For those who mark this season, one on the church calendar that encourages a time of going into the desert in order to go deeper, hopefully the words you find here will be bread for the journey. For those who simply stumble across the entries, hopefully they will provide a speed bump on the information superhighway that will invite you slow down, if even for a moment or two.
For many years I compiled these poems and reflections on paper. While others were eating pancakes and enjoying Mardi Gras celebrations on Fat Tuesday, the night before Ash Wednesday you could usually find me sitting in the middle of my living room floor surrounded by pages of poems as I decided how to best compile them into a booklet that I would frantically photocopy early the next morning so it would be ready for those who visited the Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage on Ash Wednesday and throughout Lent.
Last year, however, I chose not to observe Lent. No poems, no giving up chocolate, or cookies, or taking an extra dose of a spiritual practice. My Lenten practice was not to observe Lent. So as a bit of a pre-Lenten post, below is an essay I wrote about my experience last year. It was an assignment for an essay class I took at the Writer's Center where we were given a list of words and had to write a personal essay based on one of the words. The word I chose was dust. It's much longer than any of the upcoming Lenten posts will be but hey-- Fat Tuesday is all about excess and indulgence before a season of sparseness so I'm going for it.
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Housecleaning by Terri Lynn Simpson
Evidently it’s a myth that the major component of household dust is human skin. It would have been more theologically significant for me to be cleaning on Ash Wednesday if that old wives’ tale was actually true. I could have been reflecting on my own mortality while wiping away the dust from which I came and to which I will one day return. Although now that I think about it, maybe the lingering scent of furniture polish wouldn’t have had the memento mori effect that going about one’s day with a forehead marked with ashes is meant to have.
The impression many people have is that Lent is a season of self-sacrifice or self-flagellation, but I’ve never been one of those. For me, Lent has always been an invitation, an opportunity to enter a desert of my own creation, forty days to reflect on where I am, where I’ve been, and where I want to go in the future. The beginning of this journey used to be my favorite day on the church calendar, but these days I’m not much concerned with the church calendar, or actually anything having to do with the church for that matter. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering in the desert this past year, a result of circumstance rather than choice, and I’m not eager to go back any time soon. So I certainly didn’t plan on observing Ash Wednesday this year by dusting. As a matter of fact, I didn’t really plan on thinking about Lent at all.
I did plan on cleaning my room, however. I tossed a can of Pledge and a few paper towels on the bed thinking that after I worked out and took a shower, then I’d dust. That was last Friday or maybe the Friday before, I can’t recall. I do know that in the realm of my ability to procrastinate, it wasn’t that long ago. Usually my intentions linger in piles on my bedroom floor for longer than twelve days before I get around to doing anything about them. Lately my favorite form of procrastination is purging, ridding myself of possessions I don’t need. That way, the self-judgment I impose on myself for being lazy and unmotivated is mitigated by the self-congratulations on the virtuous endeavor of simplifying my life. Plus, I feel like I’m being productive even when in the midst of avoiding the task at hand.
My latest urge to clean out something began when I was working on my dissertation. Instead of sitting at the computer writing about the theology of the imprecatory psalms, I’d stand in front of my closet and curse the impulse that led me to spend too much money on trendy t-shirts and uncomfortable shoes. Experts say that when cleaning out your closet, if you haven’t worn something for a year you should get rid of it. That may be good advice for some, but not for me. There are things I’ve worn recently that I know I shouldn’t wear again, such as the bubblegum pink t-shirt with the black skull that bears an uncanny resemblance to my brother.
After culling my wardrobe, the compulsion to purge was still there. I needed another project to tackle. One morning when I actually was working on my dissertation, I had just typed up the bibliographical information for a text that I’d first encountered in grad school and re-read as part of my project research, when it hit me—not only did I never want to read that boring book with a misleadingly lovely title ever again, I didn’t have to. In fact, I didn’t even have to keep it around. Just as I’d bagged the shrunken cashmere sweaters and skull t-shirt, I needed to get rid of books that didn’t quite fit me any more either.
For well over a year, I’d been meaning to organize my basement bookshelves. When I first learned my job had been eliminated, my biggest concern as I faced unemployment wasn’t what I’d do for health insurance or a paycheck, but how I could make space in my house for the all the books that had lined the walls of my office, In the end, I just crammed them into every available space so that trying to take a book from a shelf was like a giant game of Jenga.
It’s always been far easier for me to get rid of clothes than books. Perhaps it’s because I look at the volumes that line my bookshelves—from the biography of the Brontë sisters to the Marcella Hazan cookbooks—and see reflections of who I am, or perhaps more accurately, who I want to be. Getting rid of a book feels a little like abandoning hope. I hesitated before taking the “teach yourself Gaelic” (and Italian and French and Czech) books off the shelf, but in the end priorities won out. While there are many things I need to work at becoming, a self-taught conversational polyglot isn’t that high up on the list.
One theory about procrastination is that it isn’t a symptom of laziness but rather fear. For months I had been putting off going through my bookshelves because I was afraid that in deciding what books to let go of, I’d also have to let go of possibilities for the future that had been my safety net for the better part of my adult life. As The Moral Vision of the New Testament joined the language textbooks in the ranks of the rejects, it hit me that the boxes I was filling didn’t hold abandoned dreams, but rather the detritus of the past that had been obscuring a vision for the future. After I finished clearing the shelves I stepped back to look at the new arrangement. In my excavation process, I not only rid myself of several boxes of books, I also unearthed some long forgotten volumes that had been hidden behind the double stacked rows on the shelves. I noticed that on my newly reorganized shelves there was a lot less theology and more space for poetry.
Last year I decided to get rid of one thing I didn’t need each day during Lent. The idea was that in letting go of material things I would somehow create more space for God. A year’s worth of unread New Yorker magazines went, along with the fraying t-shirts I saved to wear to the gym and the tights with a hole that could be hidden by my shoe if I put them on just the right way. I don’t know how much space I created for the holy, but I did end up with more room in my dresser drawers. On my nightstand where the magazines used to be I recently placed the copy of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets that I’d forgotten I had.
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