~Virginia Woolf
One. Two. My sneakers, getting worse for wear these days, slid tight into their appointed places in the closet shoe hanger. I'd thrown them behind the door, but with a little effort it was one less thing on the floor. "Don't be lazy," I said to myself. "Put them where they go." One. Two.
Maybe I've become a little OCD with age. My mother used to pile the clutter on my room into a huge burial mound in an attempt to visually and physically force me to clean up. That would be me now, throwing Star Wars figures, G.I. Joe soldiers, random cars, trucks, and space vehicles along with bits of hardened Play Dough and model pieces into a pyre taken straight out of the Island of Misfit Toys meets cultural revolution. Yes, somewhere along the way, a virtue popped up in some unnoticeable corner (doubtless nurtured with good diligence by my wife) called: The Virtue of Putting Things Back Where They Go.
One. Two. Two steps up the ladder of divine ascent, or in this case, the clean, crisp stairway of the same. It feels so good to put things back in their places. So orderly. So satisfying and even sacred. Virtue or not, there is a holiness to it.
There seems a direct correlation between this kind of action and a practical, no-nonsense eschatology of a sort that Martha would have gladly written into the cookbook between stout soup and a satisfying casserole. Doesn't the triune God have an economy: an ordering of the home, albeit this great universe bound in time and space? Isn't redemption itself a kind of putting things back into place. "Damn creation has gone all out of sorts, time to pull it all out onto the floor and go about the business of putting it back together." The angels go to work seperating it out into heaps: soldiers, kings, theives, harlots, Wall Street sophists, lovers, vicars, and out-of-work editors.
It is such a small act, putting things back. A little extra work--and isn't that what virtues are, just a little effort more than the minimum? Hang up that jacket you just threw into the closet. Put your glasses where they go. Wash a dish. And isn't the result a kind of cleanliness of space and of mind?
I love the clean lines and open surfaces of a space where things are meant to be. And how characteristic is the love to so much of what we human beings do on a daily basis. She designes relational databases. He runs a forklift. She replants her garden in the Spring. He checks the weather forecast and chooses to wear a thicker coat. She checks the notes for a presentation to persuade others.
Ask yourself what changes this simple virtue could make applied to just the space of a room or two of your home? To your car? To your wallet or purse? Our surroundings shape us, shape our expectations, and shape what possibilities are available to our hopes in subtle ways. Is it easier to pursue virtue when everything has a place? Is orderliness--or, to make it a noun--"returning" a fundamental virtue?
2 comments:
Intriguing post! It's true: freedom often comes via orderliness--though there's never quite enough of that in our home. Yet how beautifully things can turn out if we make the simple effort to put things where they go. (After all, even editing is simply the process of taking the clutter of words and "putting them where they go.")
Keep writing, Thom!
Now you're truly getting eschatological with me, Jen. You're seeing to the meat of the nut. I'll just point, for lack of time, where Babel--the confusion of languages and dispersion of humanity in a judgment that also furthers God's creation ordinance--is answered by Pentecost, which is the bringing back together of humanity into the unity of the kingdom, and all of it is exemplified if not motivated by language. Yes, editing is most definitely a process of putting things where they go: words going with thoughts, and thoughts going with authors and readers, and authors and readers becoming the community of citizens, that, in turn, make up our world.
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