Cleaning the filters
Opinion
In the ordinary rhythm of daily life, cleaning is one of the most basic and necessary acts. We clean our homes, our tools, our bodies and the spaces where we live and work.
Dust, grime and residue accumulate quietly, sometimes imperceptibly, until they impede function or obscure beauty. Thus, the idea of cleaning filters has become a routine, practical necessity. We clean air filters so our homes breathe fresh. We clean water filters so our drinking water is pure. We clean the filters in our cars so they function properly.
The same is true of our interior life. The ‘filters’ of our minds and souls – our habits of perception, judgment, and desire – can become clogged with resentment, distraction, self-centredness or complacency. Without regular spiritual cleaning, our capacity to see, to love and to respond to God’s voice becomes dulled. This was bought home to me recently when I had the chance to gather with some of our clergy on retreat at Sevenhill.
From our Catholic standpoint, this cleaning is not merely self-improvement; it is a form of grace-filled cooperation with the Holy Spirit, who purifies, renews, and reorients our hearts toward communion with God and others, our deepest self and the whole of creation. This is part of what it means to celebrate a Jubilee Year.
The metaphor of cleaning is deeply resonant in Catholic spirituality. Scripture often describes God’s work in us as washing, refining, or purifying. The Psalmist prays ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me’ (Psalm 51:10). This cry for cleansing is not simply moral regret but a plea for restoration of relationship – for renewed intimacy with the Creator who alone can make the heart whole. To ‘scour the filters’ of one’s life, then, is to invite God into the depths of our minds and soul, acknowledging the buildup of sin, indifference and fear, and consenting to the Spirit’s transforming work.
The Holy Spirit: The divine cleaner and refiner
Catholic tradition teaches that the Holy Spirit is the sanctifier, the divine presence who brings order from chaos and new life from what is dead. The Spirit is not a distant force but an active presence within creation and within each baptised person. Just as a gentle breeze clears the air of impurities, the Spirit breathes through the cluttered rooms of our hearts, stirring up what needs to be released and bringing fresh vitality where stagnation has taken hold.
This spiritual ‘cleaning’ is often neither quick nor comfortable. Like the scouring of a stubborn filter, it requires friction, patience and honesty. The Eucharist is the greatest way in which we can co-operate with this process, as is the sacrament of penance and prayer.
But even outside these sacramental encounters, the Spirit works in more subtle ways: through silence, through the nudge of conscience, through the voice of another person, or through the events of the world that awaken compassion and conversion.
To recognise the Spirit’s cleaning work in our lives is to recognise that God desires not perfectionism but openness. The Spirit does not scrub us into uniformity but restores our capacity for love, tenderness and discernment. This is a purification that allows us to see creation and humanity with renewed eyes – eyes of reverence and mercy.
From interior cleansing to care for creation
Catholic spirituality never separates interior renewal from outward responsibility. A clean heart sees creation not as an object to be used but as a gift to be cherished.
When Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ calls for ecological conversion, he identifies the ecological crisis as a reflection of an interior one. The pollution of air, water and land mirrors the pollution of our desires and priorities. We cannot expect a world of harmony if our inner landscapes remain disordered.
Cleaning the filters of one’s life, then, is also an act of ecological spirituality. It is a way of aligning one’s heart with the Creator’s intention for the world. When our spiritual filters are clear, gratitude replaces greed, stewardship replaces exploitation, and simplicity replaces excess. The Spirit’s purifying work opens us to what St Francis of Assisi saw so clearly – the kinship of all creation. In this light, care for creation is not a political agenda but a spiritual vocation: to participate in the Spirit’s ongoing work of renewal and healing.
To care for creation also means to care for those most vulnerable to environmental degradation – the poor, the marginalised and the displaced. The polluted river, the deforested land and the melting ice are not abstractions; they are realities that drive migration, poverty and suffering. The call to ecological conversion thus flows naturally into the call to welcome the stranger and the refugee.
Welcoming the stranger: A clean heart’s response
When our inner filters are clogged by fear, prejudice or indifference, we struggle to see the migrant or refugee as a neighbour, a child of God. The Spirit, however, cleanses these filters, restoring our sight so that we may recognise Christ in the stranger. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) exposes the blindness of the religiously observant who pass by suffering. Only the Samaritan, whose heart is free from the filters of ethnic and ritual prejudice, sees with compassion.
The Church, guided by the Spirit, is called to model this clarity of vision. Welcoming the stranger is not merely an act of social justice but a spiritual discipline – a way of keeping the heart supple and receptive to God’s voice. Pope Francis reminded us that the migrant is not a problem to be solved but a person through whom Christ calls to us. Each act of hospitality becomes a small participation in God’s cleaning of the world’s filters – the dismantling of walls that separate and harden hearts.
When we open our lives to those on the margins, we allow the Spirit to expand our narrow perspectives into the breadth of divine compassion. The Church herself becomes renewed, not by uniformity but by diversity, not by self-protection but by generosity. The Spirit who cleanses the heart also enlarges it.
A broader vision of the Church
In this broadened vision, care for creation, hospitality to migrants and the renewal of the heart are not separate missions but interconnected expressions of one Spirit-led life. The Spirit’s cleaning of the Church’s filters is ongoing; it requires repentance for past failures, courage to face present challenges, and faith in the transforming power of grace. The purified Church does not withdraw from the world but enters into it more deeply, bearing witness to the God who makes all things new.
Conclusion: Living the Psalm today
To clean the filters of one’s life is to engage in a humble and hopeful cooperation with the Spirit’s work of renewal. It is to allow God to scrub away what dulls our perception of truth and beauty, to rinse away the residue of selfishness and to polish our hearts until they reflect divine light. From this inner clarity flows outward action: reverence for creation, compassion for the displaced and openness to the voice of God speaking through all things.
The Psalmist’s call resounds across the centuries: ‘If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts’” To heed that voice is to welcome the Spirit’s cleansing and to join the great movement of divine renewal – a movement that begins in the heart but extends to the whole of creation.
In the daily discipline of cleaning and scouring our spiritual filters, we become collaborators in God’s work of love so that, purified and renewed, we may see and serve the world as Christ does: with eyes made clear by mercy and hearts made soft by grace, and thus knowing that God is Good, Good indeed!
Jump to next article
