The Washing Machine

Email delivered this today, Monday, March 23, 2009, sent from a conspiring friend:

"Osservatore Romano ran this statement from the Vatican concerning women and the washing machine:

'As International Women's Day was celebrated, the Vatican suggested women of the world give thanks for the washing machine; this humble domestic appliance had done more for the women's liberation movement than the contraceptive pill or working outside the home.' "

Interested, but cautious as only a Roman Catholicized octogenarian is hierarchically allowed to be, I beseeched the sender for a reference, a citation as it were, even, heaven forbid, a URL. He sent this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vatican-the-washing-machine-liberated-women-1640134.html

Surfing towards it, the screen displayed what looked like a sleazy left-winger rag of dribble, malarkey, heresy, atheism. And it was anti-clerical, anti-hierarchical, anti-Curial. Anti-Roman Catholic, too.

Undaunted, relentless as a research scholar, interested solely in seeking truth as an impartial, dedicated, professional attorney (used to be) and persistently loyal as a Jesuit (former, a/k/a used to be) and impervious, too, I stuck with it.

I turned to old faithful, the reliable source of all knowledge, GOOGLE. Got an instant reply of the first page of 33 pages with 334 entries referencing 7,470 items since March 9, 2009, from the simple search, typed with tremulous fingers: "Osservatore Romano woman washing machine." That blurb was picked up by reputable news services and newspapers all over the world, hushed as it were before a revelation and then exploding with the fervor and joy that only good news - gospels -- can evoke.

Google stunned me with that first page of references and showed the world-wide reaction to L'Osservatore Romano's discovery of The Washing Machine as Liberator. The websites bespoke their owners: Great Britain, Europe, International news services. Amazing how truth spreads so far and wide and quickly, once spoken infallibly by great minds. A lot of us had thought and thought about women being free, but it took the Jesuits and that one-liner in L'Osservatore Romano to get the word out. Within moments, the news spread around and around the whole wide world. My friend who sent the email -- and I who got turned on by it -- got the good news on Monday, this very week.

IT IS SO!

The Jesuits said so.

Aghast and wondrous at this display of unmitigated wisdom by Rome, I have gone silent, awed before the mystery of The Washing Machine. We romantic Romanizers are now endowed with insight and wisdom and loving kindness, not merely by faith but by knowledge certain and, lately, revealed -- It is so! Rome has spoken. Infallibly spoken.

As struggling and roaming Roman Catholics, we may now take that daring, brazen, courageous, unwavering, blind leap beyond reason, far beyond even science itself. We grew up as infants balmed with chrism and oil, passed on over through endless Sundays of catechism memory sessions, then into the tender years of teens, blossoming at last as full grown adults. We had been laved in the millennial old base of the one irrefutable, self-evident Primitive Principle: Roma locuta, causa finita - Rome has spoken, the cause is finished. At 21, we had that one absolute grasp on Truth: Rome speaks.

And now, in our withering, twittering years, it has been revealed to us, not only as blessed by Rome, but as redacted by the Jesuits themselves, that The Washing Machine set our women free, unbeknownst to them or us. There is now an unconditional privilege in all our dealings with the descendants of the woman who first offered her man an apple in a garden, to graduate from the Primitive Principle, the source of all our knowledge thus far. We now take the leap, brazenly and with sure faith, up and into the ultimate and revelatory First Irreducible Principle: Deus ex machina - God from a machine. The Washing Machine.

I saw my mother, 70 years ago, in the cellar of our Shanty Irish townhouse, pulling, tugging soggy, dripping sheets and underwear and T-shirts and girly things, with dozens of socks, that used to be white, out from within the great gasping tub of that machine. She shoved a dripping bunch into the jaws of the wringer, and, winding that big handle round and round, she had no idea at all that she was about to be liberated.

Lunging into the back yard, lugging a basket of wrung yet wet clothes, soon to be worn by her loving family, she clothes-pinned each wrinkled hunk of limp cloth to the ropes Dad had strung across the yard from house to trees, like telephone cables sagging between poles. The drying process could begin. Mother trudged away, with not one single tinge of an idea in her worn out mind and heart that she had just been set free.

She was too focused on her next task, shoveling coal from the coal-bin to the stalwart furnace chugging away as it had for the past 100 years, remembering to fill the black coal bucket smiling up at her with its big spout, looking for enough nuggets to keep our kitchen stove ready for cooking supper when the afternoon wore on and the clothes out in the yard, bathed in sun and whipped in wind, got fresher and frisked in the afternoon breezes.

Though freed, Mom didn't know that later and within her own life span, The Washing Machine would evolve. It would go wringerless, spin dry, and be operated with push buttons that sent out mysterious commands to a sturdy box of a machine powered by electricity. Dryers, too, would shun the sun, come indoors and hug electricity. Freedom has a such a way about it, even then, that she went upstairs to the parlor and sat on the sofa for a while, dreaming about being free.

Closing my eyes on this reverie I fancied Doctor Martin Luther King, standing tall on a floating cloud, arms open to embrace womankind herself in all her beauty, beaming down on us, orating, "I have been to the laundry room. Alleluia."

Lovers of women, and all women, too, rejoice. Let the song of your hearts be heard. Woman has already been liberated. By The Washing Machine! She is free. Free, at last! Give thanks.

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ROMA LOCUTA.

DEUS EX MACHINA.

CAUSA FINITA.

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