Today someone put a chapel veil in my mailbox. It had my name on it (misspelled, but only slightly), a holy card of St. Catherine of Sienna, and nothing else. My housemate who is also a young woman and a parishioner did not receive one, at least not that she mentioned. She's not super communicative, though, so it would not be shocking for her to listen to my fount-of-off-the-cuff-information-on-chapel-veils and speculation as to the mysterious donor without volunteering that she also received one. The chapel veil itself is pretty. It is white and about large enough to wrap a midget in. I like to think that the beauty of my "long luscious hair" (quote from a New York subway story that is percolating through the blog filter) prompted the gift. Someday I'll have to comb the men out of my hair, but for now the residents love playing with it.
But this brings me to the bigger problem of chapel veils. St. Paul says "That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels." (1. Cor. 11:10). Now, not to be disrespectful, but if St. Paul were my student, the paper would be returned to him marked "unclear causal link." The preceding verses explain that man prays with an uncovered head because he is the glory of God, woman with a covered head because she is the glory of man. The angels thing was evidently the ace up his sleeve. I don't mind covering my head for the sake of the angels, I'd just like to have an idea of how they got tangled up in the God-man-woman thing.
I might go ahead and wear it. I've thought about it before, but haven't carried through and parted with actual cash money for the thing. Someone in college also said that you shouldn't wear a chapel veil if it would be a distraction to others, but I'm starting to feel like the others need to take some responsibility for their own distractions. This reminds me of another story caught up in the blog filter, about the phlegmy man who sat behind me and spent all of Mass trying to clear his airways. He had an ingenious two-step process in which the mucous was torn from its foundations by being alternately sucked in and blown out (but apparently never removed from his system). Over and over again I found myself marveling that any woman was willing to countenance such noises, especially since a production like that while upright bodes ill for the nocturnal experience. Then my sinfulness (for having such thoughts in Mass) would smack me in the face, and I would pray fervently to the Divine Mercy until the phlegm was shaken from its home again, when it all started over. All in all, I reflected as I left the church, it was a pretty successful prayer experience.
