Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

This Gospel always gets to me at a deep level because I am a messy person. I do not typically have a room that is well swept and put in order. But everyone, even messy people, likes a clean room.

When everything is cleaned up and nicely ordered, and you step into it for the first time, it feels wonderful. It feels freeing. But then you have to keep it that way. And that is where I always fail.

You leave one can on the table, one dish somewhere, and you think, “I’m tired. I’ll get to it.” And then you don’t. Seeing that mess, you add a little more mess, and suddenly you are back where you started. Keeping that room clean and ordered requires constant watchfulness. It requires constant work to stay on top of it.

That is why I find this Gospel challenging. You get the demon cast out and clean everything up, and the moment it is all clean, the demon comes back—with friends. Now there is a lot more room to mess things up. The only way to keep it clean after you have cleaned it once is to keep working: staying on top of it, doing the little things, and taking care of it.

That tells us a lot about the spiritual life. We get so focused on the big things. “I’ve struggled with this one major sin, and I’ve finally overcome it. Now I’m not going to do anything. I don’t fall into that sin anymore, so I’m not going to confession this year. The big thing that always drove me to confession is gone, so now I have no reason to go.”

But then the little things keep going wrong, and the mess slowly returns. It may return much worse because we are not even paying attention anymore.

In the spiritual life, we do focus on the major things first. We cast out those demons. But then our attention and energy have to turn to the little things, the things that will slowly wreck the place and create an even bigger mess in the end. We have to give them the time and effort they deserve and recognize that they, too, are a big deal.

We call them small. In the Church’s tradition, we call them venial sins. And when we say “venial,” I think what we often hear is “trivial.” They are not trivial. They do not, in and of themselves, separate us from the life of grace and our relationship with God. But they are still sins. They still do damage. They still create the mess.

If we let all of that go, those sins ultimately build up and will push us off the cliff. They will lead us to mortal sin one day. We cannot let the little things go. I hope everyone reaches the point in life when you are no longer routinely struggling with mortal sin. That should be a Christian goal. But once you reach it, you are not done. You have taken one step.

Now comes the hard work of cleaning up the venial sins, attending to the little things, and building up the life of charity that Christ himself demonstrates—all that work that is impossibly difficult. That is our next task.

Keeping the interior room swept and in order means focusing on those little things and working at them again and again. Never leave the dish sitting on the table overnight. Put it away. Take care of cleaning up those things. That is the Christian life. That is our greatest struggle, but it is what we have to do. Otherwise, as the Lord says, our final state may be far worse than where we started.

So let us pray for that grace. Let us pray to the Holy Spirit for help to focus on the little things the very moment we conquer the biggest ones. Let us keep our minds and hearts focused on the end goal: life with Christ. That infinite gift is worth all the work, all the tedium of the spiritual life. Coming to know Christ and truly be like him is the greatest thing we could possess.