Underwear

(Now that I have your attention . . .)

Okay, I have to be honest. After reading and listening to the First Reading from Jeremiah today, I don't think that I can look at underwear the same way.

"What are you talking about, Frob?", you may be asking.

Clinging.

Specifically, clinging to God.

Our First Reading for the Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time was Jeremiah 13:1-11. It reads:

 The LORD said to me: Go buy yourself a linen loincloth;
wear it on your loins, but do not put it in water.
I bought the loincloth, as the LORD commanded, and put it on.
A second time the word of the LORD came to me thus:
Take the loincloth which you bought and are wearing,
and go now to the Parath;
there hide it in a cleft of the rock.
Obedient to the LORD’s command, I went to the Parath
and buried the loincloth.
After a long interval, the LORD said to me:
Go now to the Parath and fetch the loincloth
which I told you to hide there.
Again I went to the Parath, sought out and took the loincloth
from the place where I had hid it.
But it was rotted, good for nothing!
Then the message came to me from the LORD:
Thus says the LORD:
So also I will allow the pride of Judah to rot,
the great pride of Jerusalem.
This wicked people who refuse to obey my words,
who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts,
and follow strange gods to serve and adore them,
shall be like this loincloth which is good for nothing.
For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty.
But they did not listen.


The Lord wants us to cling to Him, just as tightly and intimately (and even as awkwardly at times) as our underwear clings to us. In all the moments of our lives, the Lord draws us tightly to Himself; He holds us, without giving to the thought of letting us go. We may struggle against Him. We may try to wiggle ourselves out of His grasp. We may even try to play dead like a possum so that He'll loosen His grip. But, ultimately, the response is, "Nope. Ain't goin' to happen. I have you, and you are Mine." It's up to us to choose to hold as tight to the Lord as He holds on to us. It's a choice that we have make daily. It's like making sure our underwear fits right - if we gain weight, the underwear will cling to us in ways that are extremely uncomfortable; if we lose weight, our underwear will just fall right off of us. If we want it to cling to us the right way, we need to make sure it fits just right. (Know your size!)

Also, we know that we use our underwear to protect those most intimate parts of our body. God wants to protect our most intimate part - our heart. Just as hides those items on our bodies which make us most vulnerable, the Lord reminds us that the most vulnerable spot for us is the human heart, for that is where we process all the relationships and encounters of our lives, be it with family, friends, strangers, enemies, or God. The intimacy that we share with God - and, by extension, our human family - is something that we should cling to, for it is through our heart that we come to understand, appreciate, and live out our vulnerability. We cling to our God because He wants to protect us when and where we are most vulnerable - and that is the place where we encounter Him most intimately.

Yet, it's important to acknowledge that sometimes our underwear clings to us in an awkward state. And so do we with God. Face it: humanity is awkward. Yet, wearing underwear is awkward at times. It rides up on you. It gives you a wedgie. It inches its way too far up or too far low. And yet, do we not do the same with God? We, at times, cling to Him in a most awkward fashion, trying to remind Him that we're there. Yet there's never a reason to be awkward with God: He knows we're there . . . we know He's here. Yet our humanity, our living out our lives in the flesh, is awkward. Yet God never sees us - or our clinging to Him - as awkward. He sees us as trying to live our lives as faithfully as we can. The awkwardness comes in when we mess up, when we sin . . . and then that awkward feeling develops on our end. It's never awkward for God. And, honestly, if we're trying to cling to Him through our struggles to be faithful to Him, it should never be awkward for us.

Yep . . . I bet that you'll never look at your underwear in quite the same way the next time you're choosing a pair to wear or doing the laundry. But the key is that, if we want to keep our underwear from clinging to us in that awkward fashion, if we want our underwear to protect those intimate and vulnerable areas of our body, if we want it to fit us the right way and cling to us, then we are in need of making sure that we take care of our underwear. The same with our relationship with God. We never want to be found feeling awkward before the Lord; we never want to have those intimate and vulnerable areas of our hearts going unprotected; we never want to be found thinking that God is too big or too small for us to cling to. We need to be attentive to our relationship with God. We need to recognize that we can't let go of our grasp on God - even though He will never let go of us.

God simply wants us to cling to Him.

No. Matter. What.



Go ahead - trying going through the rest of your day ignoring your underwear. I bet it'll be a little more difficult now.

And awkward.



But that's okay.











Enjoy the journey . . .