Keeping Up Appearances

I love the British comedy, "Keeping Up Appearances". Hyacinth fancies herself part of the upper crust because she married a banker. She spends her time promoting herself with her "candlelight suppers" and charity work, but inevitably she has to deal with her low-class sisters, which usually involves hiding them from people she is trying to impress.

My favorite sister is Daisy, who lives with her husband Onslow, neither of whom care a bit about appearances, preferring instead to read romance novels and watch the telly, respectively. Onslow sits with beer in hand, wearing his signature sleeveless sweater vest that barely covers his belly, but not his beefy arms.

The kitchen counter and sink are always filled with dirty dishes. One day Hyacinth came to call and Daisy offered to make her a cup of coffee. Noticing her sister's disapproving looks at the messy kitchen, Daisy took a dirty rag and half-heartedly started wiping a spot on the filthy counter, all the while chatting merrily. She never rinsed the rag, never even moved from that one spot. She essentially just smeared the grease around, accomplishing nothing. That extra touch on the actor's part wasn't central to the scene, but made it so funny, I laughed until I cried.

I remembered this scene while in church last Sunday. No, not because someone reminded me of Hyacinth, Onslow, or Daisy, nor because the sermon was boring and I needed a diversion. I had been thinking about my own life and how cluttered with sin and irrelevances it has become.

The indulgence of the holidays and the forsaken resolutions of the past year are piled up like the dishes in Daisy's kitchen. Like her, I sense that something needs to be done. I'm uncomfortable under Hyacinth's gaze, so I begin making a motion that resembles cleaning, but all I'm doing is just smearing the dirt around.

There needs to be an end to pointless, minor adjustments that are designed to distract, to prop up, to cover up, to maintain the status quo. Promises to do this, not do that, are merely attempts to take the edge off guilty feelings while preserving life as it is.

I long for a fierce, icy wind to cut deep, to blow away all the dead leaves. I need a tsunami to wash over me, to blast away the cobwebs of habit and indifference. I want words like, "Take up your cross and follow me" to make me tremble.