A House Out of Order

A house out of order...sounds like one of those irritating word-picture puzzles that are supposed to represent common figures of speech, which teachers dole out to laconic students when they run out of real class work to do. Who am I kidding? I love those puzzles.

Houses are such interesting things: so many possible configurations, sizes, colours, shapes, materials, contents. Being three dimensional, there are so many possible perspectives you can have of a house, both within and without. Every house is as unique as the individuals who inhabit them, and each house affects and reflects it's master. They are the back-drops for most of our intimate relational drama.

Houses also make great metaphores, if you can decifer them.

What does it mean to have a clean house? What does it mean to have a house out of order? When is it right to condemn and demolish a house, versus restore it? When is a house considered 'cluttered' versus 'cozy'? When is a house described as 'sterile' versus 'organized'? At what point does a house cease being a place of refuge to become a prison? And how would you answer those questions differently if I told you that a person's body is the house of their soul?

I've spent a lot of time in other people's houses over the last few months (and very little in my own), and I always find it fascinating how different people order their homes, and how much the state of their home reflects the lives and personalities of the people who live in them. I stayed with my sister Valerie and her room-mate before Valerie's wedding to her husband, Dwayne. It was a 2 bedroom basement suite. My fiance Daniel, Valerie's blood brother and his girlfriend, and one of the other bridesmaids were also staying there. At 2:00am the night we all arrived, Valerie's basement suite flooded. It was a memorable and intellectually stimulating experience, later observing how the prior relative disorder of the house (caused by a combination of the small space, large number of occupants, the usual havoc created by all the conflicting demands of preparing for a wedding, and my sister's generally laissaize fair attitude towards house-keeping) became exascerbated by the unexpected presence of a bunch of water. Still, once the water was bravely pumped out by the quick-thinking and hard-working Dwayne and Daniel, it only took about a week before things were mostly resorted. Quite fortunately, my sister leads a blessedly simple life and had not accummulated a lot of excess belongings, so there wasn't an overwhelming number of items that needed to be cleaned and re-sorted.

Still more interesting was the experience of going to stay with Val's future in-laws while her home was de-flooded. We were very greatful to be freely welcomed into a safe and dry place to rest, but it was a strange place. The home's structure was solid, elegantly crafted to allow social, open space and maximal natural lighting, and had a very tidy yard and well-maintained exterior. But it was very difficult to notice those things if you were standing inside. If you have ever had the misfortune of seeing David Bowie's Labyrinth, then please try to put aside the traumatizing memory of his many pairs of too-tight pants, and recall the scene in which the heroine wakes up in what appears to be her bedroom. There, a strange pigmy bagwoman keeps handing her more and more of her favourite toys, until she is almost buried. Then our heroine has an epiphany: "This is all just junk!" And she bursts out of her room, only to find herself (and a replica of her room) in the middle of a vast landfill composed of endless piles of unsorted rubbage. That is the inside of this house. Well, close, anyway. There was stuff piled everywhere, sometimes right to the ceiling. Some of it was probably useful and/or beautiful, but you couldn't focus on those items because they were swamped in a pile of other things, all on top of carpets that looked like they had not been vacuumed in a millenia. And that, I know, is really not the worst example of illogical hording there is to be found- not the worst by far. It was a large, light-filled, high-ceilinged house, but I felt more claustraphobic there than I had in Valerie's 2 bedroom basement suite filled with 7 people.

After Val's wedding, I went to stay at my friend Jen's farm. She and her 2 children have moved into an old farmhouse where Jen's new husband (Dean) and his son live. It's a small 3-bedroom house. Jen was pregnant at the time I went to visit her. The kids frequently don't get along. Quite fortunately, my visit coincided with Jen's kids' summer visit to their father and Dean's son's visit to an aunt and uncle, so I experienced none of the overcrowded conditions they are usually tormented with. I did, however, get to experience the adventure of living in a house that is rotting from the base up. Jen is a cleanly lady- the house is, without a doubt, much cleaner and orderly since she has arrived and put her powerful senses of hygiene and functionality to work. But there is no soap to heal a bathroom wall that is infected with black mould, to purify a boiler 1/3 filled with sludge, to make a contaminated well's water non-fungal and non-slimy feeling, or to make a wet dirt basement floor any less muddy. This caused her much stress, and I had no suggestions to alleviate her worries.

I thought about those three houses, and their occupants, as I made the long drive back to my home alone. One disoriented house struggling not to drown when hit by crisis: succeeding, thanks in large part to it's simplicity and the many relational supports around it, co-operatively putting it back together. A second house suffocating from within, it's dysfunctionality often keeping it's occupants separated from each other and from those outside; content to remain so, because that is preferable to the pain of sorting, and the vulnerability of being seen clearly...and yet being seen anyway due to changes outside of itself it cannot control. A third house fighting to survive: a pearl knocked mercilessly around and around inside its smelly oyster mouth cage.

I thought about my mom. And I hated her soul's house for betraying her, for growing diseased and distorted when her heart isn't. My mother's body is my friend's rotting home. I wish my friend the opportunity to bulldoze her current house and to escape to a brand new one. I'm not sure I'm ready to wish that for my mother.

Which brings me to the last House Out of Order: my soul, a home of the Spirit of God. It's kind of messy at present, which should be concerning, given that a disaster is impending and I have already seen what happens when a house out of order gets further swirled around. Well, at least in my own house I know where the cleaning supplies are.