The Blessing of a Broken Dishwasher (Matt. 6.24-34)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

March 18, 2018

 

When the dishwasher broke, I consulted the manual. It was my father’s copy. I pulled it from the shelf and began to read:

Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.[1]

I replaced the manual and prepared to wash the dishes by running warm water and soap into a bin while opening the window above the sink. Sunlight streamed across the counter. There was birdsong and a gentle breeze. I remembered the manual’s advice and followed my breath. Breathing in, I felt the ceramic bowls and warm water. Breathing out, I carefully washed each one with a sponge. It was the high point of my day.

I don’t know how long it took to wash the dishes. I wasn’t looking at the clock, I wasn’t listening to the news or the radio, and I wasn’t in a hurry. But once I had finished, I picked up the phone and called the dishwasher repair company. Our dishwasher, chosen by the previous owners of the house, turned out to be fancy, and required a specialist. I was connected to a woman with a strong Eastern European accent. She asked about the make and model and told me my machine was complicated. It would take a few days before someone could come. That’s all right, I told her. We know how to wash dishes. Besides, I like doing them by hand.

Me, too, she said. It’s much more pleasant. Then she began to reminisce on the phone about her childhood and how everyone washed the dishes and dried them together. Many hands made quick work. It was so nice, she said. I agreed. I know, I know. Who needs a dishwasher, anyway? I asked. Nobody, she said. So we’ll see you on Monday. To my great relief, when the technician arrived he had only one of the two needed parts, which necessitated a back order and another week or two of happily washing the dishes by hand. I returned to the manual.

It was a worn copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. The book was given to my father by a colleague a long time ago and has sat on my shelf for more than 25 years. I consult it for minor home projects and spiritual repairs; it reminds me that most things that break aren’t things I actually need. And it also reminds me of what I do need. At the beginning of the book, Thich Nhat Hanh writes about when he was still a novice monk and his job was to wash the dishes for a community of about 100 people. They did not have enough soap. The water was cold and a large pot had to be boiled for washing. It took a long time. So he learned to treat it as a mindfulness exercise.

“While washing the dishes,” he writes, “one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.”[2] This is, in a sense, the most Zen thing he could possibly say for its training of the mind on a single thing in order to bring the practitioner fully present. In focusing on doing the thing that you are doing, he suggests, you are actually there, in the moment, awake to the only reality that truly belongs to you: the present. Again, he learned this as a novice monk. The idea is not to get to the end of the 100 bowls. The idea is to be conscious, one bowl at a time.

This kind of wisdom, the non-worrying kind, is not unique to Zen, though that strand of Buddhism has made an art of sayings and practices that evoke a present-centered mindfulness. It also exists within our Christian tradition, or at least some of the sayings Jesus offered, like the verses we’ve heard today. Look at the birds of the air, he says, and consider the lilies of the field. They are not consumed by anything but the present; they do not fritter their lives away with worry. He says this in the context of a larger discourse on the impossibility of serving two masters. No one can love what is sacred and what is not at the same time, he teaches. Only one of them can hold our devotion. So love God in the way a lily or a sparrow would. Which is a lovely thing to say. If only he would elaborate.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard actually does elaborate. In his own writing on this passage, he says that there is actually a particular way we ought to be like the birds and the lilies. We should be quiet.

“From the lily and bird as teachers,” he writes, “let us learn silence, or learn to keep silent.”[3] He goes on to say that silence matters for us because we are such wordy creatures to begin with. We are always talking, always thinking, always breaking into nature’s great silence with the clumsiness of our words, which prevent us from hearing what is being said so loudly and clearly by the great, shining world all around us. Be quiet! says Kierkegaard. For God’s sake. But that is my paraphrase. What he actually says is, “In the deepest sense, this becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God, for as the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so is silence the beginning of the fear of God.”[4] To which we might only add that he is talking about reverence. To fear God is to revere the mystery that the word God so haplessly tries to capture. In the end, according to Kierkegaard, there are no words for it. Only the felt experience that leaves one trembling, mum, awestruck.

And while Kierkegaard isn’t a Zen teacher, for a moment he sounds like one when he writes, “Only by keeping silent does one [ever] encounter the moment. When one speaks, even if one says only a single word, one misses the moment. Silence is the moment.”[5] All our words simply paper over it and keep us from receiving the gift. Which brings us back to the kitchen sink.

As I mentioned, while washing the dishes I could hear birdsong through the window. So it’s not as if birds are completely silent. Yet they are often silent, which I suppose is why we notice their trills. And we are often not silent, which accounts for all the times we don’t. But whether we are talking or listening, there are great messages being relayed, miracles all around us, if you believe Thich Nhat Hanh, Søren Kierkegaard, or the Jesus they both so admired. His kin-dom, as the Gospel of Thomas puts it, is spread out all around us; it’s just that we don’t notice. I guess our dishwashers are too loud.

So the invitation to us, this Lent as we seek to deepen our understanding of peace and our practice of nonviolence, is to slow ourselves down and stop speaking long enough to hear what the silence is saying, to join ourselves in its reverent attention. We may do this while washing the dishes. While brushing our teeth. While driving a car. While lying down at the end of the day. While letting each thing be what it is and attending to it fully so that we are alive in the moment. Simply being in this way has always been one of the hardest things to do. But if each of us was to simply be and to and allow everyone and everything else to simply be, then the kin-dom would indeed be at hand. Not far way. Closer than we ever imagined.

These things are not easy to see. Especially now, in a culture that constantly urges us to rush, buy, spend, and seek — and with technologies engineered to grab at our attention by chiming, beeping, and buzzing with distraction. Even so, sometimes we really are given the chance to see and hear things differently. If we’re lucky, the dishwasher breaks. Or the smartphone does. Or the glint in a child’s eye breaks through. The sound of a friend’s voice. The feel of the breeze through the open window.

Washing the dishes can be everything, says the monk.

Lilies and birds can be our teachers, says the rabbi.

Silence can be a kind of reverence, says the philosopher.

To which we might all fill the sink with soapy water, take a deep breath, and whisper in gratitude. . .

Amen.

 

 

[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 85.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, translated and with an introduction by Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 16.

[4] Ibid., 17.

[5] Ibid., 24.