Yesterday I spent a satisfying morning with the jet wash, cleaning a few years grime from our patio. The whole area now looks lighter. Then the bottom fence likewise a pale green with several years stuff! A day or two earlier I scarified the lawn and removed several bags of moss from a modest area of grass. Then because I'm a good neighbour, and modest with it, I cut and edged our next door neigbour's grass. A couple of car loads of assorted debris for recycling, from garden and garage and it feels like Spring and a chance to declutter and impose order on our living environment.
Finding equilibrium and balance of the inner life is a wee bit more subtle than a jet wash, a scarifier and a local recycling plant. The Christian Spiritual tradition is studded with classics of the spiritual life that urge simplicity, discipline, focus, detachment, and a decluttering of the spirit. Such attentiveness to the essentials is brought about by focus on 'the one thing necessary', and on making the right call in the choice between life and death, and on not storing up treasure on earth, and therefore not being so self preserving that instead of holding on to our lives we lose it going after all the wrong things and for all the wrong reasons.
Moss suffocates grass; grime makes paving stones slippery; clutter is simply that, a distracting messiness that imperceptibly takes over until we can't see past it. Post-Easter is a good time for re-aligning our priorities. Those encounters in the Gospels with the Risen, crucified yet risen, are spare of details and replete with significance, vitality and the life changing energy of new possibility.
Peter was so in huff with life, so wracked and wretched with guilt, that he went back to fishing, where he was in control, he could remake his world. But he caught nothing, till the stranger on the shore shouted into his self-obsessing despair, and hauled him out of his safety boat back into the real world.
Thomas would have died for and with Jesus, but when push came to shove, he too was overcome by that strange paralysis that can sometimes drain us of moral courage and trust in life. So his demand for evidence may well have been a form of denial, until his demand is taken seriously, and literally, and he stares into the wounded side of the Saviour.
Mary Magdalene had all the courage of those whose hearts are overhwelmed by love, and whose new life goal is faithfulness. Grief like hers is told with a sparse accuracy, 'thinking he was the gardener…'; bloodshot eyes, a weeping heart, ears not attuned to hope and therefore unable to recognise the one voice she hoped to hear, and the desperate pleading to have one last look, one last hold and touch of Jesus body.
You can't read these stories without being drawn into them. Jesus comes to Peter whose guilt makes it impossible for him to face himself, and drags out of him finally, and restoratively, an admission of love; and he comes to Thomas, the one whose doubt and despair coalesce in posing an impossible question, and imposing apparently impossible standards of evidence; and he comes to Mary Magdalene, to the faithful follower who goes on following even when it seems the journey is over. And within all three he renews life, he infuses hopefulness, he restores energy, he opens up new horizons. He takes the broken hearts and confused minds and disconnected activities of the traumatised and gives back a love that will sustain, a faith that will endure, and a purpose that is its own meaning.
Reading these stories over the next week or two, is an exercise in scarifying out what suffocates love, jet washing the overlays of grime that obscure the path on which God calls us, and clearing out the clutter that just gets in the way. Kierkegaard famously said, "Purity of heart is to will one thing". Scarifying the lawn, jet-washing the paths, de-cluttering our living space. Meeting Jesus in these post-Easter stories might do the same for mind and heart.
I saw this Raphael Cartoon of Christ's renewed charge to Peter, in the V&A a few years ago. It is a beautiful thing.
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