Saturday, March 21, 2009
'Smirchy and holy is all one'
Human beans being rhythmic critters, highs and lows are ever present -- in loves, likes, passions, thoughts, habits and faiths.
The experience of living in time, the more of it you get under your belt, tends to stretch the present, lifting up those lows and hauling down those highs, flattening the extremes of the experience of life.
So it seems to me. Time beng relative, some people get it, and this, quicker than others: "Life is Grace," as Frederick Buechner put it.
"Smitchy and holy is all one ... "
xxxxx
It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they’d slaughtered for it the day before. I’d been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle.
We poured water on the carcass and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs, hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms.
They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped round its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us.
Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops -- we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath’s leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn’t so much as know my name then.
“It’s a smirchy sort of business you’re at with that pig, some would say,” she said. “There’s many a monkish boy either he’d beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it’s neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That’s the deep truth of things too no matter or not if you know it.”
Ita’s eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.
“Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear,” she said. “I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you’ve learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land.”
-- from Brendan, by Frederick Buechner; also the March 20 reading in Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner.
--ER
The experience of living in time, the more of it you get under your belt, tends to stretch the present, lifting up those lows and hauling down those highs, flattening the extremes of the experience of life.
So it seems to me. Time beng relative, some people get it, and this, quicker than others: "Life is Grace," as Frederick Buechner put it.
"Smitchy and holy is all one ... "
xxxxx
It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they’d slaughtered for it the day before. I’d been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle.
We poured water on the carcass and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs, hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms.
They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped round its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us.
Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops -- we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath’s leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn’t so much as know my name then.
“It’s a smirchy sort of business you’re at with that pig, some would say,” she said. “There’s many a monkish boy either he’d beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it’s neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That’s the deep truth of things too no matter or not if you know it.”
Ita’s eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.
“Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear,” she said. “I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you’ve learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land.”
-- from Brendan, by Frederick Buechner; also the March 20 reading in Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner.
--ER
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Yup. James Joyce wrote about it, and people called him obscene. Whether it's slaughtering a pig, daydreaming about sex with someone you love, passing gas, or whatever, each moment is revelatory if you are open to the Spirit.
Searching for something that's as close as breath always leaves one exhausted and frustrated. The mountains and laid low and the valleys lifted up, making a highway for our God.
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Searching for something that's as close as breath always leaves one exhausted and frustrated. The mountains and laid low and the valleys lifted up, making a highway for our God.
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