Everything in my home has been disrupted. Furniture from the main bedroom has been stuffed into the living room. Books have been taken off the shelves and piled into boxes. The dining room table and its surrounding area have become my wife’s work space. The office upstairs where I work has been transformed into even more chaos then usual. Nothing is where it should be and daily life has become noisy and unpredictable.

Mind you, it’s all in a good cause. The house is under renovation at the moment. Room by room, we are having our living space repaired, renewed, and made beautiful. I believe this project is worth doing. Eventually it will be worth all the grief.

But grief it is, for now and for the duration. To me it has become the Big Dig writ small. This morning I got up at three o’clock, unable to sleep longer. Asked why I could not sleep, I reluctantly replied with one word, “disruption.”

Phileas J. Fogg, our resident cat, is feeling it also. He looks hangdog these days, as if one can cross species. Clearly he, too, chafes at the disruption. Released from his cellar lair each morning, he makes his rounds, disconcerted that so much is no longer in its proper place.

Phil and I, making common cause, both bemoan our fate at having to live amid upheaval of the familiar. We live each day ill at ease, wondering when the house beautiful project will ever reach conclusion. Despite our commitment to the cause, we often wonder – – Is it worth it? We might relapse, given half a chance.

This minor domestic crisis has caught me by surprise. The simple decision to renovate the house has brought with it unforeseen challenges to my priorities. It has thus raised spiritual issues more urgently than I would have thought possible.

How can I have become so attached to my own convenience that a disruption upsets me as much as this house renovation does? And why do I so love my possessions that even short-term separation from them causes me pain? I reach out for my alarm clock and it is not in its accustomed place. I need to check a reference book but it is buried deep in some box or other far from my grasp. Soon my computer will be moved and I feel anxious about ever getting all its wires rightly reconnected.

The disruption may reveal how thin my spirituality really is. That  I cannot accept more gracefully than this the deprivation now underway does not speak well for the state of my soul. The detachment that I had prized now proves mere theory. My own convenience, comfort, and quiet have been embarrassingly revealed as dominant.

It was not always so with me. In the days of my most intense spiritual training I learned detachment from all earthly things. My Jesuit novice master taught us a rule from the Spiritual Exercises that was intended to govern my life. At that time you could have taken any of my meager possessions away from me and that would have been acceptable.

On further analysis, however, what is so wrong about these current reactions of mine? Are they not fully human, typical of the way most people would respond? Perhaps spiritual meaning is to be found in these evidences of a common humanity shared with so many others.

Is not this what the single most important decision of my life really meant? In middle age I chose to return to secular life and give up the austere role of official sacred person in order to plunge back into the world with all of its wild disorder. My wisdom then was that God could be found in the ordinary experiences of life, outside cloistered austerity.

I wanted to try the way of attachment instead of my youthful path of detachment. So if things are now crowding in on me, maybe that’s all right. It need not interfere with the spiritual life to live in a messy setting. The experience of chaos does not put us outside the realm of the spirit. In fact, it may lead to a deeper discovery of what spirit really means.

Richard Griffin