Faith Works 3-6-21
Jeff Gill
Everybody wants to clean up, but…
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When Jesus is talking to Peter, at John 21:18, he says to him: "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go."
And "where you do not want to go" is where much of this past year, and this Lent, is taking me. With apologies, I'm taking you with me, because as with most of scripture, I think what Jesus is saying is for us as well.
Yes, he's talking about death, but only in part. The prophecy implicit in the verse above is Peter's martyrdom, but it's also about aging, and limitations, and endings.
I've also found that it's about dumpsters.
This coming week is the one year anniversary of my father's death, and to be blunt how it came as a crescendo for the losses that began in the Christmas season of 2019, of losing people important to me and whose passing left a mark on my spirit, of nearly a dozen in the span of ten weeks. Yes, I'm still sorting through that.
But Dad's death opened up a giant dumpster lid that I'm still flipping back and forth. My sister and I had a house in Texas to sort quickly (which had twice as much in it as you'd think looking at this little winter home from the outside), a childhood home in Indiana my brothers and others helped with clearing at a modestly more leisurely pace, and then a church office and its storage long shoved aside, needing some final attention as I stepped down from pulpit ministry.
As I've noted before, this past year I was sifting and sorting and discarding, of necessity (please, no helpful comments at this point about where I could take it or who could use it, it's pretty much all behind me and as COVID hit, everyone was clearing out basements to where many places that took in stuff had to stop doing so), not just my own piled up notes and outlines and memorabilia, but that of five or six other lives in my family going back into the earliest years of the 1900s, and of church history to boot, both of the congregation I was serving and in my church tradition's region.
The important stuff, I kept. Or tried to. But my sister and I have already had a few incidents of learning that something we pitched was important. All in the "there's no way we could have known that had value" category, a special pencil or a drab brown dress among dozens (hundreds) that had a particular meaning. If you let that haunt you, then you keep everything just in case, and I am here to tell you, that way lies madness.
And overstuffed basements and closets and cabinets.
Our lives produce more meaning than we can save, just as our culture produces more stuff than we can use. Keep one piece out of a hundred, and you still end up with thousands in no time.
So this is not Marie Kondo, or what brings you joy to posses, or any magic clue to how to downsize and sort, except for this: there is a spiritual discipline to accepting the need to put stuff into dumpsters. It's not joy, and it can produce waves of anxiety, but it can also bring peace.
At a certain point, you get into a space of saying, to God, the universe, to your future self, whomever: I can't keep it all, and this is what I am casting aside. Sure, recycle or take for reuse or hand along to others what you can, but I've noticed in both self and others over the years that those idealistic proposals can just be further means of evasion of the reality — most of our lives are junk, trash, detritus, debris. An awful lot of it can be safely thrown into dumpsters. And the regrets over a few stray pieces has to be seen in relation to the impossibility of keeping it all.
Letting it go brings clarity, and yes, peace. Throwing out the trash starts with admitting that's what it is, which is often a place we don't want to go. But there we are called.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done dumpster diving before, but this is different. Tell him about your spiritual disciplines around taking out the trash at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
