The Clearing

What relief and respite teach us about callings and communion

1. 

Two strange sources of relief I remember each snowy winter:

First, the gratitude when your car’s wipers clean off the slush-drenched or ice-caked windshield, clearing the view and clearing the way. Especially in swirling storms, especially in rental cars where you fumble for whatever unfamiliar button or lever will bring the magical switch, transforming the danger of hidden views into an open reprieve.

Second, the strange emptiness of driving past a car crash site later, returning hours or days after the accident, the place where you rubber-necked with the gawker slowdown—or worse, the spot where you suffered yourself. Relief stands still in a landscape now calmed, the silent witness to the terror or horror (or more mildly, the crunch of inconvenience) that happened earlier.

Last week as my wipers raced to clear the snow, I inched past a jack-knifed semi-truck that tumbled down an icy embankment and cracked in two. By afternoon, the hazardous materials removal trucks had disappeared and the off-ramp was empty. No one else on the interstate knew the panicked prayers we’d whispered on the same drive that morning.

A clearing brings deep breaths: a wiped windshield or an unclogged interstate, a field after forests or a meadow open and inviting. The same word brings optimistic announcements, too: the weather or traffic or snow is clearing, thank God.

What relief when we can see a way forward where there once was none.

2. 

Within the Mass hides a moment I’ve come to love. The cleaning up after communion.

When I was younger, I found the ritual tedious and tiresome. Why make everyone wait while the priest cleans out the vessels and clears off the altar? Do it later; finish faster; get to the point; let’s go. Now I see more clearly the wisdom of the clearing. 

Because attention to the least and the last matters most.

Because God is found in quiet moments and ordinary gestures and small corners.

Because rituals remind us that details are not mere minutiae but bearers of the weight of living. 

The fact that everyone waits in the quiet church, kneeling in reverence while the washing up is done, stirs something deep within me. First we clear the way for communion; we offer the Body of Christ to the Body of Christ; we bring to each other what we hope to become. Then we clean up afterward, clearing the way forward.

Sometimes when I watch the holy clearing, I try to remember to pray for those who have made my meals, washed my plates, cleaned up my messes, done the dirty work a thousand unthanked times. Family, friends, strangers, saints and sinners. We do this for each other; we take turns doing the dishes.

May we never rush the work that others overlook. May we not minimize our daily rituals or sweep them into corners.

Here is holy labor, too.

3. 

The Gospels tell a delightful tale about clearing. The story starts with seekers determined to make a way for their paralyzed friend to get closer to Jesus.

They rip the roof off a house to get him inside, right next to the Holy. They clear aside carefully laid straw and mud and stick and tile, every best-laid plan to keep the elements out, and they lower their friend on a stretcher to the floor below. The gathered crowd parts to make a way for the man to reach the ground at Christ’s feet.

And right there within that double clearing—of roof and ground, between earth and sky—Jesus clears a way for this man to find healing. Your sins are forgiven…stand up, take your mat and go to your home.

Jesus clears a way towards wholeness and hope.

Only you know what needs to be cleared in your own life. But I can imagine tight knots may be held within you, muscled in memory, aching for years from anger or grief. Your weary mind or bruised heart may be blocked from faith’s flow, clogged channels keeping you from hearing the still small voice of the Living God. Your hidden loneliness might leave you longing for a group of friends who could clear the way, to find a place where you could meet Jesus, too.

Yet here is the pressing promise of Incarnation: the way has already been made.

Wading through birth and death and suffering and joy, Christ cleared a path through every part of the human experience, pushing ahead of us as through deep snow, leaving a wake wide enough for all to follow.

Tear the roof off the house. Go to your home.

4.

Callings need clearings.

Open space to see. Places to rest and recoup. A moment to catch our breath, within a day or a year or a decade, to realize how far we’ve come and remember where we’re heading.

Rare is the profession that provides sabbaticals, but we all need sabbath. Humans were made for weekly rest, to be freed from work and freed for worship.

Like a cleared-off kitchen counter ready for baking, or a tidied desk awaiting tomorrow’s work, or a row of seedlings needing to be thinned, or a vacant lot eager for construction, we cannot grow unless we have cleared.

When we are called in any certain direction, toward people or places that need tending, we are also called to keep removing obstructions that tumble into our path, whatever is unwanted or unneeded, whatever hinders us from moving toward God.

Your own callings and questions, your own twisting, turning paths invite you to stop and consider, time and time again: what walls need to be broken down or roofs ripped wide open to clear your way to God?

5.

Today, too, is a clearing.

This Saturday is the last day of the liturgical year. An ordinary day in Ordinary Time. A pause between chaos and clamor, a moment’s respite from the rush between holidays.

Make the most of this clearing. Do not miss it or mistake it for mere downtime.

Tomorrow the church will begin a new year. No party hats or noisemakers, no midnight toasts or lofty resolutions. Simply a month of quiet preparation and holy waiting, an Advent that always brings us back to the beginning. A place of stillness and silence, a holy hidden gestation while the radio blares that Christmas is already here.

We know it is not yet. What relief that we get a wider view, a longer stopping distance on this twisting, turning road.

May the way ahead be clearer. May we stay steady as we go. May the One we follow turn to show us that we are never as lost or lonely as we fear.

May what comes next bring the gifts we cannot know we need.

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A few links to keep reading if you’re curious about:

-       The purification of the vessels at a Catholic Mass: “In the Roman Rite the ritual purification concludes the ritual of the Sacred Mysteries.”

-       The healing story from Mark 2:1-12 or Luke 5:17-26