Her name is Marie Kondo.
You might have heard of her.
She has a new series on Netflix right now, but I first heard
of her several years ago when I read her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Marie Kondo makes her living by showing other people how to
declutter and organize their homes. Personally,
I suffer from what I call “clutter anxiety.”
When my condo starts to look like there is too much stuff sitting on
tables and hiding in corners, I go through a quick purge. Books, papers, toys, clothes … very little is
sacred to me. It is my clutter anxiety
that keeps me from becoming a hoarder.
But even I benefit from Marie Kondo’s approach to
decluttering. She suggests a rather simple
method. If you cannot decide whether or
not to get rid of something, hold it in your hand and ask this question:
Does this item bring me joy?
Her wording is actually spark.
Does it spark joy? If no, get rid
of it. If yes, keep it. Simple.
In my closet is a small box of trinkets. If you open it up, you will find some odd
things, a Christmas-colored doily with green and white fringe and red hollies, a
Snow White watch, a man’s ring with a cameo image of Jesus, and a chunky,
bracket-shaped magnet.
I rarely go through the box, but when I do, I spend several
minutes, carefully running my fingers over each item. The Christmas doily is horribly ugly, but it’s
the only thing I have of my grandmother’s, my mom’s mom who died when I was in
eighth grade. The Snow White watch
belonged to my mom. The man’s ring with
the cameo of Jesus was my grandfather’s.
And the chunky, bracket-shaped magnet was my other grandfather’s.
All of them, have long since passed.
Each item holds a memory.
I used to wear my mom’s watch when I was little. I remember standing in her old childhood
bedroom at my grandparents’ house, standing in front of the mirror that hung
over her dresser, a mirror that still carried the various stickers she had put up
there when she was a child, and I remember putting on that watch. It was an old-fashioned watch, one that
needed to be wound each day.
And while I can’t say that that watch or anything of the
things I keep in that box necessarily spark joy when I hold them, I can say
that I feel a wave of nostalgia every time I touch one.
Nostalgia has its good points and its bad points.
Nostalgia allows us for brief moments to live in the best of
the past, to experience various emotions we felt at the time … joy and
contentment.
But nostalgia also has a downside. We can get trapped living in the past,
remembering only the good times and not focusing on the bad moments which,
together with those good times, allow us to plan and prepare for the future.
A week before my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we
were talking on the phone and she mentioned that she was afraid that she might
die before her father. My grandfather
had dementia and she was worried about who would take care of him. She wanted to talk to me, wanted to make
plans as to what would happen after her death.
She didn’t mention she wasn’t feeling well, and I did what anyone does
when someone they love starts talking about death … I shut her down.
“Stop,” I told her. “You’re
barely in your sixties. You’re not going
to die anytime soon.”
It’s why I can relate so much to the disciples. Whenever Jesus starts talking about the
future, about his suffering and death, the disciples immediately shut him down.
In Mark 8:32, “…. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke
him.”
Which causes Jesus to respond with, “Get behind me, Satan!”
to Peter which always seemed a bit harsh and startling to me. I can imagine Peter turning cold, all the
blood rushing from his head at having been spoken to in such a way. But Jesus was frustrated. He had such little time. He had spent so much of his ministry trying
to pull people out of the past, asking them to see beyond the laws of Moses,
and, by Peter’s response, had only succeeded in pulling them only so far into
the present.
His disciples could only see the present, the miracles, the
teachings. They relished their time with
him and did not want to imagine a future without him.
But that is exactly what he needed them to do.
He needed them to look to the future.
We see some of that in today’s Gospel reading from Luke
5:33-39 when Jesus is questioned as to why his disciples are always drinking and
eating instead of fasting and praying.
Jesus replies in verse 35, “You cannot make wedding guests
fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you?” alluding that his stay here on earth is short
and that his followers are right to make the most of it.
And then he tells a parable.
Now the thing about Jesus and his parables is that they are supposedly
designed to make his message easier to understand, but honestly, sometimes I
read Jesus’ parables and it’s like watching someone solve a Rubik’s cube in
twenty seconds—I know it’s impressive, but I have no idea what just happened.
And Jesus’ parable here about putting new wine into old
wineskins is a bit twisty, but the key to understanding it is in the final
verse, verse 39, where Jesus says, “And no one after drinking old wine desires
new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’”
He is talking here about the difficulty in getting people to
abandon the old ways, in getting people to move out of the past. He is talking about our tendency to be
complacent with the old world. He is
talking about how tantalizing and tempting the old “wine” is because it is what
is familiar. It may not be the best, but
it is familiar and the new “wine,” brings change.
One of the greatest gifts Jesus gave us was the gift of hope,
but hope, the belief that things will get better, requires us to let go of the
past in order to envision a better future.
It requires us to let go of nostalgia, to cease minimizing the pain of
our pasts and instead face the pain, the truth, everything, and hand it over to
Jesus and let him take us to the future.
With Jesus there is no going backwards, there is no standing
still, there is only moving forward.
Marie Kondo has faced some backlash over her decluttering
program, specifically from book lovers everywhere who cannot envision parting
with a single book in their collections.
I have tried to limit my own collection of physical books—my
Kindle is a different story—but mostly, I have limited my collection to a few
books that hold special meaning to me, to books that “spark joy,” and one of
those books is, of course, The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Narnia books mean so much to me and there is this scene
at the end of the very last book, The
Last Battle where the children and Jewel, the unicorn, are exploring Aslan’s
country and Jewel proclaims, “This is the land I have been looking for all my
life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”
Further up. Further
in.
Following Jesus into the future.
“Behold,” he says in Revelation 21:5, “I am making all
things new.”
Amen.
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