I plug my earbuds in and grab the vacuum that I’ve left upstairs because cleaning and dusting there is like cleaning a different house. We live mostly downstairs and come upstairs to sleep. I’m also back using my office to give myself solitude. It’s work to haul the vacuum upstairs, so I leave it to make sure the second floor gets tended to.
Downstairs I pick up the big pieces—shavings, leaves, dirt. I look at the seven bookshelves that all need to have the books pulled out and dusted. Sometimes they are so dusty I can blow a billow of dust off the top of the book. Maybe this winter I’ll work on them shelf by shelf, while listening to the back log of podcasts because I’ve stopped listening in favor of my own thoughts. My books have to be scattered throughout instead of hidden in one library because of how this old farmhouse is configured. I feel scattered because they are not in one place. For years the house did not feel like it was ours.
Last summer/fall dust from planting, dust from harvest seeped into everything. The one time we had rain, it poured dust into our hay field so when our hay guy picked it up the baler looked like a burn pile roaring. I open the bales and dust billows. It’s useless to feed to Morgen. Already I can hear her breathe when she eats her hay, especially in the summer. Already we feed her a respiratory supplement from Horse Tech and hydroxyzine. We haul the hay to the burn pile. I’d asked our hay guy to bale the top, south pasture, but had forgotten that’s where there’s a waterway. He feeds cattle so the dust isn’t as important. I regret I didn’t ask him to bale the headlands.
I stepped on the vacuum and started in my office. Chewing gum wrappings get sucked in. Hole punch circles get sucked in. Dog hair gets sucked in. I push the head back and forth back and forth until I am satisfied the floor is swept clean. I pull the head off and jam a brush into it and start dusting my desk which is full of papers and books. I bought this desk the summer after my brother died. It’s solid oak with enough room to lay out books and papers. There are three file drawers as well. We had to take doors apart to fit it into our last house. And we had to hire movers to bring it upstairs in this one. A pristine desk does not lend itself to my creative work.
Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau’s voices chat in my ear. Kingsnorth troubles me because he thinks Western Civilization is dead and that it’s not Christians’ job to fix it by superimposing Christian culture. Pageau countered by saying, “And I’m thinking, it seems though that there’s like the wheat and the chaff in civilization, kind of like what Christ describes, and that, for example, our civilization for all its evil, and I totally agree with that, is probably the civilization in which the fewest people die of hunger that has ever existed in the history of humanity, right? It’s, we have another type of despair, which is more kind of spiritual despair. But that’s a real thing. It’s a real thing that we have this virtue of taking care of the poor that’s part of the system.”
I am relieved someone is pushing back against Kingsnorth’s argument. I know too many people who step from Western civilization is dead to burn it down. Isn’t the kingdom of God like a mustard seed, that grows into a wide spreading bush, where the crows come to nest? Tom Holland’s book Dominion speaks to how Christianity has salted civilization. Conquering kings no longer brag about how many people they’ve killed. The concept of secular vs religious changed how Indian culture viewed governance. Our culture values taking care of the poor and the weak, not just as private individuals but through our government. World poverty is down. People dying of violent deaths is down.
I reach up to the top shelf of a small bookcase sitting on the desk and dusted the two draft horses and jumping horse and pictures that are sitting there. I run my cloth across the photo of a rainbow and wish I’d had it framed with sun resistant glass because it was the first gift from Bruce with the words, “The rainbow here is the promise that the flood won’t happen again in your life.” He was right, even though we have weathered some hard, flooding rains.
I pull the vacuum away from my desk toward the cabinet where I hold my office supplies, a piece Bruce and I found at Used But Nice Office Equipment. I store paper, paper and more paper. When I first published The River Caught SunlightI thought I’d need stationery and business cards and thank you notes. I used the tree and a rainbow as a logo and don’t have the heart to toss them. I ran the nozzle over the top. My eyes drifted to the print of a woman walking through the valley of the shadow of death, that I purchased from Teresa West Carter…that shows her nose buried in a rose, the rose Christ as she walks from death into life.
Kingsnorth insisted that he’s not a holy man, that like all of us he is caught in the tension between living as Christ has called us to live and living in our contemporary civilization. “And so that’s the paradox we’re all living in as Christians,” he says. “If I look at the things we’re told to do, in terms of wealth and power and resisting evil or not resisting evil, it’s not only the opposite of what our civilization tells us to do, it’s pretty much the opposite of what I do a lot of the time.”
I too feel caught in this tension. I have confessed that I like my quiet life, a warm house, and full belly. I like looking at all these plastic horses. I have talked this over with my spiritual companion Dawn. She has insisted that I’ve been given this life and that it’s important to live it. St. Paul has said he’s learned to be content when he is wealthy and when he is poor. Godliness with contentment is great gain. All I can do is keep turning towards the Lord with these questions. And my gosh I admired the humility and honesty that Kingsnorth has shown by admitting he is not living as Jesus challenges. (I recently took a class with him. His generosity and respect called some wonderful writing out of myself and the other writers.)
He reminds us how our warm houses in the winter and cool in the summer are costly. “What’s downstream of all the good stuff we get?” he asks.”What’s literally downstream sometimes in the rivers and in the destruction of the forests and the loss of the culture and all the things that we can see happening, right? So you never get anything for free.
“You do get your good stuff, but you get a lot of bad stuff as well. That’s just life. So there’s not a lot to be gained just from saying civilization is bad and we should not live in it because we do.”
On top of the shelf where I keep my handwritten journals—fifty years’ worth—I started taking tiny plastic horses down and dusting them. I ran a cloth over the silver purple unicorn and the heavy plastic Fjord mama and foal. Stopping and dusting each one takes time from a chore I’d like to finish quickly. There is sense in minimalism as far as the time it takes to clean but I don’t live up to it.
No we don’t get any stuff for free. We cleaned sulfur out of the atmosphere, so now our fields and diet are lacking in that important nutrient. Weeds are becoming resistant to herbicides, but we can’t feed the number of people we are feeding on organic farming methods, as Sri Lanka found out. We want to stop global warming, so we plant solar panels on the richest farmland in the world and stick massive wind turbines in the ocean that are threatening the Right Whale with extinction and making the fisheries along the coast become barren. Both energy sources are comprised of toxic chemicals. We use birth control, hormones, medications that are peed into the ground and find their way to the water table. And then there’s plastic. Behind many environmental activists is the wish to cut way back on human population and that frightens me.
Also we have corrected a wounded environment, somewhat. When I was a girl the Hudson River was filthy dirty and has been cleaned up. Geese, whitetail deer, and foxes were rare. Now they are so common as to be pests. The bald eagle almost went extinct. I remember ooh and aahing when we saw a tree full of them beside the train and the Colorado river. Now I can look up in our poplar tree and see two eagles staring down at me. Never in a thousand years would I have thought this possible.
I put the tiny horses back and hooked on the floor attachment and pushed against the floor. Matted dog hair and wood shavings disappeared. I pushed toward the bedrooms.
Kingsnorth stated, “Babylon as the kind of manifestation of the great corrupt global city. And interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, when Babylon is at its most corrupted, you hear this voice from the heaven, don’t you? You hear Christ and he says, Come out of her, my people.
“It’s a really interesting thought. What are you supposed to do with Babylon? You’re supposed to leave, because Babylon is corrupt and the heavenly Jerusalem is coming instead.”
But what about the words that came to the prophet Jeremiah, where God told the people to settle, plant vineyards, live in Babylon. He sends a letter to the exiles and says, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Isreal to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters and multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer. 29: 4 – 7, ESV). So why don’t we pray for the welfare of our Babylon? Why don’t we seek the welfare of our city, be involved as citizens and “love mercy, do justly and walk humbly with our God.”
Well, I pushed my vacuum against the green rug, where dog hair likes to stick. I pushed and I pulled. It felt good to see the fabric cleaned and neatened.
When this podcast ended, about the time I got to the bathroom, I turned on Chris Green’s Speak- easy Theology. His podcasts and essays offer amazing balanced insight, especially when he is talking with David Harvey about Bonhoeffer or the readings for that Sunday. He says something a little different than Kingsnorth.
“The Book of Revelation never names the enemy, right? Well, I mean, it does. The enemy is the Satan. The enemy is evil, right? But it never names the enemy in the form that it is presently taking, because the church will always have these enemies. So to be overly distracted by the present enemy, as if they somehow are equal with the forces of evil, is actually in and of itself a lack of faith at some level…”
This time the vacuum was picking up kitty litter, and puffs of dog hair and lint. I looked out the window at the sun reflecting off the plowed fields across the road. It almost looks like rapids in a river catching sunlight. I sigh when I look at the whole line up of Breyer horses that haven’t been dusted in years. Dust covered their backs like gray saddle blankets. I am a less than effective housekeeper.
Talking about Bonhoeffer, Green said, “I mean, we’ve seen this with Diocletian, right? We’ve seen this, like we’ve seen this again and again, and we will see it again and again. He doesn’t allow Hitler to be outsized, right? And this is what I think evil wants. It wants us to believe it’s bigger and badder than it actually is, right? That it’s a bully in that way.
“By naming Hitler as a personification of evil, which Bonhoeffer resists, I wonder if we do two things. One, we over empower that particular form of evil, but we also push that evil from ourselves. So we can live in our own forms of evil, but as long as we’re not Hitler, right? As long as we’re not that over there. And we then inadvertently, but perhaps intentionally separate ourselves from sin.”
Oh my goodness what an insight. I’ve seen this with all the Hitler accusations of Trump. And yet see very little self-reflection by those accusing him. And the same can be said of the other side accusing the Democrats of grave injustices without viewing their own. When do we take these accusations as cues and look at ourselves, at how we have these same behaviors that need confession and turning back to God?
I looked at the multiple bottles of laundry detergent, fabric softener, Woolite, Shout stain remover, and thought how it might be nice to get rid of the empties and put the rest in the closet so this room could also be calmed down with how tidy it is. Only three rooms in this house might be considered calm as far as clutter goes. One is the guest room, one is our stove room, though there are piles of shoes and boots on the floor, and one is the downstairs bathroom.
I turned to the sink and shut the vacuum off so I could tidy it up. Once in a neuro psyche test I admitted the sink wasn’t neat and clean, which was added to the diagnosis that my executive function was flabby. (Not making that admission again.) I grabbed a paper towel and sprayed the spattered mirror with glass cleaner. It squeaked.
Green moved on to talk about the magi seeking Jesus. “But regardless, I think whether they were led by the star to the city or they ended up in the city because they presume that’s what the star’s leading meant, I do think it’s a reminder to us that the leading of God often does bring us to places we wouldn’t expect it to bring us.
“And if we have a strong sense of the spirit-led life and if we’ve been raised and nurtured in churches that emphasize the living God’s work in our day-to-day lives, we can easily start to think, we can easily presume that if it’s really God’s leading, we never end up in Herod’s court, right? We never end up in the quote unquote wrong place. I think we expect God to lead us directly to the stable.
“If we just knew what we were doing, we would always get around Herod and just end up where we’re wanting to go. But God doesn’t work in straight lines. Like, he doesn’t draw straight lines.
“And we have to get, now we’re back to the point about sinners, we have to get comfortable with God as the God of the roundabout way. And God is the God who leads us. And how much of that has to do with us thinking we know more than we do, and how much of that is God knowing we need to end up in Herod’s Court in order to hear the texts.”
“We need to hear in order to know what we’re seeing when we get to the stable. I think there’s a real wisdom in this story for us about how God leads us and where he leads us. And how many of us, I mean, if I were to preach the text or to let it preach to me, I think I would say some like, how many times have I been in Herod’s Court?”
I’ll be happy to answer that one. When I was in graduate school writing erotic poems as a virgin, being told my lines looked like I was on LSD and awful word plays on Catherine the Great and horses. When I was publicizing books for Crossway and found myself promoting Frank and Francis Schaeffer who were urging evangelicals to get involved in politics and culture, to salt those things with their Christian faith. And I was more than alarmed. When I taught composition to inner city kids at a local university, being quite subversive, using texts from the Dalai Lama to challenge my students to think about what makes a happy life.
And now I’m in a writer’s workshop where the chemistry is off, and the scars from the above-mentioned poetry school and other workshops move me over to the wall. I’m no longer afraid to say, “That isn’t right,” which does not score points. Laura was right when she said, “You don’t need this. You should be teaching, not being a student.” Coming from Laura, who has always said it straight, this was good insight. But I signed up, paid my money. I’m there, despite how aggravating it is, and waiting to see what good might come, which includes remembering how anger is a fine energy for writing. And I just had a dream where a prisoner, dressed in orange got out of a transport bus and then back in. The bus disappeared down the road. I turned to see a solid, handsome man who said he represented poet Malcolm Guite. Perhaps this is telling me the chains have trundled down the road and the poetry has come.
I finished the sink and pulled the vacuum into the bedrooms, where I did what I’ve been doing dusting and picking up the big pieces—shavings, leaves, dog hair. I know that we’re not supposed to lay up treasures on earth where moths and dust corrode, but my things are a great comfort. They soften my home, make it feel like a nest and don’t even birds have nests, some quite elaborate? I feel for the people in LA and North Carolina who lost their homes and neighborhoods, the ground that makes us who we are, gives us the work of love your neighbor. I think about Isaiah’s words, “But. Now thus says the Lord, he who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O Isreal: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters,, I will be with you; and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isa 43: 1 – 2, ESV).
I have cleaned this house enough, picked up the big pieces, swiped the easy dust. I used to judge farm women with crowded countertops and kitchen tables, but the work of outside chores can take priority. The weight of aging pushes me toward a future I can’t see but sense that someday I will have to say goodbye to all of these beloved things, to this house, this bedroom. I admired Marilyn who moved from a big house, to a condo, to assisted living, without being pressured by her children. And then she fell and went home to Jesus. I figure those goodbyes will be in steps, and somewhat sad.
The Jonathan Pageau and Paul Kingsnorth quotes are from The Symbolic World: 375 – Paul Kingsnorth – Western Civilization Is Already Dead, Jan 12, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-symbolic-world/id1386867488?i=1000683665013&r=876
The Chris Green quotes are from Speakeasy Theology: Being in Communion with Sinners, Jan 6, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speakeasy-theology/id1636943458?i=1000682856432&r=4281
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