What’s So Spiritual about Doing the Laundry?

Many of our articles have focused on seemingly non-religious and non-spiritual activities, such as doing the laundry, washing dishes, and reducing water usage. Are these really religious or spiritual topics? Just how do these mundane activities relate to our faith?

In his meeting with the clergy of Bolzano-Bressanone in Northern Italy, Pope Emeritus Benedict addressed just this question. He argued that we have almost completely forgotten about the theology of creation, and instead have focused almost exclusively on the theology of salvation. While the latter is concerned with individual souls going to heaven, the former focuses on God’s creative activity in bringing into existence the world around us, with all its life, its beauty, and its majesty, and ultimately on God’s promise to restore of all things in the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21:1).

When the theology of creation is minimized, we are left with a radical separation of the spiritual and physical. Pope Benedict eloquently describes its result:

The brutal consumption of Creation begins where God is not, where matter is henceforth only material for us, where we ourselves are the ultimate demand, where the whole is merely our property and we consume it for ourselves alone. And the wasting of creation begins when we no longer recognize any need superior to our own, but see only ourselves. It begins when there is no longer any concept of life beyond death, where in this life we must grab hold of everything and possess life as intensely as possible, where we must possess all that is possible to possess.

This separation of the spiritual and the physical, moreover, does not accurately represent the understanding of our Lord, of his apostles (including St. Paul), or of the Patristic Fathers. James, for example, argues that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:17) James goes on to challenge those who believe that they have faith apart from works to show him their faith; his implication is that where there are no works, there can be no real faith either.

For the early church, this combination of faith and works was viewed as an imitation of Christ and was seen as the essential activity of Christians. We see it reflected, for example, in Jesus’ call for us to take up our crosses (Matthew 10:38) in the missionary discourse, or in St. Ignatius of Antioch’s hope, as he makes his way from Antioch to Rome to be martyred in the Coliseum, that by combining his sacrifice with that of Christ, the lives of others will be saved.

This imitation is not confined to the sphere of religion or to selected good deeds (however important they are). Rather, it reflects who we as followers of Christ both are and strive to be. It means that we recognize God as creator not only of ourselves, but of both the animate and inanimate world around us. It means that, because God is the creator of all things, we strive to live in solidarity with all that God has created, that we see ourselves as connected and intimately relate to God’s creation, rather than apart from or above it. To return to the earlier question about laundry and dishwashing, it means that we care about how we are using the resources that God has created, that we care about what we are depositing in the water, and that we care about the effect that what we do will have not only on the natural environment but also on the generations that follow us.