spring cleaning

Every other Saturday is cleaning day in these climes. Time to rid the home of the collected dust and dirt that obfuscates the natural beauty of life. Yet it wasn't always so. I distinctly recall a 30 year ago visit from my sister Beth, who exclaimed upon entering my disheveled abode how unkempt it was. It cannot be denied; it was my first apartment on my own and I had not yet nurtured a routine for the necessities. Even this past Friday I was thoroughly embarrassed because the evening's dinner party was a day too soon. Cleaning is a cold and grim chore approached with enmity and suffered with brutal abiding. It steals time from agreeable activities, yet endured for the reward that clean living imparts.

So it was yesterday, in the midst of chaos and order, that I called my dear friend Elizabeth to send birthday greetings, yet more probably to procrastinate. I was scrubbing a white molded formica chair encased in months of grime that somehow escaped the marauding rag when I began to understand what was truly happening. As the surface began to shine I felt a deep feeling of rightness and tranquility. The happiness which ensued from my literal, task at hand, assured me that this was how life ought to be.

Through our light and cheery conversation and my darkening rag, the duality of near and far, clutter and organization, drudgery and contentment, melded into a sense of oneness. Immediately it set the morning's gospel passage from John to bear, wherein Jesus expounds that we must be born of water and spirit to enter the kingdom of heaven. But this is not some far off hope, much less a dual conception to be reconciled. In this precious human life we are in heaven - and we are of heaven - yet too often fail to see through the mire. Contending that the disparate water and spirit extend beyond its traditional baptismal implication, the combined accouterments of earth and divine surely manifest in the human composition: We are composed of body and spirit together, and only need a good cleansing to reveal our eternal association and dwell in harmony with the divine will.

This past week I finished Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full," and was astounded with the synchronicity to these ideas. "The Manager has given every person a spark from his own divinity, and no can take that away from you," proclaims the rejuvenated entrepreneur Charlie Croker who, after spiraling into insurmountable difficulties, is resurrected by a Stoic messenger voicing teachings of Jesus' contemporary, Epictetus. "We are born with two elements," Croker continues, "the body, which we share with the animals... and the mind and reason, which comes from the spark the Manager has given us." And I couldn't help but paraphrase John's patois, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son" - that is, himself, to dwell with and in us. This is human fulfillment - to be so clean as to perceive the divine spark dwelling in unity. It's time to get out the rags and see what lies beneath.

love, always

pia