Unloading

Right now we are pulling up in our collective vans to move once again, this time into a new era in our country, in our world, in our Church.  And, as with every move, it’s time to decide what we will take with us and what we will leave, knowing even that will never be a once and done process.  Moving on is a forever chore – and, yes, an opportunity, too  –  but, oh, how wrenchingly arduous on body, mind, and soul it can be. 

Who we are and what we do in this process is highly significant. In the October 2020 issue of Commonweal, Rand Richards Cooper wrote an article called “Savers and Unloaders,” dividing us fairly neatly into those two categories. He even went so far as to claim: “Messiness and neatness, as traits, tend to parallel two personality types: savers and unloaders.”  (I’m kind of a messy unloader myself, but then I’ve always resisted categorizing.) 

The larger point, according to Cooper, is that savers are the kind of people who seem compelled to preserve their past and present lives with “tangible markers,” saving objects that say to their future selves and their progeny: “I was here…Just touch this object and feel its ‘talismatic magic’ bringing me back.”  But of course that kind of magic rarely happens. Those tangible markers are not really us or our lives, and they will probably have little more than a fleeting meaning for those we leave behind. In fact, as Cooper reminds us: “They may even become a burden.”  

Savers, he posits, are seeking a lost home, the one we forever long for but which is no longer – in fact maybe never was – and certainly never can be – ours again. And that is the danger. It’s hard not to be nostalgic for that kind of home and to want desperately to preserve it. I want to think of America at its heart as small town July 4^th parades and pick up baseball games and countrysides dotted with small farms, endlessly forested, unfailingly friendly and perfectly unified, but that is not what it is. I may want to think of my Church as warm as the odors of incense, as comforting as Christmas hot ciders, as protective as mountain refuges, and as welcoming as wide open doorways, but that is not what it is.  And trying to capture these already faulty memories through preserving outworn traditions, edifices, rituals, and rhetoric stalls the moving van and paralyzes the mover. Even worse, Cooper says, the saver may veer “toward an idolatry of the self, arranging the personal effects of memory into a kind of shrine: ‘my life, my life, forever,’” he adds quoting author, John Updike. 

Having challenged savers and saving (while admitting he is one of the foremost among them), Cooper then modifies his tone: 

“Making a shrine of your own life is a kind of spiritual error. And yet it is also a gauge of how much we love the world and the blessing of our lives in it. As with so many things, the challenge lies in reconciling opposites into a richer and more capacious whole – in cherishing and letting go, saving and unloading at once.”

As we proceed forward with our move, we cull and unload what may not have been seen clearly in the first place and certainly no longer works in our sacramental world.  Perhaps we start with the intangible before tackling the tangible: Is the cult of “rugged individualism” working in our country when we are so desperately dependent on each other and on reconciliation and reconnection? Is “personal salvation” really the prime mission of our Church when a suffering world is crying out for our attention and healing energies? 

There are no easy answers, but the questions of what to save and what to unload are profoundly relevant now and worth careful discernment. There is only so much room in the van, and we’ve got to move on.