By Greg Jones
People who study the universe talk about something called “Dark Matter.” Turns out that the majority of the matter in the universe is invisible, not only to the animal eye, but to any kind of eye – whether x-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma ray, or whathaveyou. Dark Matter is something which dominates the mass of the universe, cannot be seen, and is only detectable because of one thing: it has weight. Yes, the dark stuff of the cosmos has weight – and as the cosmologists tell us, it’s quite literally pulling on everything. It can’t be seen, but it’s heavy anyway.
I discovered a bunch of Dark Matter on my trusty five year old laptop today. Well, not exactly, but I discovered that 99% of my hard drive was full, and I had no more room to do the basics any more. Things were running slow. I had to get rid of good programs, just to manage the shortage of disk space. Yet, every time I tried a quick stab at getting rid of junk on my drive, it didn’t seem to make much difference – there were literally billions of bits of extra stuff on there that I couldn’t seem to see, find or detect in order to remove. The digital Dark Matter was keeping me from the mission I needed to accomplish with that laptop – and it seemed helpless.
Then I went after it with a purpose. I got some good hard drive cleaning software, and with that and about an hour’s time, I went through that little rig and found all the stuff I didn’t need or want anymore. Mostly, it was stuff that was all hiding in dastardly places allowed for by the arcane operating system born into the rig by its maker. All that stuff that was hiding in there – running either little routines or simply taking up space – well I got rid of it. All of it. And it felt really good. And now, that little computer runs better.
What about you? As Jesus said to Peter, “your mind is too much on human things.” Are you weighed down with all sorts of Dark Matter? Old things that are stashed in your mind, heart and soul that have weight, but you’ve lost sight of them? Is it time for a spring cleaning of issues, concerns, anxieties, agendas that are almost forgotten, but yet still remembered in the attic of your mind?
Maybe, this Lent is a time to look for that dark matter of the soul – and – well – chuck it out. It’s called confession. It’s called prayer. It’s called letting go of dark matters, and allowing the Spirit to cleanse us.