Liturgy of the Body

 

 

Liturgy: a release of prayer, homily, spirituals, and observances

 

During my daily walks around the neighborhood, I have begun to notice prayer flags strung on porches, over plucked gardens, and hanging off of wooden fences.  They are made of linen or cotton, in blue, red, and yellow with prayers pressed into the weave with black ink.  They are more apparent to me now in the grey winter light with all the primary colors drained out of the landscape and the trees bare. For the newly hung, the cloth is whole and stiff, and the prayers are black.  Uncured, these new ones are unable to let go of what they are holding.  In the older ones, the cloth has frayed and the prayers have faded pulled out of the softened cloth by the wind, rain, sun, and snow, the liturgy of the prayer flags.  

 

In other yards, I see laundry hung across porches, gardens, and fences. Some are laid out like rainbows with reds and yellows followed by the blues and purples.  Others are arranged by size with briefs followed by t-shirts and shirts and ending with pants and sheets.  The laundry holds pleas like the flags pressed into them from the palms of those who hang the clothes out to dry, the liturgy of the laundry. 

 

Fifty years ago, my mother and grandmother hung our laundry out to dry from the window in the upstairs kitchen where a rope was strung between the house and a pole near the garage.  I liked to play at their feet curled up in the wooden clothes basket rocking side to side like a creaking boat.  My mother and grandmother in their floral house dresses and hard soled slippers would carry the wet laundry up from the basement, white on Mondays, colors on Wednesdays, to hang out to dry in the midday sun.  They would gossip and smoke and drink strong coffee in between loads, in between the folding and the clipping and the stirring of the red sauce for the pasta.  Some of the prayers they pressed into the cloth still lined the wooden basket that I rolled around in and clung to the sheets that folded me in for the night, the liturgy of the grandmothers and mothers.

 

It seems to me more important to know how to release our prayers than to know where they are going.  By releasing them into the world we honor them and our vulnerability.  It is how we cultivate courage and faith.  Our prayers inked by holy longing into our hearts are released when the heart becomes lacy like the fraying flags, tender as the old bed sheets, joyful as the smoky upstairs kitchen, the liturgy of the body.