The summer before my senior year at Calvin, I packed a large suitcase and my violin and flew across the country to work for a few months in Yosemite National Park.
I spent my Sunday mornings as a volunteer helping to lead worship services in the park campgrounds. That particular aspect of the summer was complicated, with some meaningful moments but also some tricky ones, as the members of our volunteer team had differing perspectives on significant theological issues, including whether women were allowed to serve in ministry roles.
The rest of my week, though, was spent hiking, exploring, and working my full-time day job. Before I’d arrived in Yosemite, I had applied for a bunch of summer jobs in the park: retail, food service, housekeeping, pretty much anything that required no experience. I figured I could make the best of anything, but I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation when I received my job offer to work as a sanitation janitor at Curry Village.
Curry Village is not so much a traditional hotel as it is a collection of all-weather sturdy canvas tent cabins, with a few more traditional wooden cabins and cottage rooms thrown in the mix. These sturdy tent cabins have an incredible view and location, but no private bathrooms, so the sanitation janitors (or, as we all called ourselves, san-jans) were responsible for the handful of public restroom buildings that served these tent cabins.
There were two san-jans on duty every shift, and we walked from restroom to restroom, doing plenty of DCs (“disaster checks”) and trying to make sure each restroom got at least one deep clean every shift—toilets, sinks, soap dispensers, floors, and shower stalls (some, but not all, of the restrooms had showers).
Was this job often pretty gross? Sure. I’ve got some stories I won’t tell here. But, in hindsight, I am surprised just how much I remember enjoying those shifts. I got to walk outside in an incredibly beautiful place and I enjoyed chatting with my coworkers.
Trying to communicate to guests that a bathroom was closed for cleaning led to some humor in unexpected places. I fully understand the desperate need for a bathroom and have plenty of compassion for people in that scenario. But the nearest open bathroom was always 50 meters or less from the one closed for cleaning, and when I was cleaning the floors there was some risk of slipping and falling.
By about two weeks in, I realized people will ignore, walk around, or duck under a “bathroom closed for cleaning” sign surprisingly often, so the trick was to construct an obstacle course of brooms and cleaning supplies to make it physically impossible for someone to come in and slip on a wet floor. I’d still usually let someone polite and desperate sneak in if it was safe, but the floors do need to get cleaned sometime.
I worked these eight-hour cleaning shifts five days a week, mostly on my own. Sometimes I’d put in earbuds and listen to music, but other times I enjoyed the silence and time to think.
Early on that summer, a friend suggested I read The Practice of the Presence of God, a book he’d found meaningful while working a similar job. It’s a collection of teachings of and conversations with Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a 17th century Carmelite friar. Though Brother Lawrence was not well-known during his lifetime, spending his days working in the kitchen in his religious community in France, by all accounts those who knew him were drawn to his peaceful disposition and love for God. After Brother Lawrence’s death, Father Joseph de Beaufort compiled conversations he’d had with Brother Lawrence, along with some letters and maxims, into this small volume.
The title of the book gets at the core of the message: Brother Lawrence used his years of kitchen work to practice the presence of God. For him, this was about awareness and intention: “The holiest, most universal, and most necessary practice in the spiritual life is the presence of God. To practice the presence of God is to take pleasure in and become accustomed to [God’s] divine company, speaking humbly and conversing lovingly in our hearts with [God] at all times and in every moment.”
Writing this now makes me sound very pious, which I assure you I am not—remember, my days were spent challenging myself to create ever more difficult obstacle courses of cleaning supplies—but I remember carrying those words around with me that summer, and the gift they were in the midst of my routine.
That summer, perhaps more than any other time in my life, I was reminded of God’s presence in a way I still can’t entirely explain. I have always felt most connected to the Divine outdoors, so it’s no surprise this was true during my days off, which I spent on long hikes, usually alone. But it was true, too, in the early mornings and late nights spent walking from bathroom to bathroom, checking for disasters and putting things in order again.
Maybe it was practice, or intention, or prayer. But I tend to think it was simply a gift, the peace I needed for a summer before a very difficult year, a gift I may not find in exactly the same way again from a God whose presence I still believe is steady.
