I’ve been on a Lawrence of Arabia reading jag lately; I should say re-reading, since none of the ten biographies I have looked at is new. But a life so heroic, talented, scholarly, and fearless, complex and contradictory can never be easily or quickly assimilated. Some of the books have splendid black and white photos of Bedouin life and this brings me to my point.
Around or adjacent to the camp fires are the trademark brass Arab coffee pots. They are at the same time functional and aesthetic; icons of a cultural context of hospitality and in themselves things whose graceful curves bespeak an eye for beauty.
Where had I last seen these displayed? Not in any middle east country, but balanced over the door frames of my eldest daughter’s Canadian home. There were nine of them.
Why do we accumulate so much when one or two should suffice as reminders of the eastern Syrian desert where my daughter acquired them? Whence this endemic attachment to so much stuff? Stuff that ends up crushing and suffocating so many middle class or aspiring middle class families?
A friend who read this condemned me with Jesus’ words, “physician, heal thyself,” for picking on my daughter to exemplify clutter. In extenuation I pleaded that I used Bedouin coffee pots as my example only because that image was fresh in mind.
My excess books, files, and tools could have served as well, but without the exotic flavour.
In my advanced age I often find myself confessing that were I to live my pastoral ministry over again, I would preach more often on texts that speak to this problem. When is the last time you heard a sermon (assuming you still hear sermons) on the text “do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven….” (Matthew 6:19-20).
I read recently a piece pointing out that our duty to the next generation requires that we start the purging process now. I am stressing a different starting point: put the breaks on acquisition now. Stop buying so much stuff. We can worry about the economic implications as we go along.
Our present day fusion of capitalism and information technology makes that difficult advice to follow. But it always required moral discipline. We must recognize the irony that you don’t have to be rich to accumulate stuff. My wife was in many ways the paradigmatic minister’s wife. Thanks to her frugality and practical know-how we lived well on the Home Mission Board’s minimum salary (or less, since I insisted on a cut when I took time to commute for my doctoral studies).
She enjoyed stripping old furniture of its accumulated coats of paint and varnish so that she’d have a vintage dresser or sideboard for each of our four children. If she spotted a deal on teenage girls’ bell-bottom jeans she bought four pairs, even though our children were still in grade school – one for Julia, one for Joanna, one for Sarah and one for Mark’s wife (Mark was still a ten or twelve year old boy!).
When she died, much of this stash was still burdensomely stored in trunks with that characteristic basement smell, and bell-bottoms were out of fashion anyway. Admittedly much of this story is tender and touching, but may still serve to exemplify Augustine’s insight that evil is good perverted.
I’m not advocating a Manichaean world-denying ascetic life. I once stood in a Syrian courtyard and gazed a long time at the remnants of the seventy-two foot stone pillar atop which perched Simon Stylites for thirty years.
Clearly, he had adopted an austere, renunciant life. That’s no way, I thought, to live the Christian life which characteristically demands worldly engagement. Jesus left the relative security of Galilee to go to Jerusalem and death. But worldly engagement does not mean turning your life into a warehouse for stuff.
Ponder Jesus’ disturbing words, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).
This is not a recommendation for voluntary homelessness.
But it is a warning against the illusion that human fulfillment comes from the possession of the latest electronic gadgets, fashions, or upscale real estate.