doing the dishes

Sometimes I like doing the dishes, but often it feels like drudgery.

The best dishes I've ever done were the dishes I did at church. Before I had my daughter, I was on our church's Altar Guild, and I helped to wash up the things from Mass, and to wash the wax build-up out of the votive candle holders. Doing that menial task felt peaceful and good, because I was doing it in the Lord's house. I was washing up his things.

I think I'm going to try to think about that whenever I have dishes to do, even though they're dishes full of applesauce slop and sticky animal-cracker goop, instead of wax and wine and bread crumbs. (The dishes that were used in the Eucharist, btw, are washed over a special sink called a piscina (sp?), which drains straight into the ground, instead of into the sewers, out of respect for the body and blood of Christ.) Because the dishes at the church are more special and holy, but the work I do for my kids is the work God's assigned me to do right now. And as St. Paul said, whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all to the glory of God.

I'd like all my life to be full of that kind of peace, the peace that's found in places like church sanctuaries, where people have prayed for years and years. Eventually, I want to be, myself, a place where prayer has happened for years and years. So I'm thinking I should pray all the time, even in the middle of the dishes.


Okay, I can't post this without feeling hypocritical unless I add this caveat: I'm sure as heck not there yet. But I think these things have to go together somehow, that what I find at church has to be able to come home, because God's God in both places and I'm me in both places, and I want to be as aware of him at home as I am at church. This is sort of a what-I'm-aiming-to-get-to-when-I'm-eighty post. I have to add that, because I feel like this blog is largely aspirational. It's about what I'm aiming towards, what I'm aspiring to, what I want to learn. I'm not there yet. Lord help me. Amen.


peace of Christ to you,
Jessica