Like many people I know, I have a tendency to hold onto things until one day I become a slave of my own "stuff." Now that I am retired, I realized that I have too much stuff in my living space and that I have outlived much of its usefulness - clothes, books, files, pictures, nick-nacks, tools, appliances, dishes, picture frames and you-name it! Finally, a day comes when you know you need to "go through it" and "separate the wheat from the chaff" so to speak, but you just can't get motivated. It was then that Marie Kondo's little book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, fell into my lap at the beginning of December from God-knows-where?
The first insight that came into focus, as I read the book, was the realization that decluttering would make my life richer, not poorer. Once the clutter is gone, my personal space would be a whole lot easier to clean - meaning less work! The second insight that came into focus was the realization finding what I truly need would be a whole lot easier to find - meaning less wasted time. The third insight that came into focus was the realization that I did not need to own things like 30 pairs of black pants of various waist sizes, 50 outdated old text books and manuals from high school, college and former jobs that I used to have, 150 file folders from the 150 priest retreats I did in 10 countries when I had most of the truly important information in my computer. Then there is the 15 years of weekly clippings of my column in The Record in albums when I have all of them in three fat books. Does one person really need three Crock Pots of various sizes?
I don't need to belabor the point by listing all of the other categories of clutter that I had in my condo and garage - things like outdated spices in kitchen drawers, outdated pill bottles in the bathroom and duplicate tools and broken things of all sorts that I never got around to fixing in the garage! I won't mention things like the six boxes of old pictures that I reduced to two that I had not looked at since I took them years ago - many in duplicate and triplicate. I reduced two three-drawer file cabinets full of paper down to one and got rid of the other file cabinet!
Reading the book is what motivated me to roll up my sleeves and dig in all during December! Once I got started, I was on a roll! In less than two weeks, between Good Will, the Second Hand Store at St. Thomas More Parish, the condo recycle bins and the dumpster, I have filled no less than three full pick-up truck loads, two recycle bins and probably half a dumpster. I find myself now going through the house actually looking for useless accumulated things to get rid of that I might have missed! It was like getting to your goal in a weight-loss program. I felt great!
The Church has
attempted to do the same. In a moment of great humility, something rare for our
church at that time, the bishops of Vatican II admitted that the church is
“semper reformanda” — “always in need of reform.” The human side of the church,
just as all human organizations, has a tendency to fall into sin and decay and
must be called back to fidelity, over and over again, as it moves through
history.
In the above
reading, which depicts a dramatic and public gesture of outrage, Jesus’ anger
boils over. It is very important to remember that the anger of Jesus was not
directed at people who sinned or failed in all their everyday ways. His anger
was directed at those who controlled religion and used it to abuse simple
people.
He had pity and
compassion on the outcasts, the sick and sinner, but he was outraged at what
had happened at the hands of their leaders to the religion he loved. In some of
the most blunt words from the mouth of Jesus ever recorded, he called them
“snakes, fakes and frauds.” He called the places of worship “whitewashed tombs
… all clean and pretty on the outside, but filled with stench and rot on the
inside.”
It is important to
note that Jesus was not against organized religion, but what these people had
done to organized religion. As this Gospel story tells us, he did not come to
tear down the temple; he simply came to clean house. The temple had become a marketplace,
and they were making a profit in every corner of it.
It is sad that
many people never see beyond the packaging when it comes to religion. They see
only the earthenware jar and never the treasure it holds. The purpose of
religion is to serve, not be served. The goal of healthy organized religion is
the personal transformation of people, not the using of people to serve it!
It is also sad
that many people naively assume that organized religion is evil simply because
it has gotten off track here and there in history. Jesus was clear that he did
not come to destroy organized religion but to lead it back to its original
purpose.
Without organized religion, we would not have
the sacred Scriptures, we would be split into millions of personal opinions and
small little cults, and we would not have a way to offer support to other
believers around the world. Yes, the church may need a good “house cleaning”
every now and then, but the organization of the church is always needed.
As Kenneth
Woodward has pointed out, for the last 30 or 40 years people have operated out
of a romantic notion that all the ills of the church reside with the
institution — so that if only we could reform it, we ourselves would be better
Christians. The truth quite often is the other way around. The institution will
get better when each one of us is reformed and transformed.
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