Spring makes me want to fling open windows and clean from top to bottom. Whether life is going smoothly or bumping through a rough patch, I find a good deep clean to be healing and restoring.
To really deeply clean, you have to strip beds, flip mattresses, empty cabinets and beat rugs. In short, you have to make a mess. That’s one reason I love Franciscan contemplative Richard Rohr’s phrase for the eternal patters of change and transformation, “Order, Disorder, Reorder.” Could there be a better description of spring cleaning?
Rohr says that for change and transformation to happen, we have to move from Order through “a period – or many periods – of Disorder.” Often that means loss and disappointment. The disorder stage is all about letting go of control. (See Rohr’s The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder [Franciscan Media, 2020]).
Then we can open ourselves to Reorder, where we radically “let go and let God.” Order, Disorder, Reorder. Life, Death, Resurrection. We enact this pattern again and again as we live our lives and clean our living spaces.
This message is excerpted from “Spring cleaning” by Anne E. Basye in the April 2021 Gather magazine. Today is the Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere.
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