Like Communion Wine: Natural Dye as Spiritual Practice

A ritual with a reclaimed white dress...

TW: religious trauma, abuse of various kinds, purity culture

Well, this would be perfect, I thought.

I was sorting through a rack of dresses at a pallet liquidation store. I had just stumbled upon a natural fiber dress that I loved.

But it was white. And I almost never wear white. That color is wildly impractical and holds a lot of baggage for me personally.

No, I had different plans for this white dress. (Plans that reminded me of the line about that white dress in EMELINE’s “cinderella’s dead.”)

For a long time, I had been looking for a dress like this to use as a canvas to experiment with natural dye. But which dye would I choose?

The answer came when I looked in the fridge at home.

Grape juice.

The same grape juice that replaced communion wine in my growing-up experience. The same liquid that had been used to weaponize Jesus’s body and blood against me.

It was time for a ritual of reclamation through creativity.

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There was something holy—something magical¹—happening as I prepared the dress for the dye, soaking it in a hot mixture of vinegar and water.

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Then, as I dunked and stirred the now-prepared dress in a warm pot of grape juice, I whispered ritual words—an incantation, a prayer for reclamation…for freedom from the past and liberation for the present and future.

I let the dress soak in the juice overnight.

The next day, as I rinsed the dress in cold water, I watched it transform from pink to purple to blue. (Grape juice is a color-changing indicator.)

The dress in its blue form.

A white dress plunged, stained, reborn in color—it was all deeply symbolic for me.

As a bi woman raised in purity culture, so much of my sexuality was demonized, repressed, hushed. I was to be “pure white”—virginal forever. My lack of sexual experience was used and upheld as an unholy metaphor in the racist, sexist, homophobic, colonizing system that is purity culture.

But I grew up…and generously spilled red stains (like communion wine) on that vision laid out for me, exposing the bloody abuse I both saw and experienced there…and bathing myself in the wine shared by Jesus, in the liberation found in his anti-empire life, death, and resurrection.

I was transformed, like that white-to-pink-to-blue dress. I too was bathed in a fiery pot of oppression, dying to the old lies of white fundamentalist evangelicalism, and raised to new life and new wine, free to express the multitudinous colors of my identity, all indicators of all that I am. I was also now free to rejoice in the multitudinous colors of the identities of my community, all indicators of the diversity of our wondrous planet. This allowed me to see a deeper meaning of communion: the Love I believe is holding us all up, connecting us and compelling us to work together for each other’s liberation, safety, and wholeness.

And so when I wear this dress, I remember how I used natural dyeing as a spiritual practice…as a ritual of my transformation and healing, as a wearable reclamation of the gift of communion.

Now I turn this open communion table to you, readers. When have you seen transformation/reclamation/healing through creativity?

In Wonder,

Kandi Zeller (she/her)

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Website: kandizeller.com

Instagram: @kandi.zeller

1. I love the definition of magick laid out in this article: “action taken to bring about internal transformation or external change”