LIFE IN COMMUNITY is always messy, all the time. Which is amazing -- when you think about it -- because it seems like we're forever cleaning things up. Dining room clean-up. Wedding clean-up. Night dishes. Weekend dishes. Kitchen rotation. My father always told me, If you don't go to college, you'll be washing dishes and sweeping floors. In that, at least, he was prophetic. But what he couldn't have known was that I wouldn't even be making the minimum wage.

On a good clean-up night, I love how everybody knows their job without even being told, like a hive full of bees. Tony's sweeping the kitchen. Noah's wiping tables. So I go check the senior dining room. Ted's already at it. How about the bathrooms? No hurry, I decide. Noah could probably use a hand wiping tables...

On a bad dish night the problem may be food issues — I'm sure we all have stories — but more often it's a people issue. Darrin's band has a show that night and he forgot to get a replacement. Or Noah's gone on vacation and did get a replacement but the replacement got a replacement who forgot about dishes and rest of us who remembered now have no way of knowing who we're supposed to remind. I've gotten so bent out of shape over people not showing up on their night — Dish Rage, you might call it. Because nobody likes to do extra work, especially if the whole time they're imagining the person who's AWOL — at the movies, eating out, dancing. Meanwhile, I'm watching the dish rack pile up because the cooks have decided tonight is the night they're reorganizing the pot room. Of course, if it's me that forgets about dishes I find I have great capacity for understanding. I'm a master of the plea-bargain: Let me off this time (I'm pleading to my Inner Judge) and I'll always remember this moment and be full of compassion for the next guy who stiffs me. And, who knows? — maybe I will. But I always seem to be in need of further lessons in the art of loving my neighbor as I love myself.

Some lessons of community I have been trying to learn ever since I walked in the door. It might have been Lesson Number One: when you live with people there's just some things you have to live with — people. In those days, among the cleaning duties was emptying huge garbage cans in the closet at the end of the hallways. I joined the community during the original baby boom: there may have been less members, but all the members were roughly the same age, all having multiple babies simultaneously. The JPUSA institution we still call (somewhat anachronistically) "Mom's Shopping" got its name because it was 90% diapers. So were those garbage cans in the hall closets — industrial-sized containers, repositories for hundreds and hundreds of dirty diapers, balled up and overflowing out of the can onto the floor of the closet until they were knee-deep, waiting to be picked up by some single guy fully inexperienced with babies and their accouterments. Somebody like me.

I was younger in those days, not so adept with legal nuances such as plea bargains, rather appealing to absolute rules I felt everybody always should be obligated to obey. One of these rules was "People ought not leave their babies' poopy diapers for me to pick up with my hands, and if they did, they ought immediately be kicked out of the community." (However, in hindsight, I suspect that if they had merely made the rule that I didn't have to be the one to pick them up, the case would have been settled.)

No matter how much we clean, or how many signs we hang, or how much we nag, threaten or shame, our house is always a mess. And maybe it always will be.

"A typical JPUSA property." What kind of image does that phrase conjure for you? I heard it used twice in the same week awhile ago, which is why it struck me. The first time, Tim Bock was talking about how eager he was to help Keycie find a new mechanics' garage, lest he bring the unsightly contents of the garage from which he is presently being evicted to the spiffy new Lakefront warehouse and risk turning it into "a typical JPUSA property." A few days later, I heard John Herrin talking about trailers at Bushnell, saying he hoped Tim Bock might put some new siding on his prominently-located trailer, since we didn't want it to turn into... "a typical JPUSA property". Whatever that means.

I think it means, "There goes the neighborhood."

Of course, our own Chicago neighborhood, Uptown, was a legendary mess for years and years, and we've recently seen some enthusiastic efforts to clean up the neighborhood. I'm sure those people would love to work with the Jesus People to help them get their messy act together. (Stay tuned on that story for further developments...)

Meanwhile, the heroic effort to transform "Uptown" into "Sheridan Park" — which involves making the city as much like the suburbs as possible — has not yet fully accomplished that goal. Which is fine for most of the Jesus People, since they have traditionally viewed the suburbs as a somewhat disreputable place: sterile, empty, Caucasian, mass-made mini-malls, Stepford lawns. A state-of-mind more than anything: neat and clean on the outside the cup, to use Christ's metaphor, but inside... Put it this way: scratch Laura Petrie and you'll find Mary Tyler Moore from Ordinary People. Many of us ran screaming from the burbs and didn't stop running until we ended up in a commune: just as the Fifties begat the Sixties, with its back-to-nature, barefoot, blue-jeaned vibe, its organic values, i.e. "dirty hippies." It's hard to believe there was ever a time when rejecting consumer goods and suburban neatness was a worldwide pop cultural phenomenon.

As it has turned out, the Sixties were just another Baby Boomer fad; if what has been happening in our neighborhood is any indication, the torch has been passed from Abbie Hoffman to Martha Stewart.

I was reading my Bible recently and I had this weird thought. What if the sisters of Lazarus had been Mary and Martha — Stewart? I can just see Mary sitting there at Jesus' feet listening to him speak, having chosen, as the Scripture tells us, "the best thing." ( Luke 10:38-42) And there's Martha Stewart, running around, grumbling — tastefully, "Look at her sitting there doing nothing while I'm working by myself to set the table with this festive matching placemat and napkin set I sewed myself, and chopping up these fresh and tender homegrown scallion onions, ideal raw as a garnish or quickly stir-fried..."

We had a guest speaker here at the JPUSA some time ago, a missionary, who told us of his own experience living in community. He mentioned in passing what we already know: that things owned by "everybody" are often treated as if they are owned by nobody. The cars were rusted and busted. The communal houses were dirty, broken down. "I had to get out to save my sanity," he said. I understood what he meant about the cars, the house, even the sanity. But I wondered where he was going with this inspiring word about community, and what kind of mission field he found better suited to his sanity.

Obviously, among the occupational hazards of community living is the possibility that some people will assume that if they leave a dirty dish, someone else will clean it. I have longed to catch somebody in the act of abandoning a dirty dish in my floor's kitchen. But I never have, and its just as well: it's another form of Dish Rage. I've even considered installing surveillance video cameras, to find who among us still believes in the House Fairy. My guess is that some of the owners of those diapers I used to pick up are still leaving things for me to pick up.

But I know people also pick up after me.

This is Andrea Spicer's philosophy, she told me. Every Tuesday morning she comes to her class room in the living room across the hall from where I live to find it completely destroyed by weekend revelers, who also believe in the House Fairy. (I've tried to catch these revelers, too, but I think they must come out after my bed time.) If they're reading this, I'd like to reveal to them that the secret identity of the House Fairy is... Andrea Spicer. Before she can teach her class of sixth graders, she has to sweep up popcorn, mop spilled Kool-Aid, even wipe off the layer of sawdust left by some handyman who worked all weekend in a valiant effort to bring his own living space to the level of Martha Stewart cleanliness and beauty. I once asked Andrea how she copes with this weekly task of cleaning up after anonymous mess-makers and she says she just assumes other anonymous people are cleaning up for her kids. She also admits that she has a high tolerance for disorder.

"I'll say she does," confides a former member of Andrea's neighborhood. "She's so tolerant she leaves hair from haircuts on the 8th floor living room floor for weeks." (Probably because she's worn out cleaning the living room on my floor, I'm guessing.)

An anthropologist will tell you that dirt and disorder are relative, in the eye of the beholder. I think we understand this instinctively, on our better days. I know from experience because during Wedding clean-up I always get assigned the pot rack, spend hours scraping off the crud, and am convinced afterward that its clean enough to eat off of. Then I see the look on the wedding visitors' faces as they pass the rack area on their way into the dining room and I realize that one man's pride and joy is another's appetite suppressant.

We encounter something even more fascinating by combining this Relativity Theory of Dirt, with the notion of Natural Selection, whereby we discover a new law of community life: Those most capable of living with disorder, are the ones most capable of creating it. If we're not careful, in other words, we end up with a dynamic in which people with low tolerance for disorder might be systematically weeded out, which in turn will result in a growing concentration of people with a high tolerance for disorder. In other words, if you think our house is a mess right now, check back in a few more years. It may well be that we have created a situation in which the mess will get exponentially worse.

Okay, maybe this isn't strictly true. Not everybody who passes through our revolving door makes war on the mess and not everybody who stays has made peace with it. The trick, as always, is balancing extremes, and history shows us low-tolerance people can adapt to the environment. Tina Herrin is a self-confessed obsessive-compulsive. Her family once played a trick on her by moving all the knick-knacks and pictures around her room a fraction of an inch to the left or right. And — wouldn't you know it? — as soon as she walked in the door, Tina she instantly fixed on the fractional anomalies and set her house in order before she'd taken off her coat. And yet she was able to make room for the maladjusted people who would do such a thing to her. I realized, in talking about this with Tina, that the way to cure an obsessive-compulsive, is for them to learn to view their own obsessive behavior as out of order. Tina, who has kept an orderly house in the midst of the chaos that is community for nearly thirty years, says she decided to take ownership of herself, without giving up ownership of her room. And the hallway outside her room. And the living room across the hall. And the kitchen. And the stairway from her floor on down. And sometimes the lobby. The key, she decided, is to view one's anger at others as one more big dust bunny to sweep up along with everything else.

WE DO HAVE TO MAKE a conscious choice about what parts of our environment we are going to OWN. Because owning everything, feeling responsible for everything, is just too much. Especially in community: you have to set boundaries; it's a basic survival skill. If you don't manage sensory intake, you'll end with sensory overload. Take the hallway phones — please. Outsiders wonder why we let them ring so long before we pick up. The answer is community Lesson Number Two: when you share one or two phones with a couple dozen families, you either learn to filter out most of the phone rings or you'll find yourself ripping the phone off the wall and filtering out them all. The same principle obtains in any circumstance in which community living exponentially multiplies ordinary human phenomena.

Ergo, we can tune out a good deal of disorder and dirt. For the sake of our own sanity, indeed, we just don't always see garbage outside those areas of our personal ownership.

It's amazing how detached one can become. You're walking down the stairs. Outside the 4th-floor east stairway door you notice a big yellowish blob, a pudding-like substance. Dripping down wall. What kind of person would make a mess like that and just leave it? And what is that stuff anyway? It looks like vanilla pudding. When's the last time the kitchen served vanilla pudding? Not today. Not this week. But this blob doesn't look like it could be older than a week. It retains a uniform color and softness.

Unlike that crusty, brown glob on the stairway wall outside of Third Floor West.

Two days go by. You are astonished to note the blob is still soft and yellow. In fact, it takes you all of two weeks to realize that it isn't pudding at all. It's BUTTER. No wonder it retained its color and texture. The notion that perhaps you might get a sponge and wipe the butter from the wall doesn't even occur to you. Indeed, neither to you, nor, obviously, to any of the dozens, maybe hundreds of people who have walked past this blob during the last fortnight. Janet Cameron, the Martha Stewart of the 4th Floor, has walked past this same blob as often as you have, you realize.

Now that you've identified the substance, and neutralized responsibility, you don't have any reason to see it. You let it fade into invisibility, as it has for everyone else. The only chance this blob now has of becoming visible is if a new person comes down the stairs and sees it for the first time: and acts before seeing it more than once.

Unfortunately, the new person most likely to see that blob will be a visitor, someone's mother, a youth group, a building inspector, a camera crew from the 700 Club.

That's how we usually end up tuning things in we've successfully tuned out. We see a visitor and — BOINK — it's like we're transported into their head, and now we're seeing with their eyes.

You're outside yammering around our urban camp fire, the laundry vents, with friends while your kids play. Then a tour group or a guy in a suit suddenly sticks his head out the door to peek into the yard. BOINK. The blind can now see. You suddenly notice the styrofoam cups clinging to the fence, a plastic Jewel bag floating overhead like a bird, rotten kids' clothes drying on the laundry vents since 1994. Kids digging holes under the wood chips. Like Adam and Eve biting the apple, your eyes have been opened, and you've been expelled from Paradise.

The only place to hide is... Well, its in the visitor's head. So you jump in. You come to identify with their perspective so well, you forget it's not your own. Why can't THESE PEOPLE do SOMETHING about THIS MESS?

Or, maybe this has happened to you. The side yard is still, deserted as you pass through, oblivious to all but the birds and your own little bag of trash you're bringing to the dumpster. Then you happen to spy, say, beneath a bench and sparkling in the sunlight, a piece of broken glass. Could you live with yourself if you ignored that piece of glass? Truthfully, if you could find a way, you probably would. But this morning you can't, so you have no choice but to stop and pick it up — putting yourself at risk for more than cutting your fingers. First, you've relaxed your control over what you see. Now that you've noticed the glass, you're liable to see that tray of last night's dinner. If so, the smart move would be to grab the tray and run into the house. But you're stuck if you've already fallen victim to the second danger: that is, despite all your humble protestations, you let slip a quick congratulations to yourself for being so responsible.

Now you've done it. Not only is your self-image at stake, but so is your reputation. You have no choice now but to play this thing out to the end, play it to the hilt — be the responsible citizen, pick up trash, open the floodgates, pick up more trash, trash you didn't even see a few minutes ago in your ignorant, irresponsible bliss. The choking cloud of psychological dust you've stirred up now includes particles of your own righteousness and amazement at the utter pollution of everyone else. And you have become vulnerable to the Third Danger of those who clean, the Elijah Syndrome.

This one always trips up Karl Sullivan, he told me. As House Coordinator, he has a harder time than the rest of us in evading that feeling of responsibility, but with each styro picked up, he follows the spiral down. I am the last righteous one left. The others have all turned to Baal...

WHICH IS ALWAYS A FASCINATING PHENOMENON to observe for Karl's wife, Sarah. For while he may take personally the side yard, Karl has to step over bags of his own trash to even get downstairs. We all know this cleanliness thing is at some level a Mars/Venus thing. My own observation is that women feel obliged to guard their domestic sphere, and when something is out of order, a car alarm goes off in their heads. And they cannot feel a moment's peace until they can shut the thing off. Guys don't hear it, of course. But their wives can usually let them know when it's happening. The most basic Husband Survival Tactic is to figure out what it takes to shut down your wife's alarm — usually taking out the battery will do it. I mean, taking out the trash.

Now you have to understand: Karl could get riled over the sideyard because that fell under the domain of "Work", not "Domestic Sphere". The cleanliness of his own home isn't likely to hold as high a place in Mars' symbol system. For Venus, the domestic sphere is the arena for symbolizing self worth. That's why, when Mars fails to take out the garbage, Venus takes it personally. Indeed, if Mars washes the household dishes, Venus might actually say "Thank you." Do you think Mars is likely to say "Thank you" to Venus for doing the laundry? Venus believes this is because Mars is self-absorbed and ungrateful. Or perhaps because there is no intelligent life on Mars whatsoever. But the problem is that Mars has no concept of the Venus symbol system. At least not at first. When guys become aware of how the system works, their first strategy is to try to explain to their wives how stupid their way of looking at things is. Which usually doesn't get them very far.

So then they set about making the system work to their advantage. I came to understand that my doing our family's dishes was, for my wife, a symbol that I love her. For me, it just means I've run out of cereal bowls and I'm tired of drinking out of the measuring cups. Rather than try to talk her out of that interpretation, I'm smart enough to realize I'm getting off pretty cheaply. Other guys have to make much more considerable investments in symbolic expressions of love than fifteen minutes of dishwashing.

Don't get me wrong. There really ARE some stupid symbol systems out there and to take the path of least resistance with every one of them means you'll wake up one morning and believe that unless you're washing those dishes with a particular brand of dish soap your life is meaningless and people will hate you and you'll probably die because only one brand really kills germs on contact. Or if you fail to posses some model of car or brand of beer, your life is — what? — a mess, and you might as well not go to the trouble of living at all.

It's all too easy to become the "victim of metaphor".

This has been a challenging year for me, with new and difficult work responsibilities, a constant feeling of being overwhelmed, a sense of things out of my control. For awhile, the symbol for my own helplessness was the men's room at the Cornerstone office. Possibly the single most vile men's room on the planet. Mushrooms growing out of the baseboards. Can't fix the walls until they fix the plumbing. Can't fix the plumbing until they tear up floor. Can't tear up floor because, University of Chicago biologists have held up the building permit so they can study the mushrooms in their natural environment — an environment which has been known to include our own community's pastors and blue-suited representatives of our denomination the Evangelical Covenant Church. Thankfully, the pastors addressed this issue: they recently moved their board meetings to the spiffy new Lakefront offices.

But it was too late for me: I'd already started seeing the bathroom from the perspective of blue-suited Covenanters. Why can't THESE PEOPLE do SOMETHING about THIS MESS?

Obviously, the idea of a bathroom used as a symbol for someone's self-worth is troubling. On the other hand, we just had the bathroom in our home redone and every time I'm in there, I feel really good about myself. The point is, human beings externalize their self-worth, packaging it in one symbol or another. They tend to compare the symbol they've identified with their self-worth with some symbol they've stored in their mind as a standard. That's how we think: we organize our experience into pictures and make judgments by comparing new experiences to stored pictures. If we don't have a picture for some experience, we have a problem. We have an anomaly. We can either ignore the anomaly, reject it in toto, or make room for it. The anomalies of our life are, by any other name, "dirt".

It's good mental hygiene to ask sometimes where we get our stock of pictures. Television? Magazines? Maybe some foo-foo magazine offering up the Victorian world as our model? The latter sounds safe enough. But think about the messages those images convey: you deserve to be surrounded by beauty, always; you deserve to take long baths every day (using all the bath products we advertise). And recall that the Victorian world tried so hard to divide the foo-foo from the seamy side of life that one of the most compelling pictures we have of that world is the schizoid myth of Jeckyll and Hyde.

Pardon me if this topic becomes necessarily serious.

The connection between cleanliness and godliness is this: one is a symbol for the other. Human beings instinctively apprehend a moral order in the universe. Likewise, they sense they have violated this order, and have somehow been tainted, taken in something that doesn't belong, something which must be removed if they are to be returned to a state of purity, of wholeness. These instincts are manifested in the multitude of laws, taboos, rituals of cleansing, of blood sacrifice, which appear in all cultures, in all times. Our contemporary obsession with soap and household cleaning is clearly something more than a concern over germs. We long to be whole and pure. Ironically, this instinct is behind some of the most filthy stains on the human record, such as ethnic "cleansing" or racial "purity". The Nazi elimination of the physically, ethnically and socially "unfit" (Anomalies! Dirt!) was always pursued the context and language of "hygiene".

But I am overstating my case if you believe I'm suggesting that cleanliness is next to genocide. It would be a mistake to think I believe that only a Nazi would complain about our messy communal house. What I do believe is this: that equating moral goodness with good housekeeping is to value the bathwater over the baby: and, no, I don't think that's very pro-life.

The point is that at a level different than most people realize, matters of cleanliness are matters of life and death: dealing with whatever is 'dirt' to each of us is disturbing: it "involves thinking about the nature of order and its relation to disorder, of being to nonbeing, of form to formlessness, and of life to death." ^[1] And human beings would rather do anything than consider these questions: "Even if the average man lives in a kind of obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive all of repressions to hide the problem of life and death... [A]ll through history it is the 'normal, average men' who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves." ^[2]

Human beings despise dust because they're made of it.

WHENEVER I HAVE CAUSE to consider — in any context — the Nazi "euthanasia" program I can't help but think of our good friend, Jean Vanier. So many of the very people the Nazis targeted for exclusion, Vanier seeks to include. His L'Arche communities are made up of people that folks in nice houses don't want to see and usually sweep under the rug as so much human "dirt." This is a guy the Catholic Church is going to some day name as a Saint. And when he is, those of us who are still around and remember when he came to our house will make sure everybody around us knows it. I saw him. I heard him speak. I helped clean the house when we heard he was coming to visit our community.

Ahem.

Wasn't it great when, during the question and answer time after his talk here when somebody asked him, "What is the biggest problem with living in community?", Jean Vanier shoots back, without a pause, "I am the biggest problem with living in community." But then this guy behind me is whispering, "Wow. It's awesome to hear him finally admit it: I always thought Jean Vanier was the biggest problem of living in community!" No doubt somebody who had been on the receiving end of a few too many quotes from Community & Growth via our local Vanier devotee, Pastor Neil Taylor. It is true, of course, that Vanier's recent visit to the Jesus People stirred up a certain amount of dust. It certainly put the topic of "Community & Cleanliness" into the air. And the fragrance wasn't always "minty fresh". But for those with a taste for irony, there was plenty to savor. Among these was the notion of cleaning our house for a visit by the one guy in the world who would understand that community is always messy, all the time.

"Which is exactly my point, Dude," our tattooed and body-pierced house guys argued to clean-up coordinator Karl Sullivan. "He already knows the truth. Why do you insist on making us carry out this charade?" And Karl would say, "Dudes, if we were really going to clean up around here to try to impress visitors we'd have to send a lot of folks down to Bushnell for the weekend..."

It certainly seems a fair enough question: why bother? Especially in the light of all I've had to say that would tend to minimize the importance of cleanliness in the grand scheme of human relationships. I suppose the answer is similar to the reason I wash the dishes around at my own house — aside from the fact that there are no more clean cups. It's about symbolic value. If I can make a clean room a symbol of my own self worth, I can also make it a symbol of how much value I put upon you. Why did Jesus wash the disciples' feet? Because they kept tracking mud across his clean kitchen floor? Or as a symbol of his love for them, and a symbol of how much they should love one another?

Isn't funny how so often that's the way our thoughts take go we start to resent somebody leaving a mess for us to pick up? What do they think I am, their servant?

The point is that the symbolic value of cleanliness is better utilized as a means of demonstrating the value of our neighbors, rather than our selves. And if we understand that the value of the neighbors is what the symbol points to, then we're better positioned to still value them when they're a mess. Our community has always, and with God's mercy, will always, be a dust magnet. I'm speaking now of "dust" in the sense which people who arrive on our doorstep have often done so after being swept off someone else's. Keeping our house in order means keeping the door open: it will always require those who live here to expand their stock of mental pictures: we need to find ways to make room for, rather than eliminate or ignore "anomalies".

That means we've got to make our peace with disorder.

I once was privileged to watch this sort of peacemaking being conducted by a real pro. One year at the Cornerstone Festival, I was helping host speakers, and had to walk Bill Backus to a new tent we'd switched him to mid-fest because his first was too close to a music stage. For those of you who don't know him, Bill's a psychologist and the author of the book Telling Yourself the Truth, among others. That day at the fest, he was clearly frustrated by the move, and how untogether the speaker staff was, and as he walked along to the new tent, I heard him muttering to himself: "This is unpleasant. But the fact that the Jesus People are so de-centralized is one of their greatest strengths. It makes room for the kind of creativity that produces this festival. But that same de-centralization is one of the most frustrating things about dealing with JPUSA. It often seems like there's nobody in charge." I felt privileged to see this: Dr. Backus was working his own program, telling himself the truth! And it IS the truth: creativity is born, not from order, but from chaos.

Here's an anthropologist, who's written on cultural views of dirt:

"Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality." ^[3]

Here's another anthropologist, a Christian:

"The biblical worldview focuses on relationships, not tasks and achievements. Consequently, it has room for chaos. Unlike the Indo-European view that all chaos is evil, Scripture has room for chaos as the unformed potential from which spring life and creativity -- the unshaped material out of which God created the universe... and the infant not yet grown to adulthood. It also has room for the chaos that is inherent in all truly mutual relationships." ^[4]

I'm not saying that if you ask your neighbor to do something about the pile of camping equipment that's been in the hallway since Cornerstone '87 you'll pose a threat to human life and creativity. What I am saying is that the creation of an order in which your neighbor's junk is never in your way will have just that effect.

The paradox of the sort of Chaos Theory outlined here is that the messier the Jesus People get, the more creative will be their solutions for managing the mess.

I'll leave you with one example. In the wake of the clean-up movement spawned by the Vanier visit, I realized one "House-Cleaning Night" which house I needed to clean. I took my bucket and brush and cleanser over to the Cornerstone Office to clean that vile bathroom. I share this not to offer myself as a candidate for sainthood. As C.S. Lewis says, even a mediocre tennis player can get off a good shot every now and then. I share this because it was a necessary symbol for me, and maybe it will be one to you.

This symbolic cleansing was not about earning my salvation by swabbing a toilet, nor reclaiming my cosmic worth by wiping down walls that should have been torn down. I sensed a need to gain control, yes, not of my environment, but my own personal symbol system (which is what "telling yourself the truth" is all about); I wanted to go back to being one of THOSE PEOPLE, to own this part of OUR mess. I understood that doing so required me to see it less as a symbol of my self worth than a symbol of my "self" in the New Testament sense of the term: my old, unregenerate, nature, my own messy inner life. (Indeed, if that place was a symbol for my own messy heart, I really could feel sorry for the Person I had invited to live there, a guest worthy of more honor than even Jean Vanier!) Cleaning out that nasty old bathroom was not so much about gaining control, then, as relinquishing it.

I provided a little background music while I worked, humming the tune to the worship song, "Create in me a clean heart." The lyrics are from David's cry to God to "wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin." ( Psalm 51) — a potent reminder that one kind of cleanliness remains our most fundamental human need.

So "Excuse my dust" — as the witty Dorothy Parker suggested for her own epitaph. I beg your pardon while I set my house in order. It's just been so hard to keep up. A place for everything, everything in its place. One thing at a time. Godliness, I'm working on first. When I have that down, let me assure you, cleanliness is next.

—April 22, 2000

Endnotes:1. Hiebert, Paul G., Shaw, Daniel R., Tienou, Tite, Understanding Folk Religion: A Christian Response to Popular Beliefs and Practices (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), p. 209-210. [return]2.Becker, Ernst, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 187. [return]3.Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London & NY: Ark Paperbacks, 1966), p. 94. [return] 4. Hiebert, Paul G., et al, p. 275. [return]

© 2000 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.