From a great blog I stumbled upon named Lessons from a Monastery, a post on cleaning holy objects.
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Here’s a tip I consider to be very important that I picked up from the monastery the first time I cleaned with them.
The sisters use four different cleaning clothes when dusting the various pictures, icons, and objects in their monastery. For all the (for lack of a better word) secular things in the monastery they use a wet wettex to dust and a dry cloth to dry. However, for all the icons, censors, anything like that, a separate wettex is used and another dry cloth as well. The basic principle being, “holy things are for the holy”.
They simply write an “E” (for eikona - icon) on the cloths for holy things so they don’t get them mixed up. I prefer to always use a different colour wettex, pink for holy objects, blue for regular ones. Once the wettex/ cloths for icons, etc. have become too tattered to use the sisters burn theirs (we’ll discuss this in another post). I have just thrown mine out in the past.
(As a funny aside, I always assumed the word wettex started with a “v” because the “w” sound is not natural to Greek-speakers, and so the sisters always said it with a “v” sound. I was looking to buy them at the grocery store once and when I saw how the name was spelled, I laughed out loud. Living in Greece my pronunciation is subject to correction by everyone: taxi drivers, old yiayias, the guy at the kiosk, and even my friend’s toddler – who at the age of three loved correcting my Greek. Needless to say, perhaps I took a little more delight in the mispronounced “w” than a normal person would.)
Hope you enjoy the tip!
The sisters use four different cleaning clothes when dusting the various pictures, icons, and objects in their monastery. For all the (for lack of a better word) secular things in the monastery they use a wet wettex to dust and a dry cloth to dry. However, for all the icons, censors, anything like that, a separate wettex is used and another dry cloth as well. The basic principle being, “holy things are for the holy”.
They simply write an “E” (for eikona - icon) on the cloths for holy things so they don’t get them mixed up. I prefer to always use a different colour wettex, pink for holy objects, blue for regular ones. Once the wettex/ cloths for icons, etc. have become too tattered to use the sisters burn theirs (we’ll discuss this in another post). I have just thrown mine out in the past.
(As a funny aside, I always assumed the word wettex started with a “v” because the “w” sound is not natural to Greek-speakers, and so the sisters always said it with a “v” sound. I was looking to buy them at the grocery store once and when I saw how the name was spelled, I laughed out loud. Living in Greece my pronunciation is subject to correction by everyone: taxi drivers, old yiayias, the guy at the kiosk, and even my friend’s toddler – who at the age of three loved correcting my Greek. Needless to say, perhaps I took a little more delight in the mispronounced “w” than a normal person would.)
Hope you enjoy the tip!
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