An Outpost of God's Kingdom

Making a Christian home.

Lauren F. Winner | posted 7/01/2007

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Alice Peek, who confesses that ironing pillowcases has sometimes gotten her through the low moments of life, has gathered together an ecumenical potpourri of reflections on the spirituality of housekeeping. Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping features poetry and prose from writers ranging from Homer to Joan Chittister, from Starhawk to Gwendolyn Brooks. Cleaning here is figured as service to others—"take a broom and clean someone's house," advises Mother Teresa. "That says enough." And cleaning our surroundings becomes, in the hands of both Hasidic masters and Buddhist sages, a metaphor for cleaning the dirt in our own souls. Cleaning is imbued with dignity and even nobility: Dorothy Day, in an excerpt from On Pilgrimage, reminds us that "St. Francis' first job was to clean up a church." Poets Billy Collins and Tess Gallagher comment on the relationship between writing and housekeeping. (Anyone who's ever been a student will recall how sparkling clean your house got the day before a big paper was due.) And Peek juxtaposes passages from Scripture with midrashic meditations thereon: Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's description of cleaning for Passover illumines Exodus 12:15, and Lydia Maria Child's definition of "true economy" nicely complements the instruction in 2 Kings to "Set thine house in order." From Pablo Neruda's ode to ironing to Brother Lawrence's quasi-canonical prayer to the Lord of all pots and pans, this rich anthology—which ought to be dipped into, not read straight through—will amuse and edify, prompting readers to reflect on the ways that the most mundane requirements of life are inseparably bound up with the transcendent.

—L.W.

Peterson's interpretation of housework is deeply scriptural. Keeping House is organized around what Peterson identifies as three crucial imperatives in the Bible—the injunctions to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. Those three activities are at the heart of Jesus' words to the disciples in Matthew 25, and they are at the heart of housekeeping. In Peterson's hands, rather mundane tasks like cooking, washing clothes, and changing the sheets become crucial, transformative acts of love. Insofar as housework is creative, incarnational, physical, and sacramental, exposing the ways the material and the spiritual come together to remind us that "the provision of home is a central aspect of God's creative and redemptive activity," housework allows us to participate in life with the God who called the very dust mites into being.

Cleaning per se doesn't get much attention—Peterson admits that she has never loved mopping or vacuuming, and she suggests that not everyone need hold to identical standards when it comes to washing baseboards and polishing the wooden coffee table. Noting that the late-19th-century sanitation movement led some churches to reject the common Communion cup, she gently queries the interplay between theological conviction and culturally scripted notions about cleanliness. At the same time, she honors the committed housecleaning of an elderly black woman who once told Peterson that Jesus doesn't live in dirt. "I suspect," writes Peterson, "that this lady's doors are clean enough to eat off of. I suspect further that in her life she has encountered many closed doors, but one open door has been the opportunity to keep a clean house, with all the potential excellence and beauty that involves."

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