Joel 2: 12-16a; Luke 4: 1,2

Spiritual Spring cleaning

Dear friends,

Let’s talk about Spring cleaning.  It’s a little early, but the weather seems to be warming up slightly.  Can you think of things you would like to get rid of, things you just don’t need and that clutter your life?  I think we all can.  But what if we apply that to our spiritual life?  Could we come up with items just as fast? Probably not.  It seems a bit too abstract.  It’s not tangible. We can’t wrap our brains around it.  Let’s see if we can get there with a story.

I recently finished reading a novel by Richard Russo with the title: “That Old Cape Magic.” It is about a Hollywood TV screenwriter who also teaches at a college and about his thirty year old marriage and the wedding of his only daughter. He is a man who wants to live his life well and effectively and happily like all of us, but has great difficulty doing so, not unlike us in many ways.  But you could say this man Jack Griffin has a sour streak.  He is always putting people down and judging them.  This seriously affects his relationships of course.  He is always trying to get away from placing he looks down on: L.A., Sacramento and the Mid-west to be specific.  He gets his attitude from his parents, cranky college professors who graduated from Yale, wanted to teach in the Ivy League but wound up teaching in state college in Indiana.  They would get invitations to teach at one Ivy League school or another, but never at the same time, so they never went.  However every year they would rent a cottage on Cape Cod and as soon as they crossed one of the two bridges that lead to the island they would start singing “That Old Cape Magic.”  It was a refuge for them, a place they could spend the summer reinvigorating themselves.

It is also the place where Jack Griffin finds himself again two years in a row because of two weddings he has to attend, one being his daughters.  At the time of the first wedding he carries his father’s ashes in an urn in the trunk of his rental car, determined to pour it into the sea off the Cape. He finally enters the waves, trips, loses the urn and then, to his relief, retrieves it. Happy to have retrieved it, he takes the urn back home again.  The next year he comes back to the Cape he carries two urns, one with his father’s ashes, the other with his mother’s ashes.  The story becomes all about how Jack is like his over-critical, cranky, inconsiderate, selfish parents returning with nostalgia to a place they loved carrying their ashes, ashes he can’t quite get himself to release.  It is as if he won’t rid himself of their voices.  And that’s what it is all about: the voices of his parents.  At the last wedding he finds himself reacting to people the way his mother would: full of sharp sarcasm.  In the end he can let go, dumping out the urns at opposite ends of the Cape his parents both loved, because while they loved each other they were divorced and his mother insisted they be laid to rest at significant distance from each other.

Friends, Jack Griffin has emotional and spiritual Spring cleaning.  While he loved his parents, he cannot get rid of their anger at the world and his anger at them.  He wants to hold on to it, keep it in the trunk of his rental car.  As long as he holds on to the urn, he can keep resenting them for the sourness and disrespect and negativity they brought to the world.  It isn’t until in the end that he can do spiritual spring cleaning and ask himself who he really is and should be? He is finally free to be the kinder person he should be.

In Luke Jesus hears the voice of the Evil One Who tempts Him to take power because it is at Jesus’ fingertips, but he rejects it.  Instead of grabbing a hold of all the things that would make Him famous but would keep Him from with growing into the spiritual leader He should be, He renounces the power to follow God. Jesus will not take on the baggage of power that will make him nasty and selfish. So from the beginning to the end of his ministry Jesus travels light.

Friends, we call carry all kinds of baggage from the life we lived so far: the disappointments, the resentment, the anger, the grudges, but also the sins.  At Lent it is time to try to let go of them, to dump them out in the waves and live our lives renewed and with less weight to carry around.  We keep the memories and the love, but we get rid of all the bad stuff that weighs us down.  May God help us do so.