Order from Chaos: 3 Tips for Keeping January's Resolutions

"Let all things be done decently and in order" (I Cor.14:40)

God is a God of order. Like cold is what happens when heat is absent, chaos is what happens when God is absent. Without the hand of God, or your hand as His child, all things will revert to their original state: nothingness. The process isn't pretty. The first few stages are mere messiness and disorder. Left alone, these degenerate into chaos. Chaos ultimately ends in obliteration and annihilation.

A wife and mom is in a constant fight with the descent into chaos.

It's the oldest story out there. Creation was orderly and functioned well until we introduced the chaos of sin. After that all Hell broke loose, literally. To make a near eternal story short, if you are battling the Home Depot web page or a counter top that continually fills up with junk mail, half finished scribblings, hair ties, dog collars, dirty coffee mugs, broken crayons, unsharpened pencils, random lists and rubber bands, you can blame Adam and Eve for it.

Thanks guys!

Though, from the looks of my counter top (and no, I will not be showing you a picture of my desk), I'd be the last person to ask about organization, I do have an insight or two into the process. I know how to get organization schemes wrong, I know how to fail, and since that's about it, let me help you avoid some of the pitfalls as you enter into January's Resolution Season.

#1 Let God In
Since God created order and you need Him for that, begin any home improvement project with prayer. Don't try to go at the house on your own steam. Don't even try to go at it with some expert's scheme. None of that is going to work as well as simply starting from the premise that you can't tackle this problem alone. Face it, the Universe is spinning out of control, your counter tops and dusty baseboards are merely evidence of a problem greater than mankind. Entropy is a law you are trying to break! Which leads me to my next point.

#2 You Are Doomed

Not my actual counter...

You are going to fail. You may quit reading now or you may build into your system this humbling realization. Like we continually fall into sin and laziness in our spiritual life and need to be continually repentant and prayerful to battle that tendency, you will continually fall into it in your physical life, too. Whatever your new plans are, a new diet or a vow to keep the gas tank above a quarter tank, you are going to do very well on your new system for a few weeks and then you will slip up. No matter how diligent you think you are, one day in the dim gloom of a drizzly February day, you will look up in surprise to see that counter looking worse than it did when you started. It will hit you that you have failed and you will be tempted to look upon all the effort you put into it to change yourself and your life was a great big honking waste of time! My thinking usually sounds a bit like this, "Almighty Me has put for a bit of effort and now the job should run itself without anything more from Me. It isn't fair!" If that sounds in any way familiar or if that random Internet pic of a messy counter top is yours, swallow your pride, pray, repent, and get back to the job. That's just how that works.

#3 Be Smart and Be Lazy
Be lazy enough to understand that a little effort every day avoids the tremendous effort once a week/month/year. Putting off a job multiplies magnificently (horrifically?) the effort it takes to do the same job. You may think you are being lazy by ignoring a problem spot, but the really lazy person designs her life around the least effort humanly possible. If 10 minutes of cleanup twice a week is all that it takes to keep the counter top clear, but 5 seconds of putting away a piece of mail in the moment is all it takes, be lazy enough to pick the latter. That's just smart.

So, enjoy your New Year. Keep your Resolutions, but do so armed with the understanding that breaking an old habit of disorderliness with a new habit of orderliness is going to take time and a bit of human frailty. Always keep in mind that first thought, that God is a God of order. If you find your February beginning to bloom with the flowers of your old familiar chaos, remember that like cold is the absence of heat, chaos is the absence of God. Laxity in your physical world may be a sign of laxity in the spiritual, so begin weeding it out with prayer and repentance. That could never hurt.

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Be careful what you read...

Reading this...

led me to read this...

which of course puts this next on the reread list...

and will cause me to watch this again.

All of this will lead me, once again, to irritate my friends with sharing the thoughts that we, too, got it all horribly wrong. Russia's Communism was merely the flipside to 20th Century Western Consumerism. Both Communism and Consumerism come out of the mistaken world view that we can create a Utopia merely by an act of the will: the collective will of Communism or the individual will of Consumerism. Just like Communist Russia, we Consumerists are bankrupting our economies and our moral structure. We simply have taken a little longer to fall apart. Unless we change, we will and probably soon. Our culture can not survive much longer enslaved to our whims. Since there is no self control, control will be imposed from without. It's inevitable. Nature, and human nature above all else, abhors a vacuum.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I know the answer to our problems lies in a renouncing of our materialistic philosophy. We have developed it, worshipped it, and danced with it since the Renaissance. It has left us empty. The Individual, when he looked up from his centuries' long dance, has found himself alone

and oh so lonely...

It is time to look God in the face again, and let Him answer the eternal question, "Who am I?" with "You are mine."

Pondering my ponderings...

I blog about momming and teaching and fostering and wifing and cooking and goating with my particular Catholic and ex-unrepentant heathen flavor because these are the things that I do. I hope I don't come across as a self-proclaimed expert because I am certainly not one. My main point, in most of my posts is to think out loud, share what has worked for me and what has not, smile at my shortcomings, and hope for the best. That's it, really.

I feel that I am pretty okay at mothering. I have my good days. I know I was a pretty decent school teacher because I had these yearly evaluations that told me so. I make a poor excuse for a wife, I'll admit. I know I wouldn't want to be married to me, so I give credit where credit is due for any success there: the Sacrament, my husband's forgiving nature, and a whole lot of reading up on the real experts. Most of my wifely posts are me preaching at me reminding myself to get doing what I know I am supposed to be doing.

I thought somebody out there might have enough in common to laugh with me or even enough common sense to laugh at me at times, but I knew I enjoyed the company of others' thoughts on the ethernet and thought I might be able to contribute a thought or two, too. It's all a little awkward though, this blogging thing. I can see how easily it might degenerate into a roadblock to family time, a popularity contest, a vanity feeder, or an idea narrower. I really don't need any help finding new ways to fall short, so I do try to keep the pitfalls in mind. At best I guess, blogging is a bit like writing magazine articles, but it has a more intimate appeal to it somehow. When I read a good blog regularly, I feel the stirrings of something very like friendship with the blogger.

If this were the 1950s, I'd have you over for coffee and tea in the afternoon and we could laugh over the mountains and molehills of the daily grind together. But this is the Post-Modern Era. We are so neatly modern that I sit here in my home and type, you sit there in yours and read, and we share a moment displaced. It's much less entertaining this way. Much less civilized. All this social networking and blog reading feels cozy and homey, but is it enough to battle a certain modern loneliness we all have?

I don't know. What I do know is that I've been privileged to share some of my inner workings here. I feel very grateful and sometimes apologetic towards the people who have read what I've written. I hope you all, like my husband, find me just entertaining enough you can forgive me my shortcomings and, like real friends, point them out when they show, so I can tuck them back in again.

Sin!

Here's something I've been noticing in my long road of conversion: only Catholics seem to really sin.

We have sinning down to a science. It's categorized very scientifically by its relationship to your soul, the effects  your sin has on the world, the consequences attributed to sin, all kinds of ways and means of classifying sin. And so it should be scientific: The Catholic Church invented our science system. (Oh yeah? Yeah...)

Over the years of talking to various groups, none of them seems to have a handle on the various forms of missing the mark. With the exception of the conversations with the Jewish folks I've known. They know from human frailty.

This is by no means a lofty or even an accurate list, but I'd sure like to discuss this with anyone who's interested. Human weakness intrigues me. Probably because of my daily (hourly, breath by breath) struggles with mine. I got the same old, same old sins I've struggled with each and every day I decided I didn't want to be a slave to my every whim.

My Observations

Protestant versions of the human struggle to improve:

• Variation One Sin is general. We are all "sinners" in the general sense, but me specifically and right now specifically? No, I've been saved. I don't sin.
• Variation Two Sin is general. We are all "sinners" in the general sense, and pretty nasty, too, but Jesus throws a cloak over me and I'm good enough. My sins don't matter. I've been redeemed.

NeoPagan versions of the human struggle to improve:

• Variation One Sin is a Christian thing. If you mean actions counter to self-improvement and enlightenment, I'm well on my way. I cycle back to old issues, but I'm always on a new place on the spiral. Onward and upward.
• Variation Two I'm beyond sin. Other people might think they sin, but that's just because they aren't far enough along the path (like I am). 

Atheistic/Humanistic versions of the human struggle to improve:

• Variation One Sin is a waste of time. We all are basically working toward survival of the genes and whatever gets us evolving is fine. Do what you want. If your genes survive, fine, if not you're out of the pool.
• Variation Two Sin is what society agrees it is. It's different for everyone and every culture. If you don't like it here, change it or leave it. 

I may have missed something in my journeys through these various groups. (Admittedly, I wasn't an Atheist ever, merely a bad and poorly catechized Humanist.) Other than the touches of arrogance here and there, the main problem I saw was that people were all considered to be bad from their starting point--or neutral at best. Or that children were somehow revered as "pure human" and "perfected" until society screwed with them. These views all ran counter to my intuitive understanding of human nature. The more I found out how the Catholic Church views people and our nature, the more I realized they'd been what I'd been looking for all along.

So, instead of just giving you my opinion, I'll just restate in my own words a brief (there's 2,000 years of this stuff, folks) description of what the Church has to say about people.

• We're created good. Yeah, hold a baby. You can tell that one right away.
• But we have a tendency to screw up. Sure, check in on that baby as soon as she can start making any kind of behavioral decisions and you've got "naughty" on the radar.
• We're all sinners and we're all in this TOGETHER. We can screw up, be sorry, try again, and still be in the same building? You can be forgiven for stuff and then move on? Together? That was a revelation for someone who grew up in a world where as soon as sin entered into the picture, someone got fired, you changed churches, or there was a church-ectomy and part of the congregation split off to be a better church than the rest of you. Let me tell you what a revelation that was coming into the church in the years after the fallout from the Priest scandals was in full force. (I came in Easter 2003)
• We have to struggle or we're a slave. Someone gave me a simple definition of sin. It's when you love yourself more than God. I get that completely. When I don't get my butt off the computer chair and immediately go admire that 5 year old's Play Dough flower because, by golly, I have a blog people read, I'm not serving my family. I'm serving my pride. It ain't pretty. God blessed me to be a married woman in a family and that is how I best serve Him. It's so easy to get tangled up in that pride, I'm telling you. Like any sin, you indulge it once and you've got the burden of a little practice to overcome the next time. Indulge in it frequently and you are building up so much momentum, you're becoming habituated. After it's a habit, you are pretty much stuck in a groove and a slave to that impulse because you're bound to react the same way every time that impulse hits.

Well, that barely skirts the topic, but I'm done writing for now. It's late and all. Besides all that Blogger just ate my really cool ending. I'm too tired and lazy to recreate it just now. You'll have to trust me that I managed to pull it all together in this neat little package for you. I'm really cool that way, you know.

And no that doesn't count as Pride. It's sarcasm.

....and just maybe Sloth.

(Dang it!)