I mentioned last time that I recalled learning from my seminary professors that one should even sweep a floor to the glory of God. This lead me to similar references in C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, I was left wondering–where does this striking and memorable image come from? Where had my Presbyterian professors heard it?
To seek an answer, I went up to the choir room at First Presbyterian Church, Green Bay, and pulled from the shelf a Presbyterian hymnal that dates to 1914. Hymn 343 is written by Rev. George Herbert (1633) and revised by John Wesley (1738). It goes like this:
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee.
To scorn the senses’ sway,
While still to Thee I tend:
In all I do be Thou the Way,
In all be Thou the End.
All may of Thee partake;
Nothing so small can be
But draws, when acted for Thy sake,
Greatness and worth from Thee.
If done to obey Thy laws,
E’en servile labors shine;
Hallowed is toil, if this the cause,
The meanest work Divine.
Clearly this old hymn teaches that the lowliest, smallest thing we do is still a sacred act. Wesley’s revision preserves the sense of the original poem, but I wanted to read Herbert’s own words. I just so happen to have in my office the Classics of Western Spirituality volume titled George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple. On page 311, I found his poem, The Elixir. A footnote explains that the elixer is a philosopher’s stone, claimed by alchemists to turn base metals into gold. The point is that when God touches even our most mundane actions, they turn to gold.
The fourth stanza that Wesley revised above reads as follows in the original poem:
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.
A seventeenth century English poet used the image of sweeping a room as an example of a fine spiritual activity! From there the teaching (but not the image itself) found its way into a Presbyterian hymnbook. I heard it from my teachers who were able to recall the old hymn and perhaps even knew the original poem. Herbert’s poem, and especially the stanza I have just cited, fits beautifully with the current trend to appreciate a spirituality of the mundane.
