Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God. (Luke 12.21)
When the rabbi named Jesus died on the cross, the only material possession he left behind that was worth fighting for was the shirt on his back. When Mahatma Gandhi died, he had only a handful of possessions to his name, including his watch, spectacles, sandals, and eating bowl. When Mother Teresa was met one time at the London airport by a reporter, he asked her if they needed to pick up her suitcase at baggage claim. She answered, “No. I carry around all my worldly possessions with me in this little bag. My personal needs are very simple.” She held in her hand a small white cloth bag.
It is difficult for us to imagine our lives without “our stuff.” When we hear examples of people who seem able to move lightly through life, not weighed down by material possessions, we wonder how it is possible. The closest many of us come to ridding ourselves of our stuff is when remove from our closet the clothes that don’t fit us anymore. But somehow, the closet magically fills up again in just a matter of weeks.
Yet, simplicity was one of the Galilean teacher’s primary lessons to his disciples. The book definition of simplicity is “something that is plain, natural, or easy to understand.” When we find the same word used in the Biblical texts, it is defined as “singleness of mind.” In other words, the person who lives simply lives with just one thing on his or her mind. Here, that one thing is understood as God. With that singleness of mind, the person is not bothered by anything outside that divine sphere, such as accumulating possessions, positions or prestige. Instead, he or she seeks what is plain, natural, easy to understand.
Admittedly, the Biblical way is not the American way, where our gross national product is determined by how much we buy and where a lagging economy is buttressed by getting people to spend more money. Were we to live as Jesus, Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, there would be no shopping malls and Jeff Bezos would not be worth 165.6 billion dollars. Nor would there be two Black Fridays–one in November and one in July.
It was not always this way. We don’t have to go that far back in history to know that closets weren’t always crammed full of clothes and pantries weren’t built the size of rooms. In fact, houses in an earlier age didn’t have closets. As we know, people used armoires, which were relatively small upright wooden boxes in which clothes were stored. The so-called clothes hanger was not invented until 1869. The first reach-in closets were built in apartments in New York in the 1880’s. The rest, we could say, is history, although it is a big jump from armoires to walk in closets. And an even bigger jump from Adam and Eve with no clothes to our collection of apparel that sometimes looks like a miniature department store.
When my great-grandmother died in 1940, she had just a nickel to her name. I know this for a fact because I have an envelope that my grandmother kept in a special place that held an old nickel. She had written outside the envelope, “Nickel found in Grandma Wilde’s house after she died.” The only reasonable explanation for her writing that description is that it was the only coin found in the house. I also have my great-grandmother’s obituary that was written in 1940 by one of her sons-in-law in which he stated she had given all she had to charities and to religious houses so that when she died she had nothing to her name, only the good she had done with her life.
I cannot claim to be my great-grandmother. I enjoy the use of this computer. Still, when I hear the words of the Galilean teacher, I am reminded again of that “singleness of mind” that the Scriptures hold as the better way. As Rabbi Jesus said, “Be rich in what matters to God.” While the honest truth is few of us are going to dispossess ourselves of our possessions until it is forced upon us by our own deaths, still we can strive to seek more of that singleness of mind that makes us rich in the eyes of God. How to do it is always the spiritual challenge.
I suppose it begins with a conscious effort to decide what matters and what doesn’t matter in life. Simplicity or singleness of mind would have us fix our eyes on God and not on ourselves. Contrary to everything the so-called “prosperity gospel” preachers would have us think, God does not want us to be rich. At least not in stuff. In richness of spirit, yes. It seems to me that when our eyes stay focused on God and his rule, then we aren’t shopping at Target every weekend for that new outfit that we already have too many of in our closets. We free ourselves from the falsehood that we are first and foremost consumers, like chickens in cages that are force fed to fatten them up for the meat aisle. Instead, we are children of a God who “clothes the grass of the fields” (Matthew 6.30) and who cares for us with the same loving attentiveness. So long as we remember whose we are, we stand a chance at living a life of simplicity.
One day a grabby man, who was acting more like a child at the candy bowl than as a child of God, approached Jesus with this concern, “Rabbi, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus then told him the story of the foolishness of bigger barns (we can substitute bigger closets) with the stark reminder that death claims us all and, as he asked, “To whom will all that stuff belong?” It is a good question for us to consider. As a rule–were we brutally honest with ourselves–a lot of the stuff we have stockpiled will end up in a pile of black bags ready for the dumpster. And what doesn’t end up on the side of the street will end up causing a fight among heirs who behave like hockey players fighting for the puck. We’ve all seen it happen too often to know it is more the rule than the exception.
As we may want to recall, Job, the man in the Bible who had everything taken from him, gained wisdom of heart in the exchange. He responded to his great losses with this great truth, “Naked I came forth from the womb, and naked I will return” (Job 1.21). With that in mind, I guess we can make it easy on the person who has to clean up our clutter when we’re gone by remembering those same sobering words. We can clean out the closets ourselves. So, I’m going to start on my closets the first thing tomorrow. Wait! The Rabbi said nobody has promised me a tomorrow. I guess I should start now.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 