Glorifying God in Housework

All once was perfect, ordered, pristine, back there, In the Beginning. In That Garden. But not now. Not in this house, not in this garden. Science may call it entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, the wearing down of all systems, the measure of chaos. I call it what You call it: sin and decay, and my daily battle. Weeds, dirty laundry, piling dishes, dust collecting...this is life after the Fall.

Yet, in small ways, I return to You and the Perfect Time Before when I order, wash away, sweep clean...beating back the chaos, the powers of destruction. Simple acts of cleaning are my humble, conquering efforts in the quotidian struggle between chaos and order, creation and disintegration, God and Death.

Deliberate, ritual motions maintain an easy order. Easier than wresting order out of invading chaos. And a tidy house ushers in the possibility of a tidy heart. A heart beating with Yours, in a place more like that place In the Beginning.

Is this housework a picture of entering into Redemption? To bring restoration to that which has fallen...

I frame this cleaning as my monastic beauty, my daily wrestle, to create, in imperfect ways, a world for these loved ones... like You created so perfectly for humanity when the world began....

"To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory,
but a man with a dungfork in his hand,
a woman with a slop pail,
give Him glory
too.

God is so great that all things give Him glory, if you mean that they should."

~St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises


Lord, today I mean that all of it should.