Next to Godliness

 

Holy Cleanliness

“There is this male tendency to believe that somehow the initial two weeks of snappy dressing, full eye contact, and best behavior will balance out thirty years of holey underwear, mumbling, and anatomic decline. It is one thing to be a work in progress and quite another to be a work in regress. Familiarity is no excuse for lowering your standards.”

Michael Perry (from “Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace”)

          Okay, so I know this is not a quote about spirituality, even though they say that cleanliness is next to godliness. I just read it and couldn’t stop laughing, so I wanted to share it with you. I’m going to blame the pandemic isolation and the “work from home era” for the decline in human hygiene and presentability—my own, and others. My women friends and I have talked at length about how great it is not to get up in the morning and begin the whole ritual of “putting on your face” and trying to come up with clean clothes that go together from the scant selection in your closet, especially clothes that will accommodate the extra weight gained from mindlessly munching chips while staring at a computer screen in your pajamas.

          I forced myself to throw away all the holey underwear by thinking about my mother whose mortal fear was being taken to the hospital in underwear held together by safety pins. Almost every one of my t-shirts is soup-stained and stretched out of shape, and these damn tights that even old women wear are hard pressed to stretch over my newly acquired hippo-hips. A work in progress is hardly appropriate to describe the current state of humanity, including yours truly.

          In Michael Perry’s quote above, he’s no doubt writing from a male perspective, but it also applies to women. He's absolutely accurate. Two weeks of snappy dressing do not make up for the hygienic disaster of the last two years. We all must rise above the gutter and find our way back to the light of day, where people took regular baths, brushed their teeth, and put on clean, if not stylish, clothing. It’s a new day. Put all your comfey-pants, flannel gowns, stretched out and lent covered underwear into a garbage bag and carry it to the curb. Jesus wants you to be clean. He told me so.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane