The Spiritual Discipline of Washing Dishes
This article was first published as “Don’t eat vegetables more than 2 inches long”.
A couple ideas I’ve heard recently had a jolly pleasant convergence the other day, pleasant in a way that when the concepts of ‘a nice cup of tea’ and ‘a sit down’ have a get together.
On the Make Believe course we’re doing there was a bit about ‘I – thou’ relationships versus ‘I – it’ relationships. We can treat people, objects, nature, relationships as merely ‘it’, where they are nothing more than a ‘thing’. Or we can treat them as ‘thou’ – they have value, worth, are to be treated with love and respect.
The other idea is from the Richard Rohr talks we’ve been listening to recently. He mentioned a bit about being fully present in the moment (when you cook stew, just cook stew; if you have a biscuit, just have a biscuit) and how if you can accept something 100% then that can be enough to transform you.
So a couple of days ago I was doing the washing up and got to thinking about the dishwater. I always wash the cleanest things first; if there’s a pan that’s quite dirty I’ll give it a quick rinse first before immersing it in the warm, soapy water. I realized that if you treat the dishwater with respect it will reward you with a longer, more effective cleaning experience. I was having an I-thou relationship with the dishwater. I was talking with someone about this and they told me about Jewish handwashing rituals, where the water represents God and love, so you immerse your hands (which represent your actions) in God’s love.
After I’d done the washing up I made my lunch. I’ve always been one for chewing my food properly, yet I noticed that as I was chewing my mouthful I was already piling up my fork, ready to fill my mouth again as soon as I swallowed. So I decided to put my fork down after each mouthful and not pick it up again until I’d finished the last one. It was good to really savor the tastes and textures of the food, but it was also surprisingly hard work. Partly it just felt quite stop/start compared to the continuous flow I normally experience. But the main thing it showed up was my need to ‘fill’ space, my uncomfortableness with silence.
This post below was ordinally offered by Dan Cooper, on the Godspace webpage (godspacelight.com)
At the Sink
As I froth up the water running into the sink
I froth up thoughts of you in my life God.
Keep me bubbling with the quest for honesty
the quest for growth
I don’t want to stagnate
in the scum of my own ignorance.
in the floating debris of my mistakes
I feel dirty with the things that go wrong in my days
but want to come out clean,
like the utensil I pull out of the sink right now.
Take my mistakes
and wash them down the gurgling plughole Oh God,
and let me start clean again.
Written by Marian Wilcox, 1988
