Every day a baptism

Father Martin Leopold has been the most impactful religious teacher I have ever had the pleasure of learning from. His ability to straddle ancient teachings and modern world, reality and divinity is truly unparalleled and more importantly, enables a layman like myself to feel comfortable with approaching the Word.

In one of his most moving homilies, Father Martin quoted a few passages from a book by Tony Woodlief called Somewhere More Holy. I encourage you to read it…

“Perhaps more than any other room in the house, the bathroom reflects the filth and chaos as well as the occasional beauty of who we are.

Our children still love in a world where mortification doesn’t exist, and where it makes perfect sense to do whatever is necessary to get within touching distance of someone you love. They are like God in that way. I wonder, if we were as unrestrained in our search for God, if we might not find him sometimes, right here with us, where he has been all along.

It is fitting that we come here to cry and pray, because the bathroom is where we are ugliest and our most beautiful…What better place to pray to our maker than in this room of mirrors and water, where we are simultaneously more and less than we let other people see, which is to say our true selves?

It’s far better to come to God on the toilet, I think, in that state of profound humiliation, than puffed up and self-righteous in the front pew of our insular, lily-white, upper-class church, I like to think that God is less offended by the former than the latter. I need to believe that he sees all of these stories played out in our bathroom, and that he loves us in spite of, because of, what we are.”