January 23rd: Vacuuming my way to heaven

Friday night I got a call reminding me that a few weeks ago I signed up to help clean the church and that the volunteer janitors were to meet at ten in the morning. The major tasks were emptying all the trash cans, cleaning the bathrooms, washing some of the glass windows at the major entrances to the church, and vacuuming. Halls, classrooms and the chapel. This morning I won the janitorial lottery. I got to vacuum.

The great thing about vacuuming is that you can see a difference when you’re done. Sort of like mowing the lawn but on carpet. There’s a sense of accomplishment. And when you’re lucky enough to have an industrial strength vacuum with a really, really long chord and plenty of electrical outlets it’s a sort of zen experience. I hesitate to use the word zen in describing vacuuming my place of worship because it’s probably not really kosher for a Mormon to use a Buddhist expression…come to think of it, kosher isn’t the right word to use in talking about the doctrinal conflict a Christian guy would have with both zen AND kosher. But my point is, vacuuming the church CAN bring a sort of meditative enlightenment that’s rather wonderful. At least this morning it was for me.

While I was pushing that powerful inhaler of all that’s in its path I found myself remembering that from the end of my eighth grade year until I was a missionary in South Africa as a twenty year old I lived in places where we didn’t have a chapel of our own. We rented auditoriums of Junior Highs in Illinois, basements of the Methodist Church and then lunch rooms of a Catholic middle school in New Jersey. We were in a constant state of fundraising my entire teenage years, dreaming of the day when we’d have our own meeting house with a place to worship together, teach one another the word of God, be baptized and confirmed, have Christmas programs and guest speakers and cultural events and parties and of course basketball.

When you don’t grow up in places where there’s enough members of your church to have your own chapel I found that I bonded with those who shared my faith in a profound way. We had faith but we yearned for a building to build that faith in. And in the yearning and sacrificing for the place we could call our own we built our faith in a unique and lasting way. That doesn’t mean my spiritual experience as a Mormon in Illinois and New Jersey in the sixties was better than those with their own churches every twelve blocks but it was different. Today I was feeling grateful for the people who built the building I was vacuuming. I felt really lucky that enough people used this building that it had so much carpet it took three grown men an hour and a half to finish the job. And I felt quite fortunate to spend some time pondering the nature of faith, the role of spiritual things in my life, the reality and goodness of God while pushing and pulling a really powerful vacuum cleaner.

I never felt this way vacuuming at home. Perhaps I should learn how. I’m usually in a hurry trying to organize what I’ll do AFTER I get my job done. But today, at the Church, there was something else going on that I wasn’t expecting. Gratitude, peace, reflection, even meditation. I never knew that by going on a Mission to be Happy I’d find myself vacuuming my way to heaven.

T