The Soap in the Bathroom

One of the most enduring memories of the church of my adolescence was the soap in the basement women's bathroom. We were active members of a downtown United Methodist congregation with a ground floor, second floor and basement.

In the basement was the kitchen and fellowship hall as well as the office of the director of Christian education, so that my sisters and I spent a fair amount of time there each Sunday evening, having supper before going upstairs for Methodist Youth Fellowship. 

The bathrooms downstairs probably got less traffic than the ground-floor bathrooms, and whenever I needed to wash my hands, there would be the bar of soap in the dish, invariably with deep grooves in it. It would be a while before I worked out that soap that dries out thoroughly between uses develops those grooves. The church I now serve has a container of liquid soap in the bathroom along with a small bar of soap in a dish. I make a point of using the bar soap, mostly out of nostalgia for the church basement women's room. 

To be fair, that church helped shape the core of my faith life, my peers and all the guiding adults along the well-worn path that we were making for ourselves as we traveled it. Six years of MYF will leave an impression. But together with that core are the tactile basement memories, such as grabbing and swinging from the large pipes (only in spring and summer; not when the heat was on!); clustering awkwardly in adolescent groups; going through the line for supper; and, yes, the soap. 

In any bathroom, where bar soap is an option, I'll probably use it, each hand washing bringing me back more than 35 years to the basement and the soap, used infrequently enough to develop those grooves. "When you wash your face," Martin Luther counseled, "remember your baptism." When I wash my hands, I remember the church of my youth. Not the same thing, of course, but very real.

What would happen if each of us kept to a tactile memory as pedestrian as soap? I have talismans and trinkets and photographs, as most of us do. But I wash my hands multiple times a day, often in multiple locations. And each time, I'm back in the basement.