The Beauty of Picking Up the Mess...Again

This excerpt was taken from Mother Mary Francis, the Poor Clare Abbess who wrote The Art of Waiting, a series of meditations for Advent.A special thanks to my Mom for passing this along.
Enjoy, while I go wash Bella's hands.... :)

“A Cleaned Heart”

Is not a cleaned heart what Holy Church would have to mean for us poor little ones by a clean heart?  We look into this, as I have been looking into it in my own prayer these last days, asking, what do we mean by a a clean house?  What do we mean by a clean kitchen?  There can be something that looks like cleanness just because nothing is going on.  Let us linger for a couple of minutes on those material aspects.  There are two ways, for instance, you could have a clean kitchen.

One, is that the cook never does anything there, that no service goes on there. Everything is in its proper place and is never taken out; there is no work, there is no love, there is no energy, there is no spending.  Nothing is ever spilled because nothing is ever done.  Nothing ever burns because nothing is ever cooked.  And it’s a clean kitchen.

Then, there is the clean kitchen that is the result of loving labor after there have perhaps been some spills, some scorching, some pans boiling over-and then there is always cleaning up.  Lots of work has gone on, and wherever human work goes on, there are always going to be some spills, there are always going to be some pans boiling over and there are always going to be some things that don’t turn out as we had hoped.  But then it is all cleaned up afterward.  That is a very different kind of a clean kitchen from the first kind.

Then too, there a clean house, the kind of thing we have heard about, read about, shivered about:  women who are so tyrannical that they have a spotless house because nobody is ever really allowed to live there.  Nothing really happens, in a deeply human sense.  It’s clean, all right, but for lack of life.  And then again, there is a clean house in which a mother of many children has spent herself, every day, cleaning up the mud, sweeping the rug, washing the dishes because people have been fed.  You could have very clean dishes if you never fed anyone.  You could have a shiny stove if nothing is ever cooked on it—going back to our first image. But there can be the house that is always so beautifully clean because the mother is always cleaning up the inevitable messes that human living entails; the happy little disorders that come of living, and the messes that perhaps should not have been made but then should not be pointed at –just cleaned up.  And that is a very different kind of clean house.

In our spiritual life, the parallel is very evident;  nothing else could be meant by a clean heart but a cleaned heart. Every time we confess our faults, every time that we face the truth without the depression born of pride, we are cleaned, and we can come with a clean heart to Him.  For us to come with a clean heart to God, as the Church asks us to pray, means that I come as one cleansed.  And if I have had to be cleansed several million times, that can be transliterated very accurately as saying I have been loved by God several million times, because He has never said, “I’ve had enough.  I cleaned you for the last time.”  but every time He wants to clean us so that we can come to Him with a clean heart.