Red Satin Sheets
SOMETIMES I FANTASIZE about being Catholic. I don’t understand much about Catholic theology, but I love the mystique that shrouds their traditions—the flickering candles, the rosary beads, and the Gregorian chants. I also seem to have a natural affinity for sackcloth and ashes. Sacrifice and poverty don’t scare me. In fact, I bet I would make a great nun. I can just see myself in India, caring for orphaned children or healing lepers. My children would say that I already indulge that nun fantasy too often, with a sometimes-quirky insistence on frugal living and hard work.
Fortunately, the man I married could have been a monk. Well, except for that celibacy business. We do have five children. But otherwise we’ve got the sacrifice and poverty thing down pat. We’re usually in agreement about important issues like eating beans, drinking powdered milk, and cutting our own wood to heat the house. So you can understand my surprise when he called me from work the other day.
“Ang? I stopped at ShopKo on my way to town. They had sheets on clearance for $20, so I got some.”
“Great.” I love economizing.
“The only thing is, they’re red.”
“Red?”
“Red satin.”
Silence as I try to absorb this.
“They were on sale.”
There’s nothing like logic to put a kink in illogical self-denial. How could I do something as frivolous and self-indulgent as sleep on red satin sheets? But wouldn’t it be equally frivolous to return them and spend three times as much for cotton? I was stuck between guilt and a soft, silky place. Finally, I relented. I would make the sacrifice. Red satin sheets it would be.
Of course, the complication with being Mormon is that deep down I believe (as I suspect many Catholics also do) that God doesn’t care what kind of sheets I have. In fact, to the extent that they encourage procreation, He probably likes red satin sheets. After all, isn’t it all about building the family?
Yet despite those occasional moments of clarity, I still wish that all I had to do to live a righteous life was to avoid fancy red sheets. That would be clear and relatively simple for me to accomplish. I like giving what I’m already good at giving—making easy sacrifices that don’t require me to stretch or grow. Instead, I have covenanted to give all that I have, all that I am, and all that I may receive or may become to Him. That’s a tall order. Especially the part about what I may become.
Take that business about building the family. I’m finding that God’s view of what that phrase entails is far broader than mine. When Don and I felt prompted to move back to our hometown a few years ago, we hoped that we could have a positive influence on our less-active family members. We also benefited from a discrepancy in real estate prices. When the home we planned to purchase fell through, we were able to quickly make an offer on one of the few other properties on the market—a home twice the size of our previous house. It still feels like a mansion to our family, and therein lies the problem. What are a nun and a monk doing in a mansion, anyway? For nearly a year the guilt tormented us. We kept trying to downsize to something simpler, but the opportunity was never right. And then one day the answer came to me. You are exactly where you are supposed to be.
What? How could that be?
Then I thought about what we have been doing in the time we have lived here. Making another baby, for one thing. But that’s one of those things that I seem to be good at. We have also been hosting lots and lots of extended family in our big house. And despite intentions that were sincere enough to transplant me to this new state, I’m not good at hosting at all.
Austerity and hospitality don’t mesh well. The last time I invited family for dinner I lamented to Don, “I don’t know what to cook. They don’t like anything we usually eat.”
He replied, “No one does.”
He’s right. And even though I understand, at least in theory, that the best way to love my extended family is sometimes to give in and buy a bag of potato chips, I still struggle with the call to step beyond my own habits and prejudices, to love and serve others according to their needs and the direction of the Spirit rather than my own preferences.
One of those preferences is for privacy. Don has fantasized about homesteading in Alaska for years. I don’t like the cold, so I fantasize about a deserted tropical island. Either way, we are both hermits at heart. Here, in the epicenter of both our extended families, in a house with lots of room for guests, we are being asked to become something more than that, and to sacrifice in a different way than we would naturally choose.
I felt both the strain and the blessings of that call recently at my daughter’s baptism. We invited my mother-in-law. She invited the rest of the family, and from a distance, at least, I was thrilled that they could all come. Then my mother-in-law arrived a week early, eager to help. She purchased and prepared large quantities of food for the other guests. She also rewashed the windows I had just cleaned, took down my light fixtures to check for dead bugs, cleaned out all my garbage cans with bleach, and scrubbed the charcoal finish off the brick wall on one side of the kitchen. I had to admire her work ethic, but it made me crazy all the same. We martyrs like to be appreciated, and in addition to infringing on my personal space, her well-intentioned efforts felt like criticism. After all, who thinks about whether there are bugs in Mother Teresa’s light fixtures?
Then there was the rest of the family. We had an ongoing party for almost a week. On the peak night we had between twenty and thirty overnight guests. I stopped counting. We also had over fifty people at our house for dinner the night of the baptism. It was a regular family reunion, plus some extra tag-a-longs I’d never seen before. The night before the baptism I went outside to check on a basketball game in my driveway and overheard a couple of kids talking.
“So, do you live here?”
“No, do you?”
It was all enough to make me wish for a monastery. And I can’t even say that I was much of a hostess. Mostly I tried to stay out of the way. But I’m finding that sometimes serving God is exactly that—pulling my ego out of His way so that He can work through me.
Among our many overnight guests for the baptism was Don’s nonmember cousin and his family, whom we had seen only once in the previous ten years. Don’s aunt confided that they made the trip from another state because her son wanted to feel the same feeling he had had during that other visit, when Don had given him a blessing. And that same cousin went home and began to meet with the missionaries. As challenging as the whole experience was for me, being part of their miracle was a blessing worth growing into.
So, in the interest of stretching beyond our usual comfort zone, Don and I decided to try out the new $20 red satin sheets. Don didn’t like them. After the first night he dug out an old cotton pillowcase for his side of the bed. But in deference to me, he kept the sheets.
I quite like them. They’re luxurious. They make me feel decadent. In fact, just knowing that they are there gives me a rush. The sheets are probably even comfortable. It’s hard to say, since this time of year I sleep encased in head-to-toe flannel. I have to. The house gets pretty cold once the fire burns out.
