When I was a young boy, my parents told me about their wedding. Then a few years later, they showed me my mother’s wedding dress and my dad’s suit. It was astonishing to see and touch garments that connected me to the event that led to my existence. Of course, I already believed they were married based on their word. But these holy garments made the event real and tangible for me.
Something like this is at play when St. John reports encountering in Jesus’ tomb, “the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place” (John 20:7). Those two separate cloths, for his head and for his body respectively, meant a great deal to St. John and to the early Christians. Some years after the resurrection, there surfaced reports of two cloths with unusual characteristics, one bearing the image of a crucified man’s body, another smaller one with the image of a wounded man’s face. Some call them the Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Manoppello; they both can be seen today.
These two cloths have a long and complicated history, and scholars debate aspects of them. If you’re curious, I encourage you to read about them. To be clear, I believe in the resurrection of Jesus because of the testimony of eyewitnesses and the gift of faith in the Church. Nevertheless, seeing these two mysterious cloths have made the life-giving event of Jesus’ resurrection more real and tangible for me. Maybe they will for you, too.
— Father John Muir ©LPi
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