Letting Go of Stuff, a sermon written and delivered by Margie Manning at Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg, July 8, 2012

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1 Letting Go of Stuff, a sermon written and delivered by Margie Manning at Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Petersburg, July 8, 2012 Our reading is from the book, Soul Food, by Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman The clutter of our lives blinds us to the precious simplicity that surrounds us and is within us. Too often we become possessed and imprisoned by the chains of our own accumulations. We live in fear of their loss; we evolve complex strategies to protect ourselves from failure and deprivation. This burden inhibits our ability to walk with lightness of heart. The noise created through our own busyness deafens us to the wonder of silence. Sermon It was the afternoon of Sunday April 15. I stood in my parent s small apartment their home for the past 10 years or so and looked around. It was virtually empty. Gone was the comfortable blue couch with vibrating heated cushions that my dad enjoyed relaxing in. Gone was the vintage console TV that was purchased before the birth of my first daughter 31 years ago and that continued to hold a place of honor in the living room, even after it quit working. Gone were their bed and their dresser and their kitchen table and dishes and clothes. All that remained were two small chairs, waiting to be picked up to take to the long-term care facility where my parents had moved to suddenly following a health crisis just a couple of weeks earlier.

2 In just a few short days their lives and to a much lesser extent, mine were turned upside down. For my parents, who had lived in eight homes, condos or apartments over the course of their 64 years of marriage, home suddenly became a single room that could accommodate only a few of the possessions they had accumulated over six-plus decades. Because of the emergency nature of their health crisis and their sudden move, they had had no time to pack, no time to set aside this or that as something special that should go with them. My mom wanted her small white wicker table that stood at her bedside, and a few favorite sweaters and pants. My dad asked me to bring him a portable radio and a watch I had bought for him a few months earlier. It fell to me their only child to figure out how to deal with the rest of the stuff that was part of their lives. Stuff. We all have it. Big stuff chairs and tables and beds and dressers. Little stuff a ticket from a play or movie or sports event we really enjoyed, refrigerator magnets, candle holders, baskets or vases or other decorations. Important stuff books, photos, vital papers. Junk random screws that fell out of something, drawers filed with broken pens or pencils, more bread ties than there are loaves of bread in the store. How do we get so much stuff? Author Anna Quindlen, in her latest book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, remembers a time as a young adult just out of school when her apartment was sparsely furnished, and it was a big deal to have window blinds and a coffee mug some of her friends, guys mostly, didn t

3 even have those. Then she got married, and the wedding gifts poured in the carafes, the chafing dishes and china. When Mike and I got married, fondue pots were very popular but really, what are you gonna do with 3 fondue pots? Then along came the children and the adorable baby clothes and the sturdy play clothes and the cribs and playpens and high chairs and educational and not-so-educational toys and the electronic paraphernalia and the books and the sports gear, not to mention the drawings and cards and school papers saved for posterity. We needed a bigger house to keep all this stuff in and once we had that, we filled it with yet more stuff. I can recall long shopping trips looking for sofa pillows in just the right shade of blue to match the new carpet. I look back now and wonder how I ever had so much time on my hands. Why do we accumulate stuff, even when we don t need it? Essayist Paul Graham suggests we over-value stuff, and our society reinforces that. Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable, Graham writes. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless. In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around, Graham writes, citing a couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a

4 place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house wasn t theirs; it was their stuff's. Anna Quindlen said she went through a period when she believed stuff meant something. She writes: I thought that if had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them, you would have a home, that elegance signaled happiness. I fooled myself into thinking that House Beautiful should be subtitled Life Wonderful. But of course, that s not the case at all. Quindlen has fond memories of the home she grew up in always being topsy-turvey. I knew couples who lived in homes that could have been lovely enough to have been featured in magazines, but those couples wound up in bitter divorces. Quindlen s words ring very true when she writes: Now that I m nearing 60, I understand the truth about possessions, that they mean or prove or solve nothing. Stuff is not salvation. I am of the opinion that too much stuff particularly when it s not organized, when it spills out of the closest and off the shelves can be anxiety-producing and depressing. I was not surprised to read there s scientific evidence of that. Mess leads to stress, said psychologist Sherrie Bourg Carter, in an article in March in Psychology Today. Clutter bombards our minds with excessive stimuli (visual, olfactory, tactile), causing our senses to work overtime on stimuli that aren't necessary or important. It makes it more difficult to relax, both physically and mentally, constantly signals to our brains that our work is never done, creates feelings of guilt about not being organized, and

5 inhibits creativity and productivity by invading the open spaces that allow most people to think, brainstorm and problem solve. Getting rid of clutter and reducing the stuff in our lives can not only reduce anxiety and boost creativity, but there s also a spiritual component to it, according to author Heidi Schaden. The ability to let go of things suggests trust in forces outside ourselves that if you really need something, if will manifest in your life. Letting go of things you don't need, creates room for new things to come to you that you DO need, Schaden said. It s a hard exercise to get rid of the extra stuff in our lives. Believe me, I know. Remember those 3 fondue pots Mike and I got for wedding presents. You know what I did with them? I kept them for years and years and years and we never once prepared fondue before I finally got rid of the last of those pots somewhere around our 30th wedding anniversary, just before we moved from St. Louis to Florida. That move was an eye-opener for me. We went from a twostory, four-bedroom home with a full basement to our first dwelling here in Florida, a tiny two-bedroom apartment. We thought we had done a good job of paring down selling furniture and appliances, giving away clothing and household goods. I spent hours consolidating our daughters 24 boxes of school papers we had kept one box for each grade for each girl into two boxes. Yet we still needed to rent a 10 by 12 foot storage facility when we got to Florida, and that storage unit stayed pretty full until we bought our home a year or so later. Our house is still pretty crowded with stuff of course, we ve

6 added new stuff, Florida stuff, over the past decade but there s a lot less stuff than before. We really try to keep it simple, to only hang on to the things we need or truly love. Suzanne Beecher, who writes the Dear Reader column that the St. Petersburg Public Library and other libraries send by every day, recently published a letter from a woman who also moved from a big house to a small one. The writer, Marlene, was so overwhelmed with stuff that she had to hire a professional organizer. The most helpful thing the organizer did for me was to hold up an item I was loathe to part with and ask: 'Do you love it?' I would hem and haw. 'Well, it was my grandmother's' or 'I've had that since I was a little girl.' 'Do you love it?' she'd ask again. 'I really should keep it,' I'd reply. 'What if I regret giving it up? What if I miss it?' 'Do you love it?' she'd ask again, louder this time. Finally able to admit that, no, I didn't really love it, sometimes didn't even like it much, allowed me to release it, and try to find a home where it would be loved. The end result is, I'm living in a home full of things I love, Marlene wrote.

7 That s why I had such mixed emotions as I was thrust into the situation of cleaning out my parent s apartment in St. Louis back in April. My dad begged me to somehow get that blue couch he loved back to Florida with me and I knew it was because he was hoping that would also mean he was passing along his good memories to me time spent on the couch reading a good book or watching a great TV show. My mom wanted me to take her coffee pot and dishes, hoping those things would keep alive the memories of the good meals she had cooked with love. But I had no way to get these things and the other stuff from their apartment back to my home, and even if I had a way, the stuff didn t hold the same meaning for me as it did for them. Still, it nearly broke my heart to see it carted away, to be re-sold to people who had no idea of the stories associated with those items, or worse yet, to be relegated to a junk pile and discarded. I did save a few things. One of our daughters took some of the kitchenware and the other daughter asked for pictures. Besides their important documents, I saved for myself a small glass duck purchased more than half-a-century ago when I was six or seven, a decoration I was allowed to pick out when my parents bought some new furniture. That duck now sits on my kitchen windowsill because it holds very special memories for me. As for my parents they have almost no stuff with them at the assisted living facility that s now their home. A few pictures, a treasured bible, those chairs that the social worker suggested we send over as something familiar. My mom, sadly, has slipped

8 into delirium and I don t believe she is aware of her surroundings. But my dad, who at 96 has a mind that s still sharp, didn t hesitate to leave the stuff behind. When I asked him if he wanted to leave the apartment and join mom at the assisted living center, he didn t have to think twice. For him, home and the only thing that mattered was to be with my mom. From the book, Soul Food: To know how much clutter you carry in your life, simply ask yourself what you would truly miss if you were suddenly transported to another time and place. It would not be the many things we could have filled our suitcases with; it would be the simple delights of shared laughter and shared sorrow, the simple love of those close to us. So may it be.

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