Finding Meaning in Ordinary

Tasks


Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote that he washes dishes with as much care as if he were bathing the newborn Buddha: "If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have a cup of tea, then I will be incapable of drinking the tea joyfully."

What if we were all able to slow down and treat house work as if it mattered? I'm thinking of the Zen proverb: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." The idea is that we should find meaning in ordinary tasks, because true clarity if fleeting enough- and when it's over, somebody still has to clean the crisper.

If house work were no more than drudgery, would it be part of so may religious traditions? Twenty-four verses of the biblical book of Leviticus are devoted to the fight against mildew. The Japanese religion Ittoen is centered around the humble practice of scrubbing other people's toilets. Every week before the Sabbath, observant Jews are meant to clean their houses in preparation; Passover cannot properly happen unless every crumb of leavened bread is gone from the car, the cabinets, the carpets.

"That massive cleaning effort is a metaphor for cleaning out your soul," says Rabbi Sherre Hirsch, author of We Plan, God Laughs. "When your physcial surroundings are cluttered, your emotional and spiritual self is cluttered. If your space is clean, then your mind is open and you can let God in."

For the Benedictines, work and prayer are one and the same. "I think one of the reasons the [Benedictine] order is still here after 1,500 years is that no one is excused from kitchen duty," says Kathleen Norris, a Benedictine oblate and author of The Cloister Walk. "They try to honor work as part of just being human."

She says, "If you think you need some voodoo...here's the magic soap - your own attention is what spiritualizes things. Attention to the meal you cook, the clothes you wash. Attention is love. And that's transformative."

Cleaning changes things. So much of life is uncertain-you take vitamins and get sick, love people who disappoint you, pour your heart into a job and lose it at the end of the fiscal year. But if you take a rag to a piece of soap scum, it will go away. From that point of view- the pure continuum of cause and effect-cleaning stops seeming futile. It starts to look like the only thing worth doing.

Excerpted from body+soul's April 2010 issue, by Amy Maclin.