Lent Day 19: Cleaning

 

Guess who's using these bad boys again?

I've been cleaning. It's a pretty normal thing to do after a viral illness, I guess, but it's also something a lot of us learned to ratchet up at the beginning of the pandemic. 

Remember all the disinfectant wipes, and how they disappeared from stores and reappeared online at ten times the price?

Remember disinfecting your grocery bags before bringing them in the house, and then disinfecting the wrappings the food was in, too?

That was all so weird.

I'll be clear. I hate, loathe, despise, and abominate cleaning... except when I really, really want to do it. (Don't worry, my house is fine.)

This morning I was captivated by an urge to really clean following my weekend bug (not Covid, some have been asking). So I donned rubber gloves and got out the cleaners that you're not supposed to inhale for too long or they'll, I don't know, scorch your lungs? And I set to work.

It took about an hour, after which I felt like I'd done, not only a necessary thing, but a good thing.  Cleaning made my house feel like home again after the dislocating, disorienting experience of feeling distanced from it, even though I've been here, without interruption, since Saturday.

Some language around Lent evokes the notions of cleaning. "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean," the psalm reads. "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and steadfast spirit within me." I will admit that some of the language of this psalm troubles me, though not because I don't believe in sin. (I do.) It bothers me because "clean" and "unclean" have been used throughout history to isolate and punish groups of people, usually on the basis of ethnicity, social class, or sexual orientation. "Dirty ______" has been an epithet hurled too often, and too many, resulting in real damage, including death.

At the same time, Lent is a time for... can we say, decluttering? Prioritizing? Setting the house of the soul in order--not because some part of it is polluted, but because clarity can be good. It helps us to see and appreciate what is there. It helps us to let go of what we no longer need. It helps us to restore order after a time of distress. 

I admit it. Cleaning can be good.