Cleaning Your Spiritual Pantry
You know that moment when you reopen a long lost food package in the far reaches of your pantry? You take a tiny bite, you ponder if it's crispy or crumbly or both, and you might spit it out as you wonder to yourself - how long has this been here? My husband and I play this game we lovingly named GFSoB (Gluten Free, Stale or Both) when we clean out our pantry. If it's his gluten-filled food that has gone bad, I have no problem throwing it away. It doesn’t serve me anyways. But even when my gluten free delights are clearly past their prime, I linger, I dally in deciding what to do. The truth is - whether the expired, stale foods in our kitchen pantry, or the storerooms of our souls - it can be hard to let go of what no longer serves us.
What is in the storeroom of your soul and how long has it been there? Why are you holding on to it? What would it look like to throw it away? As Marie Kondo and Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian both teach, you can thank it for its service, too.
The journey from enslavement to freedom is an act of cleaning out our spiritual pantry, combing the cupboards and containers that store painful memories, broken relationships, and difficult emotions, casting out the puffed up feelings of envy and excessive pride, removing the hametz that Rabbi Arthur Waskow calls the “swollen sourness in our lives.” In making room on the shelves of our soul, we create space for rebirth and renewal. While Passover invites for the bitter and the sweet to commingle, this spiritual spring cleaning allows us to gaze beyond those narrow straits of enslavement unto the expansive shores of freedom.
For more reflections on Pesach, check out the latest episode of the OMfG Podcast
Chag Sameach from our home to yours!