From Rev. Florence Caplow

This phrase, from ancient Chinese Zen, sums up the understanding that it is in doing the simplest, most ordinary and necessary tasks, that our spiritual life is polished and burnished. You might be surprised to know that in Zen monasteries the most common activity, after meditation, is – cleaning. Lots and lots of cleaning.

When I was a teen, I was profoundly lazy. All I wanted to do was curl up in corner and read a book, and any necessary or requested activity – dishes, homework, weeding the garden – was a source of profound resentment (ah, my poor mother).

It wasn’t until I went on a three-month Outward Bound course at eighteen, with twenty other young adults, that I finally began to get a glimpse of the joys of working together, of chopping vegetables for the evening meal, of rowing hard against a headwind. It was a revolutionary discovery. All those daily activities that had seemed impossibly tedious were suddenly a source of pleasure and connection.

A few years later, when I became a Zen student and lived in the monastery, I discovered how ordinary work and service – sweeping, cooking, doing dishes, even cleaning toilets – were opportunities for taking care of others in the community, creating beauty and order, and bringing awareness to each moment. And I discovered that the simpler the task, the more it was possible to take it on as a spiritual practice and an opportunity for mindfulness.

In church life there are thousands of opportunities to serve one another, to take care of our beautiful spaces, and to do these things as spiritual practices. Being a committee member, or a leader, is certainly also a spiritual practice, but I’m talking about the very simplest, material ways we can support one another, using our hands and bodies. Handing out programs on Sunday morning. Weeding the flower beds. Bringing food to share. Taking the kitchen towels home to be washed.

Recently I helped with dishes after Fellowship hour on Sunday morning – much to the surprise of a first- time visitor to our church, who didn’t think he would find the minister with an apron on – and I was reminded again of the joy of simple service.

When we were trying to decide if we should hire someone again for our dishwasher position, the Board surprised me by suggesting that doing dishes would be something people in the congregation would enjoy doing. If you choose to serve in this way, I invite you to do dishes as a spiritual practice, as a mindfulness practice, as joyful service to the larger community, and see what that’s like.

Here are few lines from a Marge Piercy poem, “To Be of Use”:

…I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again….
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident….
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.