Saint Hunna was nicknamed the “Holy Washerwoman”.
When I was very very young, I remember my mother washing the clothes by hand. She had a washing machine that would do part of the job, but she spent much of her life wringing out washing my hand and rinsing and soaking and washing things herself. Now, my father was an engineer, and was constantly looking at the ways that technology might have been able to improve my mother’s day-to-day activities. And the fact that my mother developed very severe dermatitis on the skin of her hands, which was aggravated by all that washing, gave my father even more incentive to invest in an automatic washing machine for the house and for my mother to use.
My maternal grandmother took even longer to invest in an automatic washing machine. Her laundry was positioned as a sort of outhouse-basement in her home, and she had an old twin tub, where the washing was washed on one side and she would manually rinse and squeeze out the clothes on the other side, using her hands.
My mother-in-law was even less lucky than that. Raising her family during the Lebanese civil war there were power outages and escapes from villages and fighting, and she did not even have the luxury of a washing machine at all. Instead, she did all the family’s washing by hand.
And I have been thinking about the different ways that these women washed clothes to care for their families. And I have been thinking about the way the Blessed Virgin did the same thing. There is such a humility in realising that a task that you are assigned is a task that the Queen of Heaven lovingly and perfectly engaged in.
And the Saints understood that which is why they lived such humble lives… Saint Hunna who died in the seventh century, was a French Saint who married a virtuous nobleman and together with him, opened their home to the poor. Saint Deodatus, who was a bishop, retired and lived in their home with this couple. While he lived with them, he instructed them and both Saint Hunna and her husband benefited from this religious instruction… Saint Hunna was so affected by this Saintly bishop who taught her, that she named her son after him. Her son then joined a monastery when he was older and was also canonised as a Saint. Saint Hunna continued working for the poor to the point of exhaustion, doing their washing and their mending and for this she was nicknamed the “Holy Washerwoman”. In 1520, after many many miracles were attributed to her, Pope Leo X canonized her.
And that Holy Washerwoman is an example to me – and an example to you too. You see, nothing was beneath her dignity, because she knew that nothing was beneath the dignity of the Blessed Virgin. And as a reward for her humility, God sanctified her and her son and allowed her the instruction of a Saint.
And when you stop and think about that today it seems such a wonder. Such a wonderful wonder…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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