Finding God underneath the clutter

Lately I've been obsessed with the clutter around my house - the piles of bills and credit card applications and catalogs, the mounds of school papers that come home in duplicate and triplicate in backpacks filled to overflowing, the "to do" lists and calendars filled with more events than one family can handle. It's all getting to be too much for me these days. 

Of course, the clutter is nothing new. When you have kids, and probably even when you don't, you just can't keep up with the overwhelming influx of information that streams into the house. 

Believe it or not, my new compulsion to rid our lives of clutter doesn't have so much to do with cleanliness, as it has to do with godliness. I am convinced that the outward clutter in our house is causing inward clutter in our souls.

Think about it: Monks and nuns living in monasteries are not surrounded by piles of unopened mail and a never-ending supply of winter catalogs. That would be too distracting to the interior work at hand. 

Instead they live in bare rooms, cells, where their attention cannot be diverted by anything unimportant. I'm convinced that you can't combat the mental and emotional chaos experienced in contemplation if you don't first combat the physical chaos in your kitchen or bedroom or wherever it is you spend most of your time.

You can see the trickle-down effect of the chaos conundrum in our day-to-day lives. Our plates are beyond full - from the literal plate heaped with too much food to the figurative plate heaped with too many commitments. 

Is it any wonder, then, that when we try to clear our minds and make room for God to enter, we find ourselves tripping over so much mental refuse that we often give up rather than wade through it?

Well, that's how it is for me, at least. When I settle down to prayer, my mind does the mental equivalent of cartwheels or juggling. 

Suddenly everything I need to do or have been meaning to do, from a simple load of laundry to a complicated book proposal, is front and center, tempting me to get up from my prayer space and make better use of my time. Silence can be scary because we just might hear something we don't like, something that makes us realize we have to change our ways or at least our attitudes. 

So we often abandon the silence before it has a chance to take hold and run back to the clutter, ever so thankful that there are piles of mail to distract us and lots of events that need attending. Goodness, I'm busy. I'll pray tomorrow.

But it's never tomorrow. All we have is today, right now, even if we haven't quite conquered all the clutter. I'll keep sifting through those piles of paper, but I'll also keep making time to pray in silence, even when it doesn't always feel productive. 

Surely one of these days everything will align and my countertops and my mind both will be clear at the exact same time. Good thing our God is patient.

(Mary DeTurris Poust of Delmar is author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Catholic Catechism.")

(11/20/08)