I have a confession to make: You know how my last column mentioned something about if you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor? Those words, spoken by Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and a woman I’d like to read more from, made me feel pretty guilty because, well, I have way, way more than two coats.
But that guilt has nothing on the guilt I feel now, since the week after Christmas, I went out shopping and guess what I got? Two MORE coats! Now if you’re going to have a bunch of something, I think coats are a good choice, since you wear one every day; and I really needed something warmer than what I already had; and they were on sale and I didn’t even have to pay the tax, and, and …
But what would Ms. Day have to say? Or Shane Claiborne, the guy in Philadelphia committed to living “the simple way,” who lives in a community of like-minded souls who share and rely on each other for what they need, who makes his own clothes to escape the obsession to consume? The guy who led me to start this column in the first place.
My goal for January was to give things away and buy less in an effort to become more aware of how much stuff I have (and want), to help others by giving away a bunch of that stuff, and to hopefully begin to remove myself (if only a little) from this obsessive-compulsive consumption culture of ours. And I’ve certainly been trying. I’ve been going through closets and cupboards, bookcases and kitchen drawers, toy boxes and even toiletries. (The mountains of baby clothes I’ve given to friends or donated to good causes have left my basement feeling positively empty.) It feels good to purge—especially at the start of a new year—but there are definitely things that are hard to let go of, and it’s difficult not to head to the mall to replace what you just got rid of.
Letting go of “stuff” is even difficult for my six-year-old, even though my husband and I try to cultivate an awareness that she is privy to many, many things (not only toys and books but food, water, shelter, an education, and a bed to sleep in) that so many others are not. Still, when I told her we were going to go through her things and choose some to give away, it pretty much meant that I dug through stuff for her, pulling out various items, showing them to her, and her saying, “No! We can’t get rid of that!” with a pain-stricken look on her face.
Sigh.
My husband, on the other hand, only needs to hear the word “purge” and he’s tossing out entire boxes of stuff without even looking through them. He may be slightly … ahem … untidy, but man does he hate clutter.
My youngest daughter doesn’t know the difference yet. She is more than happy to play with one or two toys. Would have been perfectly content to receive nothing for Christmas, playing happily with the dolls she already has. She had no interest in opening present after present, ignoring our continual requests to “open another one!” My eldest was like this at her age—happy with one thing when those around her wanted to give her 20. Now, she wants the 20. Did we create this?
Letting go of “stuff” is, I think, the first step in Claiborne’s call to live more intentionally, more aware of how our actions (even as consumers) impact others, and eventually to a place where we not only stop taking those negative actions, but meet the people who have suffered because of big business, befriend those people, and take steps to change the system. Doing so restores order—a Godly order—to our messed up world.
“I remember praying each morning in the leper colony with the brothers, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ And perhaps for the first time, those were no longer empty words that I hoped would come true someday,” writes Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution. “They became words we are not only to expect to come true, but also to enact. Such an idea was foreign to me in the materialism of my land, but it was so close to what I saw in the early church: a people on the margins giving birth to another way of living, a new community marked by interdependence and sacrificial love.”
Can purging the stuff we have and curbing our desire to buy more really lead us to renewal? To a world that more closely resembles the one our Maker originally intended? I’m hoping to find out.
Won’t you join me?
Until next week,
Amy
