Clean Monday – Aspirational Adventures

Clean Monday – 18th March 2024

This will also appear on Godspacelight at some point this week

Spring in my local park – March 2024. Photographed by myself

I did a piece last year for Clean Monday and only just remembered as the ideas fell into my head to write a piece this year

This year’s is taking a very different tack. I won’t go over what I wrote last time. You can read it if you want. This year I am much more focused on the cleaning angle.

Until March 2020 I rented the top two rooms out in my house with Airbnb. This meant that almost every day I was having to scrub down my house, check for dust, hidden dog toys, that we’d not left anything just lying about. It was a hard job but at that time I had the grace for it and almost enjoyed it. Then enter lockdown and Covid. My daughter lived with us for eleven of the main sixteen months. My husband was now working from home. There was no thought of anyone coming to stay over the 2020/21 period. So no real worry about keeping things too clean.

Lockdown ended. Daughter went back to her own town and back to work. Husband has continued working in the top small bedroom, venturing into his office occasionally but not regularly. All this gave me time to re-evaluate whether I wanted people staying in my house; to which the answer was No. The grace had gone and so it was time to move on with what I did with my time.

I’ve got more into my writing, into praying, into study, into coffee with friends. Life has changed. But so has my love of doing housework.

So with spring slowly appearing I have decided I need to give the house a real spring clean. I wrote the list. I planned out the rooms – what needed doing and how. I checked I had the required tools and products. I even checked the date to see what would be good one to start. What better date than today?

Or maybe tomorrow? Or when it’s warmer? Or just before we go on holiday? Or when we come back from holiday? Or just before certain friends come to stay? Or maybe I need to buy a steamer or a handheld hoover? Or perhaps I’ll do the car first? Or the garden? Or the dog?????

But then I realised how much I can be like this with my Christian life. I make the lists of what I want from this season, what books to read, the journal to write in, put an allotted time in my diary – and then …. Well there is always tomorrow. Next week. After the holidays. After friends come to stay. After I’ve bought a certain book. Perhaps the dog needs big hike in the woods and I could pray then/write poetry then/get closer to God then.

EXCUSES! Nothing more than excuses! A fear? Of what? Of the changes God might make?

Aren’t we good at finding plausible excuses?Yet the Bible has much to say about not putting off to tomorrow what you can do today. I thought there were only one or two but Open Bible has collected 46!!! Forty six bible verses that pertain to doing things when you say you’ll do them and not putting them off! Oh My Goodness!!!! That has certainly surprised me.

So perhaps I will get on and start on those spring cleaning chores. Though I think I’ll listen to Christine’s Liturgical Rebels podcasts as I do. Covering both the physical cleaning and a bit of spiritual cleaning too. And hopefully the biggest thing I’ll learn is not to put off till tomorrow what I am more than capable of doing today.

Clean Monday

Pondering walk by the river in the sunshine

Today is Clean Monday which Christine Sine explores a bit of in her post Meditation Monday for today. This is a festival in the Christian Orthodox Church, a public holiday in Greece, for people to prepare for Lent.

In the Western Protestant Church we often wait until we are in the 40 days of Lent which starts on Wednesday with Ash Wednesday, before we start the business of trying to find time to set our hearts towards God. I like the idea of having whole day beforehand, before even Shrove Tuesday, which was the day for eating the last of the winter’s rich foods before the Lenten fast. So even before celebrating and preparing the Orthodox Church was clearing out.

I like the idea of clearing out firstly before celebrating and feasting and then moving into fasting and connecting. For me this means keeping my heart right and working on the whole forgiveness things, the whole “clean hands and clean heart” and of creeping closer to God in the way that works for me.

In Christine’s blog she says that “because Orthodox celebrations still follow the Julian calendar rather than the Georgian calendar we are familiar with, this year Clean Monday is on February 27th as Eastern Orthodox Ash Wednesday is March 1st.”

I rather like that Clean Monday comes on 27th February. That is the day of my friend’s funeral. It feels, for me, like that will be a time to clear out some stuff inside of me to do with her, to do with what she represented in my life, and move onwards in a different way.

With all the friends I have each fill a different niche, each have different “functions” in my life. For my friend Tessa that we cremate next Monday the part she filled in my life cannot be filled by another and that’s ok. I have been feeling over the last week that what she filled doesn’t need filling any more, that even before she died the time had come for me not to have that need in my life. But now that she has really gone I have been having to clear out that need. So for me, with my heart, I think Monday 27th will definitely be a Clean Monday for me.

[Watch out for another post tomorrow about Clean Monday which is being posted on http://www.godspacelight.com and I will put up on here]