Sabbath Devotional :: Vacuuming Epiphanies

Jesus at the Home of Mary and Martha by Minerva Teichert

This past week, I had the opportunity to clean the temple. For four hours on Monday morning, I vacuumed and disinfected sealing rooms and one endowment room in the Mt. Timpanogos Temple, just seven minutes from my home in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

I’ve always loved vacuuming. There’s something about the rhythmic back and forth of the motion, the steady whir of the motor, and those lovely lines left in the carpet that bespeak order, cleanliness, and a job well done.

I often have my best thoughts and receive my clearest inspiration while vacuuming. In fact, my husband and kids sometimes ask: “Have you had any vacuum epiphanies lately?” And so, to find myself vacuuming —in the temple! — was pure pleasure. Vacuuming behind the veil in the endowment room was especially transcendent. All that light! All that white! It was almost blinding. The carpet, the walls, the veil itself. At one point, I felt the very clear presence of someone with me. A spiritual being. I was hoping it was the Savior, but it wasn’t. It was my mother, who passed away after a brutal battle with breast cancer twenty years ago this coming November. It was both poignant and soothing to feel her there with me — she who had first taught me to love both vacuuming and the temple. We spent a sacred few minutes together there, vacuuming, and then it was time for me to clean the altar.

I knelt at that altar, dressed not in the robes of the holy priesthood, but in white scrubs, with white booties over my street shoes. And with a soft white cloth saturated in some kind of disinfectant that smelled appropriately celestial (and I’m sure was good for the environment too), I tenderly wiped down its pearly surfaces. It was a surreal, but holy experience.

Later, as I vacuumed the hallway leading to the sealing office, I looked up and saw a painting of Christ with Martha and Mary (you’ve all seen it; that same painting that graces the walls of countless Relief Society rooms across the globe (not the lovely Teichert attached here)), and had this thought: “Usually I come as Mary to the temple, but today I am here as Martha.” But then, almost, immediately, another thought came into my mind, but this one was not my own: “How I loved both Mary and Martha.”

Our Savior loved both sisters. How it must pain both Christ and his faithful disciple, Martha, when we reduce her to “the one who was ‘careful and troubled about many things'” and focus only on what appears to be an unfavorable comparison with her sister, Mary, and forget (or overlook) the fact that it was in large measure the fervent, proactive faith of Martha, the do-er, that allowed Christ to bring forth her brother from the tomb. Remember, it is Martha who runs out to meet Christ, while Mary “sat still in the house.” It is Martha who cries out, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee” (John 11: 20-22). And it is Martha who is one of the first among all mortals (second only after Nathanael) to recognize and declare Christ’s divinity: “Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world” (John 11:27).

We do a great disservice to both Martha and Mary when we reduce them to stereotypes, when we define them by one moment in time, one story, one act, one phrase.

We are complex beings, all of us — byzantine mixtures of good and bad, strength and weakness, the sublime and the ridiculous, the profane and the holy.

May we keep this in mind as we do our work here at MWEG. Let’s look for the pure, the holy, the majestic, and the noble in each other. Whether it be our next-door neighbor whose car sports a “Build the Wall!” bumper sticker but who is always the first to bring warm, nourishing food to anyone in need, or a member of Congress who voted for something we consider immoral but bravely put principles over party on another issue, let’s acknowledge the good even as we boldly call out that which is not ethical in our government.

As I finished up my cleaning shift last Monday and put the vacuum back into the cleaning closet, I thought about the fact that these small rooms packed with mops and brooms, dusters and rags, are right there in the temple, unseen behind pristine doors, but side-by-side with the holiest of holy spaces. And I marveled at the mystery of life and the miraculous coexistence of the mundane and the holy, the earthly and the heavenly, the decidedly terrestrial and the astonishingly divine.