Relinquishment: more than values-based downsizing

Relevant quote when forthing: "Let us go then Tesakeh. I shall not feel comfortable until I know what it is we have to fear."

The current move for Lynn and me is about letting go of many things so we can be more free to work with the poor, but the process is challenging.

Moving is the best antidote to hyper-accumulation of stuff. Lynn and I just finished our formation process as Franciscan lay missioners¹ and had to move our belongings from the room where we lived since mid-August. The objects fit into fewer categories (store, donate, toss, pack for Bolivia) than the number of boxes we hastily stuffed them into. Some of the items-to-store would actually make their way back to Middle Tennessee during our farewell trip, and a few went to a basement corner in the mission house, Casa San Salvador.  All of this moving weighed heavily on my knees-heart-mind as we trudged multiple laps up and down the narrow stairs from our third-story room to the basement or our car.  While we were assessing a smaller volume of stuff than when we left our house in Middle Tennessee, the sorting process resurrected the same concerns: is it something I'll be thrilled to be rid of (take my sleeper sofas, please) is it a personal vanity thing or a tool I may really need; if it's a tool, will it be functional in the new environment (farewell, leaf blower; adios, lemon zester) and if so will I need it and must take it with me or can I probably replace it with an equivalent later; is it part of my connection to someone else (toughest category of stuff to reassess, I think) and so will I regret giving it up because it reminds me so much of our relationship that I will feel--irrationally--like I am destroying my relationship with the person if I get rid of it, or even destroying that person because I have come to think of the object as the person (in this case, maybe jettison the object pronto and, hopefully, the obsession and misplaced affection²). Of course, this kind of evaluation process coupled with late hours and extreme fatigue results in the scenario of person, object, and box, with the person looking blankly from the object to the box and back again, blinking, getting slack-jawed, and waiting for the decision to register the ka-ching of a sales event and on we go to the next object (are we there yet), and multiply this x2 and we have Lynn and Joel on the verge of succumbing to the logic of Joe³ the nomadic golfer from Beaumont, Texas, and just torch it for the sake of moving on.  But we don't.  We sort it and box it and get some rest before a few days of driving. We have family and friends to connect with before leaving for the next three years.

__________

¹ Formation, at this point, no slight intended to the formation process, feels a bit like acquiring a driver's license in the US and then finding oneself suddenly dropped in a rental vehicle on a roundabout in London.

² I think of this at first as Chang Hsi-hsum syndrome, but shouldn't our compassion extend to Chang's case too so that we don't denigrate his need to assuage ourselves about the things we cling to? Of course, we can't have compassion without comprehension, so the connection involves evaluative self, object and subject.

³ "Three moves are as good as a fire--two if you're tight and go with it--one if you're more about goin' than stayin'."