Linen involves hard work. Tedious work. I see that now.
And I’m not talking just about my fraught relationship with finished fabric – the fact that linen shirts or tablecloths require my wrestling with a steam iron in order to look crisp and presentable.
Long before linen winds up in these forms I use every day, it starts out in the field – as flax seed, planted and tended for a season by farmers. Until recently, that simple fact had never occurred to me: the components of a natural fiber, by definition, have to be grown.
But the challenges and vagaries of the growing season are just the start. After harvesting, that’s when the real fun begins. First comes retting – the process of separating fibers from the stem by submersion in water. Then comes drying, breaking and scutching – steps used to remove shives (broke pieces of stem) from the fibers. Then comes hackling – a combing motion required to remove any undesirable debris and short fibers. Next, the flax fibers are spun into yarn … and woven into fabric on a loom. And still the work is not done: the woven cloth must be finished, through various stages of softening, bleaching and dyeing.
A recent “farm day” hosted by my daughter and son-in-law opened my eyes to this hard work of linen. They grow a little flax on their acreage, and are teaching themselves about the linen-making process – demonstrating some of the steps to the visitors they welcomed that day.
I was blessed by that recent memory today, as I meditated on the parable we hear in this week’s gospel passage. Jesus teaches us about the Kingdom of God … by telling a tale of obliviousness: the rich man who failed to perceive the plight of Lazarus, lying naked and wounded just outside his door.
The rich man “dressed in purple garments and fine linen,” I noticed. And I wondered if the dude had ever considered exactly how that fine linen had come to be in his possession.
I suspect not. I’m guessing he was a lot like me – pretty much taking all that linen and flax and tedious work for granted, as something like my birthright.
But it’s not a birthright, is it? If I take a moment to “face the flax,” I come to see that linen, like every good thing in my life, is a gift … a blessing that comes to me from the hard and ingenious work of many hands, people I may never meet.
And we are, all of us – rich and poor alike – the children of God. We move and live and breathe under the sovereignty of Christ Jesus. He is, as St. Paul reminds us “King of kings and Lord of lords, [the One] who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light…To him be honor and eternal power. Amen.”
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 