Kirkepiscatoid

Many of the readers of this blog and many of my Episcopalian Facebook friends seem to engage in a strange unofficial liturgical act on Saturdays--the Saturday Sacrament of the Laundry. This Saturday was no exception at my house. We often ponder great theological laundry mysteries on Facebook, such as, "Why is it, when you put your underwear in the wash right-side-out, they always come out of the dryer inside-out?"

Yesterday, I got to pondering the Holy Mystery of the Clinging Dryer Sheet, and was reminded of it when I was commenting over on Elizabeth's blog. The Holy Mystery of the Clinging Dryer Sheet goes like this:

"How is it that the dryer sheet keeps all your clothes from sticking together from static cling, but it's always stuck to one article of clothing by static?"

Well, and you know, I got to thinking how people are kind of like that sometimes, and we always have a few people in our lives that annoy or irritate us like a clinging dryer sheet...yet we love them...and maybe part of why we love them is it seems the "locking horns" is part of the dance. We have days where we want to throttle them. Yet if they were missing from our lives we would feel the loss. The intensity of our love for them comes out in the intensity of the way we lock horns with them.

My friend who died this past summer was one of those friends. Sometimes she'd call and I'd think, "Uhhhh....don't wanna deal with this....shoo, go away!" Sometimes I was the "dryer sheet" with HER. "You're mad about something, because you are trying to pick a fight with ME. What are you REALLY upset about?" Now that she's gone, I actually MISS that.

I know exactly when I am being the dryer sheet. When something gets me upset, and it's something that for whatever reason I cannot fight directly with what is bothering me, I start looking around, gunning for a scrap...and I don't want someone who will cave in on me, I want someone who will fight back. There has to be intense love under that scrapping. In some ways, the scrap becomes a very effective cloaking device. As Elizabeth pointed out in a recent post, it might even be covering something the two of you both fear if one were to lose the other.

What would life be like without the dryer sheets in our life? I know with my laundry, I would have ALL the clothes sticking together, not just the dryer sheet stuck to one article of clothing. I would have a lot more annoying, maybe unmanageable static. I know my laundry would not smell as good. So it is with the "dryer sheet people" in our lives. We would probably have a lot more general "static" in our lives. We would not appreciate the fresh, renewing moments in our lives. We actually NEED to have them stuck to us now and then in an annoying way, if only to remind us of the capabilities of our intensity of feeling.

Thanks be to God for "dryer sheets!"