1 What's Christian About Housework? I have always enjoyed keeping house. From my earliest childhood I wanted to cook, so my mother taught me how. The first thing I learned to make was oatmeal. The second was macaroni and cheese, with a sauce that sometimes involved a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup (I liked it that way) and sometimes didn't (the rest of the family preferred it without). I don't remember wanting to learn to do the laundry, but my mother taught me (and my brothers and sister) to do that, too: sorting, washing, drying, folding, ironing. One of my brothers got so good at folding that when he was in college, little old ladies would gather around him at the laundromat for the pleasure of watching him fold his shirts. My mother wasn't much on cleaning, so I mostly figured that out on my own. Perhaps this relatively late start on the cleaning front is why I have never attained (or, truth be told, aspired to) any particularly high standard of cleanliness. But by the time I was in my late twenties, I had spent years rather happily keeping house for myself and for other people, aware that this was not very fashionable but not really caring, because I liked it and on some level sensed the value of it, even if I didn't think about it very deeply. My adventures in housework became more intense, however, during the years of my first marriage. I married my first husband at the end of my first year in graduate school and buried him four years later, at the beginning of my sixth year. Over the intervening years his worsening illness absorbed more and more of my energy, until in the last few months of his life I could do little more than moan to my therapist, "I can't cope; I can't cope; I can hardly get to the grocery store." I understood then, with a clarity that I have experienced at few other times in my life, that getting to the grocery store was one of the things that Really Mattered. The dissertation could wait; dinner could not. Forget all the abstruse theological ideas that my classmates and teachers seemed to debate with such verve in the graduate seminars I was attending. Forget fantasies of "accomplishing something." Perhaps somewhere in the world there were people who measured their days by how much they got done-at work, in class, wherever. I measured my days by whether, at the end of them, the members of my household had been dressed and fed and bathed and put to bed. If we had been, then that was a good day. I had done what mattered most. Everything else was gravy. As I moved in subsequent years through widowhood into a second marriage and, eventually, into motherhood, my practice of housekeeping changed to accommodate the changes in my household. But I retained the long-held sense, of which I had been made so consciously aware during those difficult years of illness, that housekeeping-cooking, cleaning, laundry, all the large and small tasks that go into keeping a household humming along-was not a trivial matter but a serious one. People need to eat, to sleep, to have clothes to wear; they need a place to read, a place to play, a place into which to welcome guests and from which to go forth into the world. These are the needs that housework exists to meet. Good academic and theologian that I was, I wondered,"Where are the books about this? Where are the books that might describe and unpack and explore the significance-both practical and spiritual-of this kind of work?" I couldn't find many. The more I thought about it, the odder it seemed. After all, Jesus has very strong things to say at various points in the Gospels about the Christian duty to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. He even goes so far, in his parable of the Last Judgment, as to paint this as the criterion by which the sheep are separated from the goats: "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me. . . . Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:34-40). There is a tendency, I think, on the part of those of us who are well fed, clothed, and housed to imagine that the needy people to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25 are people we don't know-the sort of people who are served at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, at which we ought therefore to volunteer at least occasionally. But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed. There is undoubtedly more to the merciful service that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 than caring for the daily needs of the members of our own households. Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning-not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that-in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others, whether those others be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves.

FANTASIES AND REALITIES

Housekeeping and domestic tasks in general have come to occupy a complex position in American popular culture. Odd as it would have seemed to my grandmother (who was a housewife all her adult life) or to my husband's grandmother (who did all her own housework and cleaned other people's houses for pay besides), housework is these days the subject of a great deal of fantasy. Designer cleaning products and accessories are marketed to high-end consumers who have no intention of cleaning their houses themselves (for that they have maids) but who like to imagine themselves waltzing about in sheer black aprons while wielding feather dusters. Newspapers bring us columns on fashion that feature haute couture-clad models striking poses on washing machines, the presumed message of which is that you can be expensively dressed, impossibly thin, and dramatically photogenic, all while a load of towels spins dry.Thirty-something women explain their plans to leave paid employment at some indefinite time in the future: "Home will be a total haven. I'll go through a stack of Martha Stewart books and learn to cook. I'll feng shui my furniture and pick just the right sheets from Garnet Hill. Keeping house sounds like fun." Fun, that is, as opposed to work. Domesticity, we are to believe, is a leisure activity, one that results in elaborate, spotless perfection while requiring nothing of us but that we purchase a few brand-name products or publications. "Have the best of everything," coos an ad for one domesticity magazine. "Scatter seeds with your own hands. Pick perfect cherries.Take a nap in an orchard. Lift corn from the earth. Curl up with a kitty. Step into your garden. Make a wreath of ginger cookies. Belly flop on snow. Send in the postpaid card . . ."The message is clear: keeping house is not about mastering a set of complex and worthwhile skills for the sake of doing a good job at something that needs to be done. It is about being perfect without even trying. Just subscribe to this magazine, and your house-and your life-will be perfect. The reality, of course, is that housekeeping is not effortless, and it is never perfect, even when it gets done, which happens less and less. Interest in housekeeping-as-fantasy appears actually to be rising more or less in proportion to decline in the actual doing of housework. Sociologists have found that over the past thirty or forty years, the amount of time that women spend doing housework has fallen by nearly half, with no comparable rise in the amount of time spent on housework by men. Food industry groups report that an ever-increasing percentage of meals are prepared or eaten (or both) away from home. When people do cook at home, they spend less time at it. They spend less time on laundry, too (they've given up ironing), and on cleaning (they've given up washing floors). And housework of all kinds is increasingly relegated to the fringes of lives filled with other things. In her book The Time Bind, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild documents the increasing prevalence of homes in which every adult member of the household works full time for pay outside the home and no one bears explicit, dedicated responsibility-even part time-for tasks inside the home.The result, she says, is homes so chaotic and unstructured that all the adults in the household would rather be at work than at home. After all, at work people know what their jobs are and can take a break when they're done; at home all anyone knows is that it is a mess waiting for someone to clean it up. The resentment and anger that this engenders in both men and women is evident in, among other places, a pair of edited volumes with marvelously evocative titles: The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch. These books, which purport to give women's and men's perspectives, respectively, on relationships, marriage, sex, and parenthood, turn out to be about housework as much as they are about anything else. Who is doing the housework? Who is not doing it? Who thinks someone else should be doing it, or at least doing more of it, more reliably, more cheerfully, more efficiently? Who is taking responsibility or shirking responsibility? Who feels overburdened and unappreciated? Who feels just plain overwhelmed and exhausted with the demands imposed, most often, by children, who...