790 Washington Street, P. O. Box 284, Stoughton, Massachusetts 02072
(781) 344-6800
Church School: 10:45 AM
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First
Parish Universalist Church 790 Washington Street, P. O. Box 284, Stoughton, Massachusetts 02072 (781) 344-6800 |
Worship:
10:30 AM Church School: 10:45 AM |
Spiritual Spring Cleaning |
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Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, April 3, 2011 |
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My dear
No, not go out to lunch at our favorite restaurant.
No, not go up to one of the art houses in
No, not take in the latest exhibit at the
No. We cleaned the cellar. We got about three-quarters of it done, too,
maybe even a little more. And it felt good. (Now, we just have to get that last
little section done before we start dumping stuff down there again. It’s one of
those jobs kind of like washing the windows on the
I don’t think I’d qualify for the A&E television series
Hoarders, or whatever it’s called. (I have absolutely no inclination to watch
any kind of “reality” television, but especially that program. It sounds rather
pathetic, actually.) But like many of you, I suspect, I have lots of trouble
throwing things away.
The cellar was full of boxes and boxes of things I had clipped from
newspapers and magazines over the years, each with its own little bit of
information I might need “some
day”—for a sermon, for a book, for whatever…
Or, they actually were things—clippings,
articles, what have you—that I had
used—for a sermon or a book or whatever—but now couldn’t bear to throw away.
But now, 99.9% of those clippings now await transport to a local
recycling bin, as do back issues of Budget
Travel, and old
TV Guides, and
The Economist stretching back to the late-1990s, which might have been the last
time I got rid of some of this stuff. They’re gone now, or going…
Now, before Easter, when
company’s coming, sticking their head into things, I have to tackle the
refrigerator—and all those jars of condiments, with a smidgen or this and a
smidgen of that. I have to get rid of last year’s horseradish, so I can make room for
this year’s. I think the stuffed green olives from Thanksgiving can go. We ate
three of them, after all. Maybe one jar of Major Grey’s chutney is enough,
instead of two or three.
Then at some point, I need to get into the closet in the bedroom, too,
and decide which clothes to keep and which to bring to
There comes a time, even for pack rats like some of us, when it’s time
for a purge. It’s time to get into the closet and toss (or, even better,
recycle). It’s time, every once in a while, for a bit of cleaning—and what
better time for that than the spring?
This spring seems to have been a little sluggish in getting here, but at
least Easter is late this year, so it has until April 24 to get its act
together.
Various cultures have their own rituals for the spring: The Jewish ritual
of chametz takes place every year the week before Passover (which
starts at sundown on April 19 this year). In chametz, an observant
Jewish family will toss out every bit of last year’s grain, in a ritual
reenactment of the actions of their ancestors in
In the Christian tradition, there is Lent, which began on Ash
Wednesday, which was March 9 this year. The forty days of Lent symbolize the
forty days Jesus spent in the desert, where he had gone off by himself to fast
in preparation for his entry into
In our more secularized culture today, we’re more likely to engage
in spring cleaning before Easter in order to prepare for the coming of the
Easter Bunny: so that someone won’t reach for an Easter egg at the hunt, and
pull out a “dust bunny” instead!
For many reasons, then, different cultures direct some kind of
spring cleaning—mainly, I think, because it makes us feel good; it puts us
in-sync with the new energy flowing in the earth at this season of new life.
When we clean a room, or a cellar, or the refrigerator, it feels like things can
breathe again, like there’s new energy flowing. That is, after all, one of the basic principles of the Chinese art of feng shui. In order to have a healthy and prosperous life, your chi—your life force, your energy—has to be able to flow. Too much clutter—in your house, or even in one’s own body—blocks the flow of energy. The chi can’t flow if it’s constantly bumping up against furniture and stuff and piles of papers and more stuff.
Now, we need to de-clutter our homes from time to time in order to
let the energy flow. This is no less true of our souls. The spirit—we might say
soul—of each of us is our vital center. It’s the core of our being; our
innermost psychological sanctuary. Now, we might pile a lot of junk in the
cellar or in the attic; but we wouldn’t think of cluttering up our sanctuary
here at church that way, would we? We wouldn’t stack boxes in the aisles, or
stacks of newspaper in the choir loft, would we? No, we want that to be nice and
clean; the aisles clear; the air and the light and the sound able to flow. Maybe
we need to take care of the sanctuaries of our inner beings that way, too.
But too often, we allow our souls to get cluttered. They even get
grimy, and dirty, and from time to time, they need a good scrubbing—or at least
some cleaning out, some re-arranging. As a writer named Gaylah Balter puts it,
“Why, you ask, would the soul need any spring cleaning? [Because] as our daily
lives unfold, we lose track of our souls’ needs… Noise, clutter, stress, or life
chaos seep into our lives and dim our ability to care-take our souls.”
Noise—clutter—stress—all things we get our fair share of,
certainly. If we don’t take time to sort through them, they before long they
become a severe burden to our souls. If we don’t question whether they are
positive additions to our beings or not—and rid ourselves of their excess—then
all this noise, clutter, and stress can cause great internal dis-ease. Whatever
the relationship is between internal and external dis-ease (and that’s an open
question), we know that the relationship is there. Sometimes, stress makes us
sick; it even kills. We know that a person who is more in balance on the inside
will probably be happier (and perhaps healthier) on the outside.
So, how’s your chi flowing? How are you feeling? Have
you taken the pulse of energy around you lately? Maybe you’re like me: a little
tired, a little rundown and stuffy, feeling a little stuck. This long train of
But oftentimes, both in nature and inside each of us, there is yet
another season between winter and spring. It gets overlooked sometimes, except
maybe in
I once heard about a dirt road in Often in life, we end up in ruts which we may or may not have chosen, for 10 yearss
There’s a rut out there for everyone (maybe a good half dozen for
some of us), and we all get stuck in ruts at different times in our lives. But a
little spiritual spring cleaning can help us clean out those inner passageways,
and climb out of some of those ruts. And we do it one rut at a time.
Perhaps the first step in the process of spiritual spring cleaning
is to take a personal inventory. Discoverr what it is that you want to
change, that you need to change. Decide whether it is something you have the power to change. Then
discern what tools your life has given
you for making the change. Discover.
Decide. Discern. That means That means finding some time to step aside from the
busyness of life, if just for a little while, and listen for that inner voice,
and ask ourselves, “What is life trying to tell me?” Just as we need to take a
day off from work to clean the cellar sometimes, so we might need to take some
time by ourselves to consider these questions of who we truly are.
Then, if you get some answers, you don’t have to change everything
at once. Indeed, that might be the worst thing to do. If we try to clean our
houses that way, we’re asking for disaster; we’ll probably just end up with that
many more unfinished projects. We start cleaning the closet in the den; then go
on to the closet in the bedroom; then we go into the cellar; then we start the
attic. Before we know it, we have a half dozen half-done projects all around the
house, just adding to the clutter and chaos.
The same thing happens if we try to change everything that needs
changing in our lives all at once. We may create more problems without solving
the ones we’ve got. It seems wiser, I think, to focus on that
one thing crying out
the loudest for you to change. You probably know what it is already. It’s the
two ton elephant, sitting in the middle of the sanctuary of your soul.
Concentrate on getting rid of that – one step – one step at a time—then move on to the next challenge. But start somewhere. Start to change. Start to rearrange your souls, so they might blossom forth abundantly. As the poet Rumi reminds us, “Don’t fall back asleep!” Don’t descend back into the interminable winter of your soul. Don’t listen to that voice telling you (and it’s probably your own voice, really): “Maybe this rut isn’t so bad. It’s a pretty comfortable rut. Maybe I’ll hang around here for another 10 or 20 years.”
Someone once said (and maybe it was me that said it, but I can’t
remember): The only difference between a rut and a grave is how high the sides
are.”
As Anais Nin reminds us, if we are to be truly alive, for all of
us there will come that blessed day when the risk to remain tight in the bud was
more painful than the pain it took to blossom.
The time for hibernation is over. It’s time to get out of bed, and
out of our ruts. “Don’t fall back asleep.” Begin your journey of spiritual
change and growth.
“Clean your room well,” the old Shakers tell us, “for good spirits
will not live where there is dirt.”
May we create that space within for a good spirit to grow, as
well.
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