"Spiritual Housekeeping"

Much ink, and much blood, has been spilled defending the boundaries of the sacred and the profane.

In this morning’s reading, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh gently and powerfully speaks to his own experience of mindfulness in every moment. No task is too mundane, and no action unworthy, of intentionality, of presence, of the care we can bring to it. As I read a moment ago, even when approaching that most familiar of household chores, washing the dishes, he writes,

I enjoy taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands. I know that if I hurry … the time of washing dishes will be… not worth living. That would be a pity, for each minute, each second of life is a miracle. The dishes themselves and that fact that I am here washing them are miracles!

Each bowl I wash, each poem I compose, each time I invite a bell to sound is a miracle, each has exactly the same value…

Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane. I must confess it takes me a bit longer to do the dishes, but I live fully in every moment, and I am happy.

Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end. That is, not only do we do the dishes in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.

Although I have studied Thich Nhat Hanh’s words and find peace and compassion in his meditations, I have not had the pleasure of being with him while doing the dishes. But in my mind I can almost see him bathed in golden Californian sunlight and standing peacefully before the double sink in my kitchen, and he’s taking mindful care with each spoon, even if it is encrusted with dried cat food. He is gently removing date pits from the food waste in the belly of the sink, lest they destroy the garbage disposal. He is smiling kindly at the baby as she toddles up to grab his knees, curious about what he is doing at the sink and eager to help by putting her hands in the water, the soap, the cat food, etc.

It is easier to imagine such a quiet moment than it is to find one, at least in my household. But I don’t resent Thich Nhat Hanh’s words– okay, well, maybe I do, a little bit – partly because I tend to imagine a gentle Vietnamese monk having one or two pottery bowls to rinse out, at most, whereas I tend to have giant iron pots of burned tomato sauce to work on – so there’s both a difficulty of the spiritual approach to housework issue, and also a quantity of the spiritual approach to housework issue for me here. Not to mention the timing of the spiritual approach to housework issue for me, since as far as I know, Thich Nhat Hanh isn’t currently taking care of a fifteen-month-old.

UU minister and mother of three Kathleen McTigue touches on this when she writes,

We don’t hear stories about saints and sages walking the path to their enlightenment hauling bags of diapers and stacks of diaper wipes, mini-packs of tissues, liquid Tylenol, and teething rings. It’s hard to imagine them engaging in soul-deepening religious thought or dialogue while they wipe a runny nose or clean up after SpaghettiOs. And a parent is more likely to be found poring time and again over the words of The Runaway Bunny or Goodnight Moon than over the classic sacred texts.

To which I say, amen, sister! That household she describes hits a little closer to home than the one I imagined for Thich Nhat Hanh, too. Take away the hand-made ceramic mug and the pouring sunlight, add two giant boxes of Duplos my husband brought home from a yard sale last week, and a duck on a string that was recently eaten by the vacuum cleaner, and that’s about what my living room looks like.

In theory, however, I’m right there with Thich Nhat Hanh on where the sacred belongs: right alongside the everyday, jangling with your keys in the pockets of everyday life. I say this not only to encourage you to find a little peace amidst hectic or isolated lives, but also because in those peaceful moments, wherever we find them, offer us opportunities for connecting and reconnecting to serious sources of strength in our lives.

But of course there is a long tradition of wild disagreement among wise and practical people about just where holiness lives.

This disagreement, this tension, it goes back to Moses and it goes back even further. You probably know the story, about after a most unusual childhood in Pharaoh’s house, after killing an Egyptian and escaping into exile, Moses was living an ordinary life with his wife’s family in Midian, out in sheep-herding territory. One day, as he walked with his flock over those dry hills, breathing in the dry air in hills not unlike the dry hills of southern California, one afternoon as he brushed aside the chaparral and found solid footing on the dusty rocks, he looked up and he saw the flames of a bush on fire – no smoke, just flames, for the bush burned but was not burned up. And Moses thought he had better go take a closer look. He got off the path he was on, he walked over to the bush, and when God “saw he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, called him by name, and Moses said, Here I am. And God said, “do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

A minute earlier, before he saw the bush, when he was keeping count of the sheep and looking at the blue sky and otherwise having an ordinary day, Moses was pretty sure he was walking over on the ordinary dusty earth. But in the next moment, a minute later he found himself in the presence of the holy. Take off your sandals, says God, show some respect for the sacred, for this is holy ground.

How do we know when we are standing on holy ground?

In many religious traditions, even those of the Buddhist communities of Thich Nhat Hanh, we eventually learn how to recognize a sacred space – a space set aside from ordinary spaces. It is in the way the people there dress – do they wear a robe, an unusual headcovering, is their dress particularly plain or particularly spectacular? It is in how the people there act – do they sit quietly and listen attentively, are they altogether silent or are they speaking, moving, or singing all the same thing? It could be how and what the people eat when they are in that space. What it looks like is different, but that it looks and feels, smells and taste, different from ordinary life is almost always the case.

How surprising, then, to walk with Moses for a moment and consider whether any ground has within it the capacity to be holy ground. One moment, he walks on dusty rocks. But in the next, he takes off his sandals, he stands on sacred earth.

We used to be quite skilled at finding transcendence in ordinary life, writes religious scholar Karen Armstrong. “In a pagan world that was full of gods and where men and women encountered the divine at every turn,” it wasn’t as helpful for religious, spiritual, or mystical teachers “to help people cultivate a sense of presence and unity: they already felt at one with the world.” When societies developed more control over their environments, they began to experience a separation between humanity and divinity. It became harder to know what ground was holy ground. It became harder to see the sunlight of awareness shining over the whole world.

From this perception of distance arose traditions and teachings that could close the gap, this time not by finding the holy in the outside world, but by seeking it within ourselves. (Armstrong, Visions of God, xii-xiii).

How do you know when you are standing on holy ground?

Is the sacred only present outside of us, or can we experience it from within?

I find part of the power of Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditations come from breaking open the assumption that the sacred has been bottled up and stored away in all the expected places: in church, for example, or in museums, in monasteries, on mountaintops. No, no, he says, that’s not where the sacred is! It’s here, it’s now, it’s in this moment with the soap, the sink, the suds. This, too, is holy ground.

It should be familiar territory in our tradition, this assumption that each of us has direct access to transcending wonder. Each of us in any stage of life, whether we are currently engaged in all the expected spiritual practices, as Catherine spoke of earlier today, or whether we are muddling through without them. Again, Kathleen McTigue offers words of reassurance for parents here, she says:

The real journey with children is motivated not by our spiritual hungers but by our offsprings’ more prosaic appetites. Although children’s lovely, spontaneous ways may re-awaken us to the world, being a parent often doesn’t look anything like traveling a spiritual path. Parents have little opportunity for regular prayer or meditation, Sabbath reflection, study, or journal writing. Instead, such practices may be reduced and disrupted almost to the vanishing point. The real journey for parents leads right through the life we are living—through the chaos, the interruptions, and the exhaustion.

McTigue calls this path – and I’m not sure this path is reserved only for the parents of young children, I wonder if those of you caring for aging parents or spouses might recognize the chaos, the heartache, the transcendent love of that journey, the circling back to an earlier stage of life – McTigue calls this path the “ordinary, unsung path.” She writes,

This ordinary, unsung path requires tremendous openness to the unanticipated. It meanders around a thousand turns that feel like detours or dead ends. It requires faith that the spirit does not grow in a straight line; nor does it require traditional forms and practices, as helpful as these can be. Real spiritual growth depends on our willingness to be transformed. And very little transforms us as thoroughly as sharing our lives with children.

To me, taking a spiritual approach to housekeeping, housework, and housecleaning is about finding, testing, experimenting with, breaking open, and redrawing the borders of the sacred and the profane. You thought the holy was only for museums, monasteries, and mountaintops? Well, it’s here, too. You thought sweeping, dusting, brushing, combing, diapering, disposing, mopping, scrubbing, and dish-washing were a distraction from a life of wisdom? Well, the spirit has been known to grow here, too. This, too, is holy ground.

Taking a spiritual approach to housework is about chipping away at the separation between men’s work and women’s work. It is about bringing that which is life-giving – about the strength that sustain us, the wisdom that really works -- back and forth along these borders, and making no assumptions about the wells from which they spring.

We come from radical, loving, hard-working women and men, we are descendents of an unusual lineage of free thinkers who did not think there was one tradition that could truthfully claim to hold the separation between the sacred and profane. And so our traditions, a living tradition, asks you to break open the sources of transcendence in your own life, whoever you are and wherever you are in the journey of life and the journey of the spirit.

How do you know when you are standing on holy ground?

Is it in your dishes, your silence, your prayer life, in your generosity, your charity, your social action, your reading of the ancient sacred texts, in your parenting? These are the practices of the spirit and those of ordinary living – they are practices we can examine and change with our intentions – these are practices I know I will speak about many times, almost as many times as I struggle with them in my own life. And in the sunlight of awareness we will see our spirits grow through these practices, and we will understand that any of these, that all of these, have the power to both form and transform us.

May it be so.