A Towel, revisited

Occasionally, in my own time, I like to revisit previous ponderings. Not because I think they are wonderful or I am dazzled by my own writing; I am not. Rather, I revisit them because they are things I am truly pondering. In my preaching class, I was told that “A good preacher will first preach to himself.” Often, these Ponderings are things I need to hear or think further about, and this provides a way for me to process, ponder, and, yes, inform or teach.

The following Pondering was the first one I wrote when I came to All Saints. And, it just so happens, that I had written the body of the text even before that. I first penned these words as I was preparing for my diaconal ordination. And as any good clergyman will tell you, “Once a deacon, always a deacon.” And while it is the job of every deacon to care for the community, it is also the job of every Christian to care for and serve their neighbor. It is easy to get caught up in the liturgics, the aesthetics, or parish events. However, if we miss the Christian life of serving and caring for our neighbor, we have made a dangerous error. We are called to “love God and love our neighbor.” The love of God in our worship of him in the Mass is bound to our love of one another and our neighbor. So, here is an old Pondering, because I know I need to hear it again.

As some of you know, I delivered our third child before the midwives arrived. I often think back to that experience, though I will save you the details. I think about seeing Adelaide for the first time. I think about how strong mothers are. And I think about all of the other myriad of things that occurred. But I also think—perhaps slightly traumatized by it all—about the role of a towel in the whole experience.

A towel often goes unnoticed. It is something used and discarded. It is more often viewed as dirty and only cherished when clean. But this is quite backward. We look for what a towel can do and neglect to appreciate it for what it has done. A towel’s job is to accompany life’s many births. It almost always deals exclusively with blood or water. At birth, it dampens the flood of blood and water. It cleans mother and child. And the towel accompanies the child throughout life’s daily births. The cleaning of the day past and a presentation of the day ahead. Even life’s many messes are types and figures of death and births.

A towel stands at the paradoxical crossroads of life and death, though this connection is made most clearly in the life of the Church. In baptism, a towel greets the newly baptized, who in an eternal/timeless act is joined to death and Life. In the Mass, it is fitting that there are many towels as the once and for all, the eternal sacrifice, is mysteriously present in our midst. Here blood and water are mixed. Life and death joined. Christ and his body united. In the liturgy towels clean, they serve, they protect and guard, and they proclaim the mystery of sacrifice. And finally, towels meet us on our way to death, as the Veil of Veronica met Christ along the way of suffering towards the cross and the Shroud of Turin awaited Christ in his grave. But in this death, all of life was reborn. Therefore, in our deaths, we find ourselves at the birth pangs of life eternal. But even here our bodies are washed and cleaned with a towel.

It is proper that the ministers of Christ are given a towel in their ordination, represented in the maniple worn on the arm. Ministers are to accompany the towel, moving from life to death in the lives of those they serve. They are to be the servers even in the small mundane deaths and births of quotidian messes. The ministers of Christ are to be towels of Charity.

But this ministry, while especially present in the life and duty of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, is for all Christians. We are all called to serve others. We are called to live a life that reflects Christ. The Gospel of St. Matthew reminds us what this means: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (20:28). What would it look like if we lived more along these lines, as someone not needing recognition or expecting the red-carpet treatment? What if we thought first to just show up and be of service? As Christ himself tells us, “Whoever wants to be first must be a slave of all.” (Mark 10:44).

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,

Fr. Aaron