My Lenten spiritual practice this year (which nicely coincided with spring cleaning) was to eliminate forty items from my house each of the forty days of Lent. That’s right. Sixteen hundred items! I found it embarrassingly easy! Cat toys, cottage cheese containers with no lids, emails, catalogues, and the list goes on. We are such collectors of stuff. Stuff comes in many forms: tangible stuff, digital stuff, emotional stuff, heart stuff, incomplete stuff. A good spring cleaning now and again is called for.
Years ago I participated in some self-improvement seminars and one of the exercises was called scrubbing your space. It was an exercise in finishing the incompletes in my life – all the things started or looming and never finished – things like having a tough conversation, or settling a dispute, or cleaning out a closet, or using that gym membership, or taking care of that in-grown toe nail. The idea was that we spend a lot time and energy fussing, worrying, ignoring and denying about all the incompletes in our lives. If we would actually complete them by doing them now, doing them by a designated date, or deciding not to do them at all, we would open up our lives to all the riches with which we have been graced. It would be like opening the best gift ever.
I wonder what scrubbing the space of our hearts would be like. What if we cleaned out all the corners of our hearts of worry and doubt and anger and frustration and meanness and fear and …. What would this be like if our hearts were clean? For me it would look like a glorious blue-sky day. It would sound like the laughter of children. It would smell like fresh baked bread. It would feel like the warm sun on my face. It would taste like honey. Psalm 51:10, lovely and familiar, says: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” What if we started each day with this prayer? “Scrub the space of my heart, O God. Help me to let go of all the things that do not serve you or your magnificent creation. Fill me with the strength of your grace. Give me life. Inspire me to stay open to all the possibilities of this day.” Amen.