Stuff

When I moved from Anaheim to NYC on May 1, 2001, Bishop Grein generously paid for the move. I did cleanup and some packing, but Pink's Movers of Pasadena did the heavy lifting. And when I had unpacked my things a few weeks later on 109th Street, I realized that the apartment I had moved into in New York was about twice the size of the house I had lived in back in Orange County, leaving out the garage.

In the seven years since that move I did what I suspect most Americans do -- I accumulated things. Rarely a lot of things at once. A book here, a cd there, a set of sheets, some glasses, some clothes. But over time they add up. Perhaps the most involved acquisiton was a set of musical kudu horns I brought home from South Africa, thinking vaguely that we might get a youth group together to play catchy South African melodies on them. Not.

So when it came time to move, well, one word really says it all: More.

I'm pretty organized when I want to be, so I went to work. The food pantry next door gave me about two dozen knocked down Kellogg's Apple Jacks cartons, and the Director of the House of the Redeemer came through with half a dozen boxes as well. I soon became proficient at taping box bottoms and learned the arts of packing. Three trips later and most of the stuff was moved to West Park. After I arrived for good on the 31st of August, I began the process of nesting. Which I have enjoyed.

St. Benedict is basically against Stuff. He devotes an entire chapter (33) to the subject. "We mean that, without an order from the Abbot, no one may presume to give, receive, or retain anything as his own, nothing at all -- not a book, writing tablets or stylus -- in short, not a single item, especially since monks may not have the free disposal even of their own bodies or wills."

Father Huntington is pretty much on the same page. From Chapter 27, on Poverty: "By our vow of poverty not only are we called to a personal surrender of all earthly possessions, saving the cross given to us at our profession, but we are bound to live in the estate of poverty, governing ourselves at all times as having no dependence on earthly resources and ready to endure in submission to God's will the utmost privation even to the loss of life itself."

This is all fairly guilt-inducing. In truth, if I had lived up to this ideal, all I would have had to do is make sure my cross was around my neck and set out on my way. But of course things are never so simple. Even the Venerable Bede was discovered to have Stuff. The saint told young Cuthbert, who wrote the account of Bede's death in a famous letter, "I have a few treasures in my little box: pepper, handkerchiefs and incense. Run quickly and fetch the priests of our monastery to me, so that I can distribute to them these little gifts which God has given me."

"I have a few treasures in my little box... which God has given me." Apart from being one of the proofs that Jarrow did not exclusively follow the Rule of Benedict, this is a delighful frame for monastic Stuff. When I look at the things I have accumulated, they are all treasures. They are all things that God has given me. Every one of them has a story, and so every one of them is a treasure.... Or so I tell myself.

In truth, many of them are treasures, but many of them are just Stuff. One of my spiritual problems is not getting rid of Stuff but hanging on to it. Socks with larger and larger holes. Extra shirts, pants, shoes. Books I haven't finished reading and aren't really necessary for my work. Souvenirs from trips. The class notes from seminary, graduate school, college, even (help me!) a few from high school. I still had piles of Christmas cards from each year spent in East Harlem.

One finds ingenious ways to stow Stuff. Years of careful thinking and arranging made my apartment a miracle of modern placement. And so when the time came, I did not have one little box, but several dozen.

And now a new challenge: greater faithfulness to the call. I suppose I will be writing about simplicity in the course of this blog. When I do, please know that it will be as a student and not as a master.

If there is a consolation in this, for a new novice master supposed to teach the monastic arts of poverty to new monks, it must be in the old adage that the best teachers are the ones who had to struggle with the subject.