Clutter:  it adds up so fast.  I just cleared off my desk…well, last month. I’m really a very neat person. . Just don’t look in my closet. Just look at all this stuff accumulated over winter. Well, spring is coming.  Then I’ll be ready for spring clearing. Accumulation: it happens in our interior lives, too. Our minds bustle with so much undergrowth that has to be raked out. That’s an aim of Lent: to clear the mind so we can set our thoughts on things above.

Referring to having a “quiet hour,” Etty Hillesum in her autobiography An Interrupted Life writes: “A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. . . . the clutter is ever present.” Etty recommends meditation “to turn one’s innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of ‘God’ can enter you, and something of ‘love,’ too.”  She admits the clearing is not simple, but has to be learned.

Etty is right.  I need a “quiet hour” with focused meditation. Now where is my meditation book?  It’s somewhere under this pile.