a mop and a prayer

Dear Lyndsey…
[Re: that post on slow]

How do you house-clean slow? I’d like to do that but can’t picture what it looks like!

Dear Friend,

First—I’m sitting here in awe of your sense of spiritual adventure. I don’t know many people who would like the idea of cleaning slow, let alone who would bother to ask for tips. I wonder if you’ve tried it yet; I wonder what you’ve discovered. Here’s what cleaning and some old books have taught me:

When you clean slow, you clean like a monk. Both Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns do manual labor in order to keep their community fields and homes, but also in order to inspire humility. Ora et Labora—work and prayer—was one of the oldest monastic mottoes, describing the daily activities of the monks under St. Benedict’s rule of life.

Benedict knew hard work makes us better, somehow, perhaps especially when we work on our own spaces for the good of our communities. And ever since he split his brothers’ days between work and prayer, generations of monastics have whispered that the ultimate goal might be to bring them back together. Work in the presence of God; the body praying; God in the chapel, God in the garden miracle, God in the dusty cracks between floorboards.

Slow cleaning is a meditation—a thing done for its own sake. It takes the time that it takes, to scrub the grime out of the bathroom crannies and out of the week and out of the soul. Sometimes in the calm chapel of repetitive motion, our bodies are able to sync with our minds or coax along our lagging hearts. There is healing in setting our space to rights. There is hope in finding the stubborn humility to do it again and again.

When you clean slow, you clean like an artist. You take in every window pane, expecting to be surprised. You watch the soap bubbles pop and you imagine where they went. See, some artists chase “inspiration,” but the best know that is only a name for the ability to look and see anew. The best artist cleans to rediscover the crack in the tile, the one that somehow perfects the regular, gleaming pattern of the whole. The best artist knows the answer to her project’s impasse lies somewhere between her own moving muscles and the layers of grime on the windowsill, just waiting to be uncovered by patience, faithfulness, care—those underappreciated virtues best cultivated by repetition.

Cleaning slow is cleaning like a lover. Like it’s the last place you’ll ever live, like you can’t imagine a better home, like this very kitchen and its crooked cabinet and the worn-off numbers on the stove dial are gifts to you personally from God. It’s coaxing the beauty out of tired and fresh things alike, not by willing them to be better but by seeing their goodness under the dust. When your cleaning is a lover’s sacrifice,you end up weary, coated in dirt—but exulting in the beauty of your place, satisfied in your family’s enjoyment of it.

Yes, it takes patience to put all the dishes away, to fold all the towels and socks. But when you care for the things that serve you, they shine for you. In a world of all new, all better, all more disposable, caring for something old is a radical act of contentment.

I, for one, am always cleaning fast. I tend to half-do the jobs in between church work, writing trips and houseguests—but when I let cleaning take its time, I am taught simplicity. I remember that I don’t want a bigger house and I remember the dignity of the other manual laborers whose work supports my life. Somewhere along the way of being lost in thought, I find gratitude for my body, my messy dirty family, my clothes and carpets. I pray for party guests and houseguests; for corners and crannies and the past and the future; for all the muck of this world that’s not so easy to put in order. I pray for every little thing to be made clean, uncovered, made more truly itself; for the grace of simple beauty revealed over and over again; I watch my wood floors give and give to us, and I pray that my own little self will take pride like them, pride only in being myself, in service. I pray that all will be made truer, be made new by the simple, unremarkable, patient, unfailing love of the one who returns to labor with us and for us, who is faithful to make us clean.

ora et labora, in love and in joy,

Lyndsey