bed linens are all washed once a week. The jaws of an odd looking machine in the corner are wide open ready for service in pressing pants or shirts. In the center of the room, against a pillar, a quaint wooden desk built of wood, perhaps in the 1950's, (the monastery is full of furniture like this), holds laundry bags, pins, and markers of indelible ink used to write each monk's laundry number on the inside collar of his house robe. There is a truth starkly and plainly attested to in a laundry room: the truth that our human condition means the clothes we wear close to our bodies tend to become soiled and in need of being washed again and again. Here, life is met in one of its most mundane aspects. Having glimpsed the infinity of God's transcendence in the splendor of North Church Field before dawn, I walk into the laundry and embrace the finite again. I even feel a quiet happiness to be back. Making my way past the washers and driers, dimly visible in the half-light, I am gently reminded that I am a creature and that, even if I am granted the beatific vision in eternity, I will remain what I was in the beginning: a creature. I am surprised at the taste of bliss and completeness I experience acknowledging this at 5:10 in the morning, in the basement of a monastery. I could die in peace in a place like this – peaceful in the knowledge that I lived my life without pretensions; happy to be what God made me and full of wonder that, what I am, God too became in Jesus Christ his Son.