When Saint Benedict wrote the
Rule for his monastery fifteen centuries ago, he instructed the monk in charge
of the kitchen to regard all utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the
altar. I have been trying to cultivate that attitude as I clean the house these
days, but I’m not having much luck.
Every Tuesday, since
housekeeping services were cancelled in our retirement community because of the
virus, my husband and I clean the house. He vacuums; I dust. In our 50+ years
of marriage, we have only done this a handful of times. Even in our graduate
school years, when we ate “dark steaks” (meat sold cheaply because it was well past
its prime), and mixed whole milk with the powdered kind to make it go farther,
we always scraped enough money to pay
for a housekeeper.
It’s not that we didn’t know
how to clean. My husband learned to vacuum before he learned to drive. During
high school and college I spent every Saturday morning cleaning my parents’
house. I dusted the trophies that my mother had brought from Ecuador: the
eight-foot-long blow gun with its quiver of curare-tipped arrows, and the
ceremonial apron and bib made of softened tree bark and decorated with crumbling,
once-colorful feathers. I had to time the vacuuming to whenever my father
wasn’t practicing the violin, giving a private lesson, or composing at the
piano. The worst was wiping the olive oil splatters off the stove and the kitchen’s
linoleum floor, since I knew that by dinner time that evening, after yet
another of my mother’s delicious sofregits,
things would be as greasy as before.
Now, here I am again,
dusting, polishing, scrubbing. It’s not the
same, of course. My teenage resentment is gone—it’s my own stuff I’m cleaning, and
I can do the work when and how I like. At first, I even found a certain
satisfaction in it. Finally, things were being done right. Take the bookcases.
The typical cleaning lady dusts the spines of the books, pushes them towards
the back, and dusts the exposed front part of the shelf. Instead, I removed
each book, wiped its every surface, dusted the space behind it, and, when I was finished, aligned all the books precisely
at the edge of the shelf.
This may be the sort of thing
that Saint Benedict had in mind, but by the time it was over all I wanted was
to build a fire in the front yard, and throw my books into it.
Things have gone downhill
from there, as the novelty has worn off. Much as I try to treat every lampshade
and every bowl as if it were a sacred object, my mind flits somewhere else,
usually to the land of “how much longer is this going to take?” The same
monkeys that during meditation hijack my focus away from the breath now whisper
evilly in my ear, “It’s just a lampshade, just a bowl. Bo-ring!”
I wonder if Saint Benedict’s
cellarer ever did manage to scour those piles of wooden bowls, those greasy cauldrons
as worshipfully as if they were the vessels of the altar. If he did, he was a
happier, more peaceful cellarer for it.
Yesterday I tried oiling the
furniture as a meditation exercise. I rubbed every inch of the sideboard made
by the ship’s carpenter on that long-ago Mississippi boat. I lubricated the elderly chests
of drawers in the bedroom. Mostly I thought about my husband’s grandfather, who
used to show up at our “married students apartment” in his enormous station
wagon, with a gift of furniture from his attic. And I also thought about what
Colette’s mother, Sido, used to say: “Whenever I spend a lot of time wiping my
porcelain teacups, I can feel myself growing old.”
Next Tuesday, when it’s time to
clean the kitchen, I’ll try to be more fully present in my work, to treat the
sink and the microwave as if they were sacred vessels. I don’t expect to
succeed right away, but then, I may well have months if not
years to practice.
