I've been reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell. He said there was an extreme dropoff in crime in the New York subway after they started cleaning up Graffiti and going after people who snuck onto the subway without paying the fare. Before they did this, every car was covered with graffiti from top to bottom. Homeless people would jam all the coin-operated gateways into the subway, and then stand next to the overflow gate and demand that people give them their tokens in order to get in. Some people would go though the overflow gate, and some would just jump over the broken turnstiles. It was chaos, and crime was rampant.
After they cleaned this up, crime dropped dramatically, because people no longer felt that they were in a dirty, awful place where nobody cared. (And if nobody cares, why shouldn't I steal from my neighbor). The same people who would steal and mug people on a dirty, filthy subway would be law abiding on a clean one. Environment affects our behavior.
I was thinking about how this relates to Holiness, or cleaning up our spiritual lives. We might think that this would be a minor change, compared with other things we might do to change our condition. But what if the cleanliness of our soul, like the cleanliness of the subway, changes everything?
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