I was vacuuming the house this morning and came across something that has made more than one person upset — a prayer book and prayer shawl (in a decorative bag) on the floor.

Understand that this is a room without any furniture. No desk. No shelves. No end table from Pier 1. Oh, there is a meditation cushion and an old Mexican chair that doesn’t fit anywhere else in the house. When we’re giving people a tour of the house, we call it “the meditation room,” but we mostly use it for trapping the cats so we can shove them into their carriers when they have to go to the vet.

My point is, there’s pretty much nowhere but the floor for anything.

So, back to the upset people.

They see the prayer book and shawl on the floor and I see them shudder. Rarely do they say anything, but you know the thought: “Those are sacred objects; you don’t put them on the floor!”

I’ve heard this thought said out loud in dozens of places, regarding objects from every religion. Certain collections of ink and paper, certain weaves of fabric, certain metal or clay forms are somehow magic and putting them on the floor seems to contaminate them.

Some may argue that it’s not the floor, per se, that’s the issue. The point of treating these magic items well is to show respect or bring awareness to your actions. That’s a fine argument except for the fact that each religion has a way of dealing with the items if they touch the ground — they must be re-sanctified, kissed, blessed, smudged, chanted over, or sometimes burned.

Look at the math on this one: Somehow these man-made, magical items are polluted by touching THE EARTH.

I’ll tell you, if I were going to be a member of a group that had magic items, I’d want the items to be SO MAGICAL that they can’t be polluted, that they sanctify whatever horrible thing they touch.

In fact, if I were the guy who came up with the idea of magic items, I would build in the idea that the highest action one could take would be to place the magic items on every evil, horrible, or just messy thing you could find… and then come and buy more magic items at my new website, www.amazing-magical-clothing.com where, by the way, you can get a discount for buying in volume.

I think one of the most incredible pieces of magic clothing I’ve ever seen was a prayer shawl (I won’t say from what religion, because it could be almost any of them), that in addition to having instructions for what to do if the magic clothing touched the ground, also had instructions saying, “Dry Clean Only.”

Remember, ground = dirty; perchloroethylene = holy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Gurus, Spiritual Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.