By Cynthia Gaw
I despise house-cleaning. I have always thought I had better things to do. My approach can be summed up in the phrase “as little as possible.”
When I was growing up, my mother’s daily demands were minimal. I must not leave the house until my bed was made and my laundry was in the hamper. I could accomplish this in my slip-shod manner in under a minute. A quick tug upon the bedclothes and repositioning and fluffing of the pillow, a spontaneous scooping of discarded clothes from the floor, and all was accomplished.
Saturdays required more. My mother’s demands could be satisfied with what I thought of as the 1-2-3. Number one, in her language was “straighten-up;” this translates into putting everything in its place. Sticky bowls and spoons from two evenings’ ago ice cream must be taken to the kitchen, washed, and put away. Books must be put on the shelves. The desktop must be tidy. Since my number one priority was speed, items lacking clear categories or just things that would take time to deal with were thrown into the back of the closet. The second weekly requirement was dust. Again, I never considered the invisible, and even the visible was a hasty affair. One swipe of a cloth, carefully positioned so as to hit across the bottom of the books’ spines and the flat surface at the front of the shelf was all that constituted “dusting the shelves.” The third and final phase was to vacuum the floor. I was not overly concerned with full-coverage, and aimed only for obvious droppings and spills. The moving of furniture or anything to do with baseboards was not to be thought on. I could usually pass on a ten-minute investment.
However, once a year, some weekend before Easter, all was brought to light. The annual spring cleaning of my room took the better part of a precious Saturday. As beach and bike beckoned, I must empty every dresser drawer, desk drawer, and, worst of all, my side of the closet that I shared with my sister. Everything must be taken out, and the empty cavity cleaned. Every item must be examined, and its destiny decided. The hopelessly stained t-shirt must be tossed. The dress with the torn side-seam deposited in my mother’s mending basket. Good but outgrown clothes translated to my younger sister’s side of the room. How such a relatively small space as my side of the closet could house so much stuff was a baffling phenomenon; much of it was utter trash. Old tennis shoes with holes the size of quarters in their soles, still smelly but long since replaced by a larger size, a punctured volleyball, a sandy lump of old surfboard wax, contributed to the massive trash heap in the middle of the room. My mother’s encouraging, “It has to get worse before it can get better,” did little to assuage my impatience to be gone and away from the noxious job.
My father’s part in the spring cleaning was far more interesting. His area of responsibility had nothing to do with living spaces, it was an invisible, underground space. Each spring he retrieved his flashlight and opened a planked hatch on the canyon side of the house under the dining room window and crawled under the house. Usually I was not allowed to accompany him, for the space was liberally populated with black widows and who knows what else. But as he was alert to teachable moments, a few times I was taken in and shown something interesting. Once a short and dusty wriggle brought us to a place where he trained the flashlight on a little pile of sawdust. “What do you think of that?” he asked.
“It’s just a little pile of sawdust; it won’t hurt anything,” was my ignorant reply.
“But Sky (for that was his nickname for me),” he asked, “How did the pile get there? Nobody comes down here to saw a board. And see how fresh it is?”
I looked up to the floor joist over the little pile. “Oh, yea, there are termites in the beam. If they keep going the living room floor will collapse.”
Another spring he took me under to show me a small area of rotted wood under a toilet. The leak could not be seen from the bathroom above because the leak was hidden by the flooring. My Dad often reminded me that problems were best solved while they were small. A termite spray and a bit of plumbing repair, and a solution is complete. But major disasters occur when growing underground problems are ignored.
Confession and repentance have followed a similar pattern in my life. The unpleasant business is a daily necessity, but often a matins’ rush job. Sundays go a bit deeper, but still the invisible places are frequently avoided. A surface-level accountability passes. The attempt is a shallow, hurried, non-invasive chore. But during Lent, time is taken for a thorough underground inspection. The invisible root malignancy of visible problems like relational irritations, impatience, anger, or offendabilities are explored and repented of. Forgiveness is requested of others because sin is detected. A still-sanctifying heart accumulates hidden sin like dust. A deep annual cleaning of the heart is the wise pattern of the historical church. Our underground, internal foundation wants mining, inspection, categorization and cleansing. Things must be brought to the light and identified for what they are. When we are honest about our heart, there’s always some bad news, but it feels so good when the nasty job is done.
The Sinner by George Herbert
Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
What I have treasured in my memorie!
Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I finde there quarries of pil'd vanities,
But shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture
To shew their face, since cross to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heav'n the centre.
In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
The spirit and good extract of my heart
Comes to about the many hundreth part.
Yet, Lord, restore thine image, heare my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone.