The Prophetic Ministry of Cleaning

Cleaning is an important part of our work as volunteers at Corrymeela.

We are here to serve others. That includes the more glamorous sides of service: having discussion, serving food, being involved in developing new ideas. But it also includes the less attractive jobs which are often not seen. Cleaning the rooms of departing guests is an interesting experience. Most of us as able-bodied adults clean our own homes. So cleaning a bathroom which has been used by a complete stranger can feel like an intrusive act, an invasion of personal privacy.

At the very core of peace and reconciliation work is the belief that all people are equal. We are all equally valuable. It is very easy to hold this belief as an intellectual idea but not really believe it in relation to how we live. We can all too quickly fool ourselves into thinking that we are too good for certain kinds of work, subtly believing that we are in some way superior or of greater value than other people. These feelings of being of unequal value can all too quickly lead us into conflict because when they are challenged we react.

If we aspire to believe in equality as an important building block towards peacemaking then we have to make concrete decisions to affirm this equality. What we believe is testified to, not by our words, but by our actions. Ideas are not enough; it is our actions which count. So we need to practically remind and re-remind ourselves that we are all of equal value. This means that everyone (especially those in leadership positions) has to do the work considered the lowest in status, in our cultural context this means that everyone has to clean!

Gandhi was a strong advocate of this kind of practical equality; he famously insisted that absolutely everyone, including himself, had to take turns in cleaning the toilets. No one is too important to do the work of the least cultural value.

This sense of superiority and inferiority is often engrained into our mentality. It is really fascinating to observe how many of the guests react to you when you are cleaning. It is often as if they have subconsciously made the assumption that being the person who is cleaning automatically makes you inferior and them superior. One example of this mindset is exemplified by how messy the rooms are often left, when leaving a room many guests clearly haven’t given a moment’s thought to the person who will have to clean that room.

So perhaps one of the ways in which we are prophetic in the way we live here is to clean. And not just to clean but to encourage others to clean alongside us. We are here to make people feel welcome. At a superficial level to make a person feel welcome is to do things for them, to allow them to feel superior.

But there is a deeper level of welcome which we can offer, we can challenge them to be our equals. Making someone feel at home can sometimes involve reminding them that when at home they have to clean their own bathroom.