Uncommon holiness in ordinary people.

I am always awed when I come upon extraordinary holiness in ordinary folks. Today I saw an example of that in the man who has been cutting my hair for years!

Tom runs an ordinary little neighborhood beauty shop. It doesn’t look like anything special but it’s clean, well run and Tom can give me a great hair cut in under 30 minutes at a very reasonable price. It’s perfect! Of course now that I have been a regular client of Tom’s for well over five years I know quite a bit about him. It’s interesting what you can learn about someone when you just listen and let them talk.

So today we were talking about the time he combed Izzy’s hair out. Izzy, my eight year old HATES to brush her hair and during the summer when she was taking swimming lessons, the chlorine, sun and lack of hair brushing gave her a rather matted appearance. It took Tom a long time to get her hair combed before he could even think about trimming it!

But according to Tom, that was minor. Recently he received a call from a gentleman who wanted to bring his mother in for a wash and a set. She had recently been hospitalized and so the man told Tom that she would need “extra attention.” Tom booked her as his last client of the day and set aside 90 minutes. When the woman came in Tom was shocked. Apparently this lady had been working in her chicken coop when she suffered a stroke. Unable to call for help she lay on the floor of the chicken coop for a few days before her kids came to check on her. In the hospital the staff merely wrapped her head up. They didn’t wash it or even take any of the feathers out.

I’m an old farm girl. I know what a chicken coop floor is like with the chicken droppings and feathers. It’s smelly and dirty even in the most well-kept chicken house. And this poor helpless lady was laying in this filth with her hair getting all tangled and matted.

Tom told me that they ended up shampooing her twice. He took a crochet hook and carefully worked out all of the tiny feathers that clung stubbornly to each hair shaft. When he finally had most of those out he at least had enough hair free to cut out the matted hair and actually have something left to style and set! Tom thought that most likely if she had gone anywhere else they simply would have buzzed her hair very short. But after four hours Tom was able to have her looking somewhat like herself and feeling much better about her appearance.

I told Tom that I thought what he did for that lady was very comendable! And then I asked him if he ever did any funeral home work.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s really not that hard to do and if the deceased has been a client of mine for years, it gives me a chance to really say goodbye.”

In the Catholic Church, helping to bury the dead is a corporal work of mercy. Tom isn’t Catholic, but I have a hunch that the special work he does in funeral homes and the special work he does for his clients like the chicken coop lady will earn him special treasures in heaven one day.

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