There is an episode of Friends
where Chandler, after marrying Monica and moving in with her, discovers a
secret locked closet in her apartment.
He and Joey speculate what she might be hiding. Joey suggests her old boyfriend,
Richard. But when Chandler finally opens
the closet, he is shocked at what he finds.
His wife, the clean freak, has a closet stuffed from floor
to ceiling with junk. She is a closet
hoarder in the literal sense.
I completely relate to this, not so much in being a clean
freak, but in despising clutter. Clutter
makes me anxious. I hate things lying
around, but, like Monica, I also have the hoarder gene and so while you may
walk into my condo and think how everything is so neat and tidy, you wouldn’t
want to start opening closet doors or old trunks or hope chests or anything
with a drawer.
Saturday, I dove into an old trunk looking for the Miami
sweatshirt I had worn in college. It’s a
trunk where I keep things that matter to me, but when I got it open, I found
more trash than treasure. There was a
pair of faded jeans with a label that said “junior.” That went in the trash. There was my old jacket from college. I checked the pockets first and found about
fifty cents. There was a vest that no
one has dared to wear since 1992 and a sweater, stretched out and well worn.
Trash, trash, trash.
And there was a sock.
A random, half of a pair, white sock.
All of this in a trunk where I was keeping things like my
old baby blanket and the stuffed elephant I sewed in Home Economics in seventh
grade—you know, things that had sentimental value.
All of that … and a sock.
Trash.
Pastor Debbie and I were talking yesterday morning about how
Lent and Advent are times of the year when it’s good to clean house in
physical, emotional, and spiritual ways.
Advent especially is a time to spend preparing for the coming birth of
Jesus. And as we would for any guest,
it’s a time to straighten up, to clean up, to throw away any trash we’ve been
hoarding over the past year.
It’s a time to ask ourselves why we hold onto things. What are the things that really matter in our
lives and what things do we need to let go of?
What things do we need to give away?
What things need to go straight to God?
What burdens are we carrying that begin in our heart, but
weigh at us physically too, stooping us over, rounding out our shoulders so
that we appear so much older than we are?
Christmas is, sometimes inexplicably, the most stressful
time of year. It’s not just the
preparations, the gift-finding, the decorating, the ever increasing need for a
day off, it’s that all these things weaken us just enough that suddenly we can
be bombarded by memories of old, things we’ve locked away in the trunks of our
mind, both good and bad. We become
Scrooge, biting the heads off of overworked store clerks, and wrapping presents
with bitterness instead of kindness. We
become haunted by our ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
Think of Scrooge’s house for moment, the cold, the damp
darkness, a bed walled off by curtains most likely filled with a lifetime of
dust. Think of his old partner, Marley,
weighed down by the chains of his own past.
Christmas is a time to clean house, to open the windows and
let the sunlight in, to throw away the clutter and the trash. In a time in which we celebrate a birth, this
should be the time of rebirth for us. We
make New Year’s resolutions, but really we should be making them sooner, in
Advent, so that everything is ready and we are able to stand with arms open to
welcome the Son of God.
Despite the stress, Christmas is still my most favorite time
of the year. I love my peppermint bark
chocolate and Christmas carols. I love
the majesty and tenderness of the Christmas Eve service. I get teary-eyed just writing about these
things, because this is the time for miracles.
Right now—if we’re willing.
This is the time to rejoice.
This is the time to throw open the shutters and announce to
the world how blessed we are.
This is the time to let go of the burdens we carry, to
unlock the chains of our past and let them fall away.
This is the time—right now—to start anew.
