I Will Give You The Keys to the Keyboard of Heaven

So there’s this rumor going around that you can clean your computer keyboard in the dishwasher.  There’s also this rumor going around that you’d better.

Seems Clorox did a study which concluded that the abc pad on your word processor has more germs than the office commode.  Telephones topped out the list of icky workplace equipment but not by much.  Tuscon has the cleanest computers and New York the dirtiest.  Anyway, it suddenly seems I’m spending my days up to the digits in finger lickin’ good fungus and I’m afraid to scratch my nose although bathroom breaks have become less stressful. 

As word of this cyber-sickness spread, someone launched the notion that the average computer keyboard is dishwasher safe.  I first heard about it on National Public Radio back in June.  Nell Boyce tossed her old HP model in on the “normal wash” setting and hoped for the best.  As she waited, she interviewed computer makers and geeks and received mixed results on the idea.  Manufacturers shun the notion and recommend antibacterial spray and those little cans of compressed air.  One outfit, Seal Shield, makes a keyboard that is not only dishwasher safe but works at the bottom of a swimming pool, though anyone who surfs the net beneath the surface has clearly gone off the deep end.

I thought I’d give it a try, but someone should have warned me that this absolutely does not work for laptops.

Actually, that last part is a lie - I don’t have a laptop and anyway I didn’t try it.  I did have a laptop but one night when I brought my dog in from the rain he shook himself dry and spattered water all over it and the keyboard died on the spot.  If a mere Presbyterian sprinkling KO’ed the thing, I somehow have to believe a baptism by full immersion would prove fatal as well. 

But what I really wonder is whether all this cleanliness is really necessary.  Or at all next to Godliness.

I say this, not because germs are unimportant, but because they are unavoidable.  After all, our bodies come equipped with an amazing system for waging war with infection.  At some point we must decide either to retreat to hermetically sealed bubbles or to slurp from the common communion cup of contagious humanity and learn to live with it, and with each other and with ourselves.

And I think this has important theological implications. 

The religionistas of Jesus’ day were fanatics for cleanliness.  They far preferred a fresh-scrubbed, though short-circuited, religious keyboard to a faith made funky in the effort to communicate.  Like surgeons with sterilized hands held aloft they moved through the crowds of commoners insisting that no one mar their immaculate holiness.  Now, clean hands are a good thing in a surgeon, but these soul physicians somehow forgot that all that scrubbing served only as a prelude to plunging their spotless mits wrist-deep in the pulsing life of a diseased patient.  We disinfect to keep from infecting, not as insurance against being infected. 

When they snarked at the Savior for not sudsing up with sufficient care he pointed to the irony of having dishpan hands and a bedpan heart.  (Mk 7.1-23)  Jesus’ fingers flew over the keyboard of common humanity, over surfaces made sticky with the clinging flesh of lepers and the STD’s of hookers and the unstaunched blood of menstrual women.  He played with clay cobbled from his own spit and drew in the dirt and dandled street urchins on his lap.  It wasn’t that Our Lord loved filth, but that he realized we can only tap out the message “God loves you” by touching the contaminated surfaces of sin-slimed hearts.

In his novel The Diary of a Country Priest George Bernanos creates a crusty old character called the Cure de Torcy.  This gruff priest acts as mentor to the callow protagonist.  At one point the old man invites his pupil to consider how the church should think about cleanliness.  Seminarians, he complains,

read stacks of books, but never have the nouse to understand what it means when we say the Church is the Bride of Christ . . . . I’ll tell you:  it’s a sturdy wench who’s not afraid of work, but knows the way of things, that everything has to be done over and over again, until the end . . . . for all the efforts of Holy Church this poor world won’t turn into a shining altar for Corpus Christi day.

The Cure goes on to describe the former cleaning woman at his cathedral.  She scoured the building to within an inch of its life until every surface shown.  This worked just fine until Sunday came and people showed up.  “If I’d let her have her way,” the priest claims, “I’d have turned everyone out so the Lord might keep His feet dry.”  In the end all her mopping only upped the humidity until the floors mildewed and her lungs wheezed with pneumonia.  The Cure concludes,

The mistake she made wasn’t to fight dirt, sure enough, but to try and do away with it altogether.  As if that were possible!  A parish is bound to be dirty . . . . Which all goes to prove, my boy, that the Church must needs be a sound housewife - sound and sensible . . . . A real housewife knows her home isn’t a shrine.  Those are just poet’s dreams.

So let us remember not to short-circuit someone’s salvation by soaking our souls in an unhealthy religious steam bath.  Let us be unafraid to have a faith interface that connects with corruption, to be those physicans who are indeed sent to the sick.  The keys to the kingdom come as we dare to touch the keyboard of contagious suffering in order to spell out the gospel of Christ to those he came to make clean.

This entry was posted on July 24, 2007 at 7:40 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.