Cleaning the House Before the Cleaners Arrive

The day before house cleaners repair the dust and grime invasion of the last two weeks, my wife is in a frenzy: stressed beyond reason that anything out of place renders our home deeply, deeply flawed. And thus we are, too. (Yes, I am lazy … ) Tiny changes in all the items that have been casually cast about are rigorously brought into the essence of “ORDNUNG!” Dishes are cleaned and put away. The bathrooms are wiped down of the more ghastly filth. A vacuum hoovers. Forget Martha Stewart or Marie Kondo or the unending “influencers,” the house must be orderly before the specialized Orderers of Our Lives arrive to clean it.

Why this panic ensues, I have never completely understood. Perhaps it’s best to not bother the professionals with small stuff. Maybe it’s a fear of pissing them off. Or perhaps there is a fear that the natural state of the house is too grim to reveal to strangers, like matting down our bedhead before going to the barber or lying to the priest who asks how we are doing. But honestly, the house is pretty tidy with all the putsch.

There are unending ways we can justify or revile ourselves each day. But what we do, succeed or fail, tells us who we are. We want to believe that we are fair, faithful, just humans. But we are humans with feet of clay, a shoelessness revealed in all of our daily doings. The outcomes may vary, but the motivations are present in every act we engage in.

“Imposter Syndrome” may be universal to humanity. The Academic Terror Dream is a near universal panic: You are 20. At school. You find out that there was a class you had forgotten about for the last six weeks and the final is in four hours: BUT you can do this! You can study! You find your classroom, your books, but finally find out that you are naked, creating a crisis of complete inadequacy.

In the zillions of things to do every day, we try our best and hope our failures vanish from the awareness of others. Some are essential: buy food, go to work, attend school. Others are more aspirational, reflecting our hopes and desires for the future. But everything we do, required or discretionary, succeeds or fails in its outcome. No peas at the supermarket. A morning alarm that didn’t go off. The proverbial drive from the tee box that shanked into the sand trap. But life usually hands us a pitching wedge instead of a mulligan.

My son was a terrific Division III college football player on an offensive line that allowed for 11 sacks in over 600 passing attempts. He stepped incorrectly on one play. He then let in one sack of the QB. In two years. That is the one play he has dreams about. And it is a terrifying nightmare, even thirteen years later.

We are all imposters: our messy home, our flawed intelligence, our flat errors are all abiding evidence of our failure to be what we should be — no matter how well we try to be perceived otherwise.

One of the few gifts of growing old is that you can no longer keep up the illusion of outward perfection. The fashions have changed too quickly to count, and the wrinkles and blemishes of decades of living can no longer be hidden. While immaculately clean and brushed, I have never worn clothing that is “right.” My hair is, well, often embarrassing. Like Popeye the Sailor, “I y’am wut I y’am” — for good or for ill. Even still, the huge engines of possible judgment— the house cleaners, the dream professor, the sacked quarterback — remain untouched by affordances given by old age.

But the weight of the years is cumulative. Faults can compound over time, and those left behind still bear witness. Every sadness of a child that was caused by my inadequacy as a parent. Every job I did not get was because I am simply not good enough to do the job. Every misstep, every overestimation, every ignorance.  By now, I “should” know that I am adequate. But I do not, at 70.

The largest “should” is that I, and you, “should” have faith that God’s love vitiates all inadequacies, failures, even stupidities. Absent sainthood, that just does not happen for any of us. “It’s all good” may be a goal, but that is not our resting state. My only cure for the fear of inadequacy is exhaustion. Too tired to clean the house before it’s cleaned by others. Too overwhelmed to do any better than I did. I cannot be a failure if frailty precludes perfection at the outset. But exhaustion is a poor mask for faithlessness.

God has given each of us the agency to believe that we, too, can be God. A cruel illusion, perhaps, proven false every day. But we do, eventually, wake up. We have to: death waits for no vitiation. God is just there, if we can simply listen. Especially in Lent. Because the Easter reality, of infinite love affording life after death, is the final miracle of our creation. The kind of miracle we don’t need to clean the house for before it arrives.