Cleanliness is close to Godliness

There are two aspects of spirituality that have been on my mind increasingly often these days. The first I want to address is that of cleanliness, or perhaps orderliness would be a better descriptor.

A little background:

I am a messy person. I always have been. I attribute this to my rebellious nature. Seriously. Of my siblings, I think I was probably the one who gave my parents the most grief, argued the most, fought the most and rebelled the most. At least directly to their faces. My little brother may have won out in the doing things behind their backs category. My dad, as you likely can imagine, existed in as straight arrow a fashion as he could, apparently for as long as he could before he eventually cracked and threw away every principle upon which he'd lived his life. As a former policeman, officer in the army, and son of a police captain and soldier, he lived a life of solid discipline. "Duty, honor and country," he'd say, generally on the same day he'd wake me up with an annoying fake bugle sounding Reveille to do chores all day long. He made his bed everyday, and said I could not make mine on the days he didn't make his. I didn't bother making mine anyway, but you can be sure I checked his bed (and called him any chance I had on hypocrisy). And that's my point. My dad was such a neat freak disciplinarian that I became messy because I hated having to clean all the time.

So I get mess. I like mess. To a certain point, at least. I hope, at least, that most people don't want to live in a shit hole or visit one for any particularly long length of time.

How does this relate to spirituality, particularly of the Christian sort? Aside from the truism, "Cleanliness is close to Godliness," I'd like to explore the effects of ordering one's environment and externalities upon one's soul.

For myself, I've found with time, and free from the influence of my cleanly parents, that I cannot reach an equilibrium with mess. I just can't get to a point where the mess is comfortable, but not a distraction, obstacle, or health hazard. I end up being too lazy to clean, too bored, too distracted, or whatever, but whatever my initial good intentions, I wind up shirking them and the mess mounts to the point where even I get sick of it and clean as best as I can bring myself to, before it all starts over again. In this I found a parallel with my (and I believe many other people's) spiritual lives, in that all too often we find ourselves letting small sins, venial sins, even mortal sins, build up in our souls like the clutter we allow to build up in our lives. We're too bored, distracted, lazy, or perhaps simply like it too much to do anything about it and clean up. But eventually we all seem to reach points wherein the mess in our hearts and minds is too much to bear, and we clean it up a bit. All too often I am afraid we resort to half-measures and corner cutting, both in our cleaning and our spirituality.

What is more is that I found that the way I treat my soul and the way I treat my environment not only seem to have similarities and parallels, but they seem to mirror each other. In other words, whenever I effect, or desire to effect a re-ordering and "cleaning" of my soul, I generally experience a desire for a re-ordering and cleaning of my environment and person. Conversely, when I become overcome with the urge to clean up the mess I've surrounded myself with in terms of laundry, books, papers, and other physical phenomena, I find not only that I have the urge, but that I've already begun to effect a spiritual metanoia. Even Saints like St. Teresa of Avila and theologians like C.S. Lewis have likened the soul to a house or a castle or a palace or a cottage, which God is not only creating, but that He intends to sanctify and enter into. When Go intends to live in you as not just a palace but a temple, it brings a new perspective to the notion of keeping your soul clean. If you're embarrassed when guests see you as a slob, imagine how you'll feel when God arrives and instead of a bright shining space, airy and lit with the light of love, filled with the arts of the talents you were given, He is shown into a damp, moldy crawlspace, without even a candle, which is filled with the refuse of your heart.

Perhaps the root of the truism is that these calls to cleanliness are linked to the call to holiness that consistently and constantly comes to us from God, and opening ourself to one opens ourself to the other. I think it is also the case that, because order is intrinsically related to morality and law and even reason, when one brings order to one aspect of one's life, whether it be internal or external, there's a desire and even an immediate reflection or continuation of that order in other aspects.

So when you clean your room, or your house, or other spaces, you begin the process of scrubbing out the dark corners and hiding places of your soul where you've hidden from God or let the detritus of immorality stain away. And likewise when you go to confession and do penance, you take the first steps on the path to cleaning up the rest of your life. I expect this is part of the reason monastic communities in religious of all sorts make cleanliness and order a fundamental part of life in the community. They could exist in a state of perpetual mess and disorder, like a commune of hippies or somesuch, but they do not. They understand that bringing order to one's surroundings helps bring order to the soul, and vice verse. So be clean in your castle's and in your interior palaces.