The parable of the bar of soap

What can be said about a bar of soap and our faith and relation to the world around us?

Claudio Oliver has spent 20 years working with the urban poor, and on community development, dental and medical projects, team equipping, and teaching in Curitiba, Brazil.

He shares just a few of the reflections one small bar of soap can spark — spiritual, sociologic, entropologic and ecologic.

(Some of you may remember Claudio Oliver from another video we watched last year during our Sunday morning gathering.)

From Ooze.TV and the TransFORM Network…

“All this got started because we were talking about holiness.”

Claudio shares the problem of used oil being poured down drains, where it goes on to pollute the community’s water. The center of community at his church has been collecting used oil from homes and small businesses in the neighborhood and using it to make soap, which is then wrapped in recycled newspaper and sold. Claudio uses this soap instead of commercially-made soap for all his washing needs—dishes, clothes, body—an example of how something that would have caused damage to nature is remade into something useful. He also gives a tour of his recycling barrels that store glass, plastic, paper, and other materials that come from people’s garbage. Two families come weekly to collect the garbage and from it are bettering their lives. One family has moved from being homeless, to the slums, to a poor neighborhood—all starting with the garbage collected at Claudio’s center of community.

But back to holiness: to be holy is to be used for a specific purpose. Oil, when it starts out, is used for a specific purpose—to cook food. But once it is used, it is damaged and it doesn’t matter what you do with it—put it in the sink, put it somewhere else—it’s going to cause problems in the nature around it. But if you clean the oil, mix it with caustic soda, and pass it through fire, it is transformed and can be used without damage. This, says Claudio, is a reflection of the Jesus-process in our lives. There is an outside intervention that cleans, and not only cleans but changes our nature, transforms us. You can’t change the soap back into oil, and similarly we are permanently transformed from something that causes problems to people and the world around us into something that can be used without damage. And so, cooking oil and soap are the modern-day metaphors for redemption in Claudio’s world . . . and possibly ours. To find out more about Claudio’s community, visit his website www.docaminho.com.br.

What have other day-to-day objects taught you about holiness? What other lessons can we learn from a bar of soap?