Shelter for the Spirit by Victoria Moran

Author:Victoria Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

How to Clean Like Brother Lawrence

With natural cleansers and cotton cloths, a little music and a lighthearted view of the assignment, cleaning your house can be a joy. With the right frame of mind, it can take you all the way to blissful. Bliss isn’t exactly synonymous with happiness. We’re usually happy because of some outside event: “He called!” “We won!” “I’m invited!” Bliss is more an understated, nonstop happiness for no reason at all. People experience this when they are in touch with the divine essence that runs throughout all creation. In simple chores around the house, the body is occupied so the mind is free to drift toward bliss.

This is how Brother Lawrence became so content in his menial tasks: He learned to see God in each one. For him, each act of everyday life was a means of “practicing the presence of God.” We practice this presence—which is always with us and which can go by any name we wish to give it—by temporarily letting go of the personal ego to embrace something all-encompassing. We can do this in many ways. Among them are meditation, creativity, and cleaning the basement. I have a suspicion that Brother Lawrence cleaned rather like children do. (I don’t think that’s an insult to Brother Lawrence: Jesus himself said that becoming like a child is indispensable for entering the kingdom of heaven.)

When children in Montessori preschools are allowed to choose the area in which they’ll work, the most popular is invariably “practical life”—comprised largely of cleaning activities. The children relish the process and see only good results. The streaks and missed places are invisible to them. They enjoy the activity and they pronounce the results good. We, too, can enjoy cleaning and pronounce the results good enough.

You can do an experiment to see how this works. Try it first with some household chore that you like—or at least one that you don’t despise. For some people, this is washing dishes, for others sweeping or mopping, dusting furniture or polishing silver. For me, it’s ironing. Ironing is calming to me, and I love seeing a wrinkly mass become a wearable garment.

Whatever task you choose, decide that during this particular time of doing it, you are going to focus on the process of transformation that you’re engaged in. I realize it’s a stretch. We don’t often think of scouring a pot as transformative, but it is. It’s a kind of restoration. Admittedly, this isn’t restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but it is restoring a pot back to the way its designer envisioned it, back to beauty and usefulness.

For the sake of experiment, allow yourself to scrub this pot or polish this table as pure experience. Be with the cloth. Be with the object being cleaned. Allow yourself to experience feelings of lightheartedness, freedom, gratitude, and unity. You may have these feelings and you may not. Just don’t keep them away intentionally by telling yourself, “This is cleaning and cleaning stinks.”

Be sure to give yourself a time limit—thirty minutes is good.

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