Sunday Reflection: Absolute trust

Today's reflection is brought to you by

Mark 6:8-9.

You told your followers

to take nothing for the journey.

A walking stick, 

a tunic,

a pair of sandals.

To trust that everything else

would be provided.

And here I am, 

my life encumbered

by so many things

I'd like to shed.

The simplicity

you taught

is in trusting

that there is always

enough.

But, 

magpie that I am,

I've collected more

emotionally,

materially,

and even spiritually

(baggage)

and it all 

weighs me down.

It sits in my mind

as distractions

to keep me from 

you.

How wise you are,

Teacher,

to insist upon absolute trust

in the way things flow

through Creator's hands 

to those who need them.

Maybe it's time to pray

a daring prayer:

teach me that kind of trust.

Help me to let go

and to rest 

in your love

alone.

+Amen.

Simple Suggestion #58... Donate all clothing you haven't worn in the past year

I believe that whoever invented the walk-in closet should be made to wear every item in one all at once, for a week. Closets that hold too many clothes cause us to take their contents for granted and create waste. Even our 1950s closet (six feet wide, three feet deep, or 2 m x1 m -- 1 m of which is my space) can hold things that rarely get worn -- and why bother keeping rarely worn things unless I'm planning on wearing them again? And why bother buying clothes that I'm not going to wear on a regular basis?

The trick is to have just enough clothing for daily wear, and a few items for special occasions. Then, when something wears out, it's a pleasure to buy and appreciate something new. If we keep our clothing to a minimum, it becomes obvious that a walk-in closet is excessive. Maybe it could be converted into space we can use for a more enjoyable activity than storing clothes?

The beginning of the school year is a great time to donate those extra items to agencies that help the less fortunate (like the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, where I spend my Thursdays) so that our needier inner-city families can find clothing for their back-to-schoolers. They'll soon be needing winter clothing, too, so don't forget to donate the too-small snowsuits and winter boots! But please... and any clothing volunteer will echo this sentiment a thousand times... don't donate anything you or your family wouldn't wear yourself. If in doubt, throw it out!

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.

My St. Barbara bouquet...

It's not working. The pear tree branches that I picked for a St. Barbara bouquet (see December 3rd's mooding on Christmas decorations) are not even thinking about budding, leafing out, or blossoming. My kids tell me that I tried this once years ago with branches from a crabapple tree, and nothing happened then, either, but that episode doesn't register in my brain at all.

So I went online to see if the German friend who told me about spring blossoms for Christmas was stringing me a line. I found the following:

Branches from a fruit tree or flowering shrub cut on St. Barbara's Day (December 4) and kept in water in a warm room will flower by Christmas. This is known as a St. Barbara's bouquet in Germany (p. 126).    

In Saints: A Visual Guide by Edward and Lorna Mornin (2006, Francis Lincoln, ISBN 139780711226067. Found under Google Books.)

Maybe our Canadian fruit trees work differently than German ones. Maybe my room isn't warm enough for the branches to bud out. Maybe a St. Barbara bouquet only blooms in Santa Barbara where there can be blossoms all year round. In a culture that has pretty much forsaken Saints for celebrities, I doubt there's anyone who does this regularly anymore. St. Barbara herself was taken off the Catholic liturgical calendar in 1969, and I suspect the generations who made her bouquets are fading away. But if you've kept the tradition alive, or you know people who make St. Barbara bouquets regularly with success, please let me know.

The failure of my St. Barbara bouquet doesn't really matter, though I would have loved to have those pear blossoms at Christmas. At the moment, our house is decorated with a simple Christmas tree and a pretty happy family. What more do we need?

Christmas decorations...

Yesterday was an enjoyable day at the clothing room. Two of my favourites came in -- Dave, a homeless guy who is always losing his backpack (and once took a Spiderman backpack because it was all we had to offer), and Fatuma, a tiny Kenyan woman who once told me, "Canada, good for children. Good education. No good for adults. I sad, sad. Miss home, no good work here." But Fatuma was in good spirits yesterday, and looking for some Christmas decorations. We managed to find two little twinkle light strings in the bottom of a box to satisfy her.

I couldn't help but think of the Amazing Grace YouTube video that went around a few years ago. Maybe you saw it, but if not, punch "Amazing Grace Christmas Lights" into the YouTube search box, and I'm sure it will come up. I won't post it here because, frankly, it makes me shudder to think that people would invest that kind of time and money into a totally ostentatious Christmas display when there are people like Fatuma in our world. Some Christmas decoration is fine, but that? I certainly wouldn't want to live across the street from so much technopop and so many flashing lights. My neighbours and I would vote the guy off the island!

The thing about Christmas decoration is that so much of it is needless use of our planet's limited resources, and a lot of it will just end up in the landfill over time. Tinsel, broken baubles and shorting strings of lights aren't easily recyclable (though our reuse/recycling facilities here in Edmonton are second to none), so it's better to avoid an excess of shiny, once-a-year trinkets to start with. What will the family of the guy who did up the Amazing Grace display do with all that stuff when he dies? The cost of his electricity alone must be astronomical... and unless his kids follow in his footsteps, I doubt they'll want to deal with the thousands of lights left to them in his will.

At our house, decoration is kept to a definite dull roar. We have a white silhouette window display of the Holy Family and a string of LED lights as our visible outside decoration. Indoors, I hang Christmas cards that arrive in the mail around our dining room doorways, and our Advent wreath (with small branches cut from the cedar outside our front door) is our table centrepiece. We buy one tree (carbon neutral -- it has produced oxygen for the planet up until it was cut, and the city grinds it up for mulch in January) -- artificial trees use up a lot of carbon in their manufacturing process and they take forever to biodegrade (but if you have one, don't switch now!) We decorate with the same ornaments year after year, special things that the kids have made at school or friends have given to us. Our tree isn't trendy teal streamers with gilded golden glamour a la Martha Stewart or Debbie Travis, but it is pretty enough.

Enough. That word again. How much is enough decoration? Is it necessary to buy new Christmas stuff every year? Where will it all end up? If we really need to decorate, can we do more with the natural, organic items around us?

I'll end this moodling with an idea I'm trying this year for the first time: a German friend of mine once told me that on St. Barbara's feast day, December 4th, it was tradition for peasants to cut a few branches from any fruit trees in their area. They would bring them into their homes and put them in water, and by December 25th, the blossoms would fill their homes with beauty and fragrance to mark Jesus' birth.

I'll bet Fatuma from Kenya would approve.

Have a happy feast day tomorrow, Auntie Barbara!

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

I'm not rich, nor am I famous, but my husband attended a convention at the Chateau Lake Louise in the beautiful Canadian Rockies this weekend, and I went with him. I have no idea about which rich and famous people may have stayed in the same building, but as I wandered the lobbies and concourses of a pretty fabulous hotel, I felt sort of like a celebrity myself. It's quite the place.

But always, what makes it hard to stay in such a place is the awareness that I am among the 12% of the wealthiest humans on the planet, while the people who make the beds in the building are not as fortunate as I am. It's only an accident of birth that separates us. I haven't worked as hard or sacrificed as much as many of them have just to get to Canada. It's not fair.

The inequities of this life are quite astounding when you really think about them. I think back to my moodling about serving the poor at the clothing room for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and St. Vincent's words, "it is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you..." For my stay at a ritzy hotel this weekend, I should serve, with love, for another year. The poor have so many things for which to forgive me!

What's really interesting about Lake Louise is that, if you want to stay overnight and have a view of the lake, you've gotta have money. People who can't afford to stay don't get the view unless they're out for a walk. There's no campsite or less pricey hotel with a view. And the rooms at the back of the hotel cost a lot less than the ones facing the lake.

Life shouldn't be like this. If the top 12% of humanity, who use 80% of the planet's resources, chose to spread out our wealth and live more simply, making sure that we didn't have more than anyone else, but only just enough, how many people would still be considered poor? We'd all be rich if only we would share.

And here's something worth sharing...