Comprobatio (com-pro-ba’-ti-o): Approving and commending a virtue, especially in the hearers.
It was time to celebrate our bath-rite. We gathered to hear the annual celebratory speech by the Filthy Hermit. We took a bath once a tear to celebrate out cult’s ability to stand together when we all stank—from feces to cod-liver oil, which we drank by the quart to keep our vitamin D deficiency in check. We piled our clothing in a pile, took a group bath in the Big Lagoon, and burned our clothing and went naked to Salvation Army for new clothing. Our public nudity was tolerated because we lived in a a Nordic country where tolerance is a key virtue. As long as we were hasty in picking out and putting on our fresh clothing we were tolerated.
Once dressed we would parade trough the city streets, back to the field and the smoking embers of our former clothes, symbolizing our rebirth as “clean” people which would last about a month as our garments began their evolution into filth and the clean/dirty cycle would complete itself after a year’s wear.
Duly assembled we waited for Filthy Hermit’s speech from the sacred mound—a pile of refuse over 1,000 years old. Filthy Hermit never bathed. He had a ring of dirt around neck and the single rag he wore to conceal his penis was covered with lichen and saturated by some king of scum that smelled like rancid animal fat.
The Filthy Hermit spoke:
“I commend you cleanly clothed compatriots. You have bone the filth of the world to arrive here as a faithful mass—a beautiful mass of faithful suppliants seeking well-earned praise as you leave today to begin your dirty pilgrimage from here and back again next year, nobly ye shall walk in the footprints of our forebears. Ye shall go forth and wallow in the filth of the word. You are deserving of my blessing. I bless thee one and all. Amen”
We all felt blessed. We all had survived another year. We rejoiced as we headed home, crawling in the dirt, rolling in dog poop, sticking our heads in trash cans, stopping for a burger and dripping grease and ketchup on our garments . . .
