Of dry cleaning, a transcendalist and baptism...
I hope I'm not the only one who has this experience - but isn't there something great about picking up your dry cleaning? No matter how difficult the day has been, if I get to stop by Village Cleaners and pick up my shirts and pants and sweaters - the day gets better right away!
It has something to do with new beginnings. Dry cleaning, returned on hangers or in shirt boxes, makes garments seem new again: clean, starched (medium, please!) and pressed just right. What I dropped off as soiled and wrinkled comes back neat and clean.
Given my work and the season at hand, my imagination wanders from the dry cleaners to images of Easter clothes and neophytes clothed in the white garments of their baptism: outward signs of their new life, birth and dignity through dying and rising with Christ in the waters of the font. The baptismal robe constitutes the original Easter clothes. It's said that the custom of buying new outfits for Easter comes from clothing new Christians at the Easter Vigil.
I remember getting new clothes for Easter when I was a child and can still spot children with new clothes on Easter Sunday morning - alongside adults in their newly dry-cleaned Sunday best.
A writer who's pretty well known around these Concord parts had some interesting things to say about new clothes:
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet -- if a hero ever has a valet -- bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirees and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes -- his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.(Please forgive Thoreau for being born before the age of gender neutral language -- and me for leaving him in his unedited state.)
-Henry David Thoreau in Walden
He makes some very fine points here but I'm particularly taken by the lines:
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?Unwittingly, Thoreau's message here fits well with the baptismal imagery above. Unless the sacramental dying and rising births a new woman, a new man in Christ, the garments are little more than drop cloths covering old furniture. Beware indeed the enterprise of baptism for it calls to a new life infinitely more gracious and deeply more demanding than the life left behind. (And for the already baptized: beware renewing the promises of baptism at Easter!)
Well, I seem to have left Village Cleaners and made my way to the baptismal font via Walden Pond -- all of which I can actually accomplish here in Concord in a 10 minute drive! But this isn't a tour of historic Concord. These are simply the meanderings of a pastor who knows, among greater joys, the peace that comes of picking up his dry cleaning.
You know what? I'm going to go out and buy a new shirt for Easter! How about some Easter clothes for you?
-ConcordPastor
Concordpastor, Henry's words on new clothing are my favorite among his musings, because I hate having to buy new clothes, considering the old ones to be good enough as long as they are clean, not truly ragged, and still fit!
ReplyDeleteHowever, you and he both have excellent comments on new personhood, whether spiritual or secular. I believe you would enjoy each other's company, as long as you could keep him to the point. I think he did ramble orally much more than in writing.
He would get you outdoors more, though -
I hope my wife doesnt read this, she use anything for an excuse to buy clothes!
ReplyDeleteIve always likes these two:
Do you reject the glamor of evil and refuse to be mastered by sin?
Do you reject Satan, and all his works and empty promises?
Years ago, I was secretary for an accountant. He and his wife and I were about the same age and were friends. One day rather than his usual attire of 2-piece or 3-piece suit he was seated at his desk in shirtsleeves and suspenders and his bow tie. He always wore a bow tie. He said, "please don't tell, Barbie. She only irons the part of my shirts that show when I have on my jacket." It struck me as so funny. But even funnier was that they could well afford to take the shirts to the dry cleaner. I think there was a bit of a Yankee streak coming into play. I don't know what Henry David's take on this would be, but I have a feeling he would have approved!
ReplyDelete