Nativity Catholic Church
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The Smell of Pine Sol Every Friday morning I am greeted by a wonderful, refreshing scent as I enter my office. Early in the morning before I arrive, our parish maintenance custodians are busy tending to the parish offices, giving them a quick sprucing up after a full week of activity. I’m not sure they actually use the brand product Pine Sol, but it sure has the distinctive smell of the stuff. When I walk through that office doorway on Friday morning, I have two experiences. One keeps me anchored here in the present and one takes me back in time. Starting every Friday morning knowing that some serious cleansing has gone on in my office provides a kind of creature comfort. The smell of the Pine Sol entering my nostrils tells me: it’s fresh, it’s clean, it’s a new beginning. No matter what has gone on in there in the days preceding the great Friday morning cleanup, a pure and pristine aura fills the room—in a sense, a kind of purging seems to have occurred. But I am also drawn backward in time by that not-to-be-ignored, all-too-recognizable scent. My grandmother Emma, amongst her varied and voluminous talents, wielded a mean scrub bucket and brush—and she had a penchant for Pine Sol! She scrubbed many a floor—not only in her own home, but in the homes of others as well. Even when she and my grandfather lived in an apartment building, my grandmother insisted on keeping the entry halls clean and fresh for the other residents. Once a week, she’d get on her hands and knees (the only real way to scrub a floor!) to scour the floors and stair risers with her beloved Pine Sol. Pushing open the building’s doors upon our visits, I could always tell when she had been on one of her scrubbing missions, as the aroma filled the whole building, and provided that same sense of freshness, cleansing and yes, purging. I think of the Lenten season and the Lenten journey as a type of Pine Sol experience! In anticipation of the cleansing and renewing waters of Easter baptism and the renewal of our commitment to follow Christ, we spend these days and weeks purging ourselves, with God’s trusted hand of course, of all the darkness and sinfulness that keeps us from living the abundant life that Jesus came to deliver. One of our Elect (those preparing for the Easter sacraments) commented after celebrating the first “Scrutiny” ritual at 5 pm Mass last Saturday, that he felt as though he had received a good “scrubbing” while he and the community prayed for the Elect to be delivered from evil and the destructiveness of sin. In these Lenten days, we pray for the grace of freshness, cleansing, and yes, purging. We pray for a fresh beginning in recommitting ourselves to the promises of our baptism, to a more faithful giving of ourselves to the Lord and God’s people. For many of us, our commitment to Christ needs constant rekindling, for we all lapse into laziness or doing the bare minimum (and sometimes even less than the minimum). We pray for cleansing from the ravages of sin in our lives. Perhaps the image of sin as “dirt on our souls” has long gone out of favor, but there is a sense that when we are truly struggling with sin and temptation, we feel dirty, messy and as though we’ve been dragged through the mud. The Lenten season provides not only the Elect, but also all of us the opportunity for a good “scrubbing.” We pray for purging, as well, in order to rid ourselves of the obstacles that prevent us from truly knowing and loving the Lord in our lives and in our relationships with others. Sometimes this purging comes by choice, and at other times, we are stripped and shown for whom we truly are in spite of our attempts to keep the façade working. I look forward to Friday mornings—but not because it’s the end of the week (after all, for a priest, Friday is merely the pause before the work-weekend)—but because for a few faint moments, I can breathe in a part of my past, as well as step into a new beginning. Indeed, this is our Pine Sol season, where God’s gracious invitation to repentance and forgiveness wafts through the Lenten air we breathe, and where we are given the opportunity to soak it into our very beings—and once again to know ourselves and others as fresh, clean, and purged by the loving hands of God.
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