The urge to tidy everything up ? like Martha in the gospels ? is not new, but modern life can make it worse. A sufferer confesses

I HAD a friend when I was a schoolboy whose mother wouldn?t let any of his chums into their neat bungalow on the outskirts of Birkenhead. It was nothing personal, he used to explain, as we sat shivering in the storm porch. She didn?t let anyone in at all. Sometimes she even made him feel unwelcome ? and he lived there. The problem was that she couldn?t bear untidiness and visitors were by definition untidy. It was, my friend added, making what I fear with hindsight was an unsuccessful appeal to our better nature, a sickness.

I often find myself remembering Mrs Adams when I?m lying in bed and obsessively eyeing a patina of dust on top of the skirting board or a pile of dirty children?s clothes kicked under an armchair. If I think hard enough about her, I believe, then I will find the strength to resist getting up to find a duster. Whether you call it aversion therapy or praying for the strength to overcome my weaknesses, it usually works. Indeed, by some perverse logic, I have now become almost proud of the accumulations of dust that decorate our house. They are the outward signs of an inner grace that has allowed me to tame this demon. (I can still, the sharp-eyed will have deduced, tell you precisely where the dust is. The devil is not so easily beaten.)

One day, I am sure, the sainted evangelists of scientific progress will detect a tidiness gene. After all, I do not suffer alone. It is, I have discovered, a common affliction. So I delight in finding fellow patients ? like my neighbour Susan, who can?t bear the presence of piles of ironing so sends it all out to be done, returned wrapped in tissue paper and slotted straight back into the wardrobe she had built specially for the purpose.

I trace my own dysfunction back to my father. Another counting-sheep exercise I resort to when the muddle involved in having two small children around the house threatens to overwhelm me is to think of my own father. He loved a tidy garden. My mother and I would watch him endlessly going over the flower beds with a hand trowel, smoothing and shaping the weedless (and usually plantless) soil as if plastering a wall. ?Old Tidy-itis?, she would call him, not entirely affectionately. That makes me, I suppose, Tidy-itis Junior.

This hereditary blight can distract others from your talents. My first job on leaving university was a case in point. It was at The Tablet as the editorial office junior. My major impact in nine months was to rearrange the disorganised stacks of church periodicals that had been flung on the shelves opposite my desk. My given excuse was that their chaos prevented me from concentrating on what I was being paid to do. I?m not sure if others saw it that way. Tidy shelves were my only bequest to the magazine when I moved on.

Tidiness is not, of course, strictly a modern distraction. Mata Hari, someone told me recently at dinner when I outed myself by inadvertent efforts to line up the cutlery, was a stickler for everything in its place and a place for everything. Henry VIII was reputedly another who liked apple-pie order, but the conveyor of this nugget may simply have been telling me this out of pity. What has changed in our wretched consumerist age is that we are now assaulted from all sides by images of tidiness: celebrities interviewed fawningly in their beautiful (and tidy) homes, ?Living? supplements packed with lavish shots of minimalist (and tidy) interiors, gadgets and cleaning products clogging up the advertisement breaks with their promises of (tidy) domestic perfection, even computer screens where an icon keeps popping up to encourage you to reorder (and tidy) your document files. In such a world the tidiness gene can make for a daily crucifixion.

First there is the futility of it all. Dust comes back, however much we feather-flick it away, as Howard Hughes discovered to his cost. Tidying children?s toys is the modern myth of Sisyphus. No sooner are Action Man and Barbie returned to their allotted boxes with all their bloodthirsty or gender-defining paraphernalia than in another part of the house the sponge painting kit is being taken out for its 15 messy minutes of fame. I could spend my whole life pointlessly putting things away. As it is, I try to balance my own mental well-being ? a surface tidy a couple of times a week, major sorting out once a month or so ? with that of my offspring. I don?t want them to end up, like my schoolmate in Birkenhead, standing on the doorstep with their friends apologising for their father. A distinguished psychotherapist and rebirthing practitioner told me, when I recounted to her the details of my son?s birth, that I would have to allow him to be untidy as a child if he was to grow up well-balanced. It?s counter-intuitive, but trying is my penance.

The major drawback of tidy-itis, though, is that it stops you getting on with what matters. I have to make sure the backdrop is well-ordered before I can sit at my desk and write. And when, on a Saturday morning, I make a mental list of things I would like to do that day and end up with tidy the bathroom, pray, or sort out my life, you can guess which gets top priority ? and not just because it?s easiest. It is the metaphorical equivalent of wanting to tidy up the church before kneeling down and sparing a thought for God.

Even a cursory reading of the gospels offers little comfort. I can readily spot a fellow sufferer ? Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus. While Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and listens to him speaking, Luke tells us that Martha is ?distracted with all the serving?. For what it is worth, I know just what you?re about, Martha, and given a time-machine I?d be right there next to you plumping the cushions, but it brought you no benefits. ?Martha, Martha?, Jesus said, ?you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part; it is not to be taken from her.?

This modern distraction, though, runs deeper. Even when I resist seeking salvation with the Shake ?n? Vac and get down to life ?n? work, I can feel the tidy-itis creeping up on me. It can, for instance, make me very literal and intolerant in my writings on what it is to be a Catholic. Instinctively, I want it all to be neat, logical and, yes, tidy. All the contradictions, the hypocrisies and the disputes will be cleared away. The best form of tidiness, in an ideal world, would be for everyone to agree with me as to the way forward.

Unlike Tony Blair, however, I am not so arrogant as to think that one trip to the Vatican to meet the Pope will be sufficient for John Paul II to turn round and say, ?Now you?ve explained it to Peter, I can see you?re right and I?m wrong.? So then my tidiness has to take me in a different direction. With tidiness there are no halfway houses. Just tidy ones and untidy ones. So if my approach is out of kilter with everyone else, then I become nervous of disagreeing with the majority. That appalling old line about Catholicism being a club and you keep the rules or leave swims back through my mind from the reject box to which I consigned it long ago. In short, I don?t want to be the candlestick that untidily stands out in the neat row along the altar.

It is, before anyone points out that I should practise what I preach, not an anxiety to which I often ultimately succumb. That would be, I believe, on a par with getting out of bed to grab that duster to wipe clean the skirting board. Catholicism, my genetically tidy mind has come to see, is nothing if not a messy, untidy, often contradictory faith and involves a great many compromises if you are to find a way through between its ideals and the realities of daily life to the promise of spiritual fulfilment that lies beyond. It isn?t and was never intended to be an easy path for pilgrims, tidy or not. Perhaps that is one of its greatest appeals for me ? its potential to save me from myself. This Lent, as I twitch involuntarily at the sight of dirt, dust or chaos, I will try to seek stillness with that thought.

Peter Stanford is a writer and broadcaster. He is the author of The Devil and Heaven: a traveller?s guide.

Back to homepage