Our first apartment was on the second floor of an old Baltimore row home.
That meant early December found us shoving a pine tree through a much-too-narrow door, dragging the thing up two dozen carpeted stairs, twisting it around not one but two impossible corners and precariously balancing it in the center of our main room before adorning it with Christmas lights and a hodgepodge of colorful ornaments.
That was the easy bit. Early January found us struggling to reverse the process.
The image that comes most readily to my mind is the carpet of the hall and stairway covered in brown and green pine needles. The tree itself wasn’t all that difficult to get back out the door — it was just a matter of persistence and pushing. But the cost was a layer of needles an inch thick.
We were at that early point in our marriage when we did not yet own a vacuum cleaner.
And so, broom in hand and sweat beading on my brow, I swept away at those carpeted stairs, determined to be both a good and thorough neighbor.
Sweeping pine needles off a carpet is tedious, terrible work.
Nowadays, I try to remind myself of that when I’m cursing my vacuum cleaner, swishing back and forth, again and again over the same spot in my home. I watch as the pine needles dance this way and that, dutifully avoiding the sucking power of my cleaning machine.
More than ten years later, and what have I got to show for it? New tools, new spaces, exact same problem. I’m no longer sweeping a carpet, but I still can’t rid myself of wayward pine needles in a timely and organized fashion.
We like to believe — or I do, at least — that with the accumulation of time, money and wisdom, our problems will fade. We’ll leave old vices or challenges thoroughly defeated in the past as we grow. We’ll encounter new and novel ones that we will then proceed to conquer in similar fashion.
Because of these beliefs, we grow deeply frustrated when confronted with the truth: Rather than defeat our vices, we must learn to dance with them. Anger or anxiety — to name but two common examples of challenges so many of us face — are part of who we are. We must learn to love those parts, to understand where there is good and set aside that which is unhelpful.
And this challenge — fill in the vice or struggle that is most relevant to you — will likely be ours to bear for life.
This is a core part of the spiritual journey. And I believe grappling with this truth hinders or advances our relationship with our God. So often, particularly at this time of year, we assess our progress, be it physical, mental, spiritual, emotional or what have you. We want to tally successes; we are ashamed of our failures.
It’s tempting, then, to look at an ongoing struggle with an old vice — or the resurgence of one — as a personal failure. We believe that God, too, looks at us this way: a cascading disgrace who can’t rise above the challenges of the past.
This is wrong. Remember: We pursue the ongoing dance, the constant invitation to return to the floor in delight and perseverance. Rather than defeat our vices, we dance with them because that dance continues our growth, gives us strength, helps us to stay spry and alert, humble and receptive to mercy, and ready to act for God’s greater glory and the good of all people.
I began with a silly story of pine needles — remember that? It doesn’t matter if I sweep them away or vacuum them up, I find them still scattered about my home throughout the year. My best cleaning efforts are always in vain judged in this way.
But perhaps that’s not how God wishes we judge our progress or success. Perhaps so-called success is simply the patient, diligent work of picking up those pine needles as we inevitably encounter them, one day at a time.