Take Your Books Unto the Lord and Leave Them There?

St. Theresa of Avila in The Way of Perfection tells us:

It is when I possess least that I have the fewest worries, and the Lord knows that, as far as I can tell, I am more afflicted when there is excess of anything than when there is lack of it . . .

Moreover, the gospel from the second chapter of Luke today says, "In the same way, everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”

After I had been living in the condo for a couple of months with a minimum of furniture and just enough dishes for us to eat with one friend, it occurred to me that I was perfectly happy without the house full of stuff that was accruing bushels of plaster dust in Mississippi. It was amazingly easy to keep everything clean--to be honest, though, the almost complete lack of dust was a help--and there was never any trouble finding anything.

I remember that after I realized there was a tree on the house and that, thankfully, everyone was all right, my first thought was, "I'll never live in this house again," and my next, almost simultaneous, thought was, "All the books are going to get wet," and then I immediately realized that if that happened, a great burden would be lifted from my shoulders. And I was right--at least about the last part.

I think I've mentioned that we did not lose anything in the Great Fall except for a lot of carpet that had had too much exposure to a sick cat and some wallpaper that I've always hated. The furniture that was sitting on the wet carpet was somehow not damaged, and every book was dry. After sitting in a damp house in Mississippi in July with no air conditioning for a month, they were miraculously okay. Except for some rather fragrant books that I've picked up at book sales, none of them had any smell of mildew. I can't figure it out--unless all the plaster dust soaked up the dampness.

And boy was there plaster dust, which gets us back to St. Theresa. I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't had any books, the house would have been completely back to normal after a week or two at the most. As it is, it's been almost five weeks, and we're still working. The books are a burden indeed, but are they a necessary burden, or even a desirable burden? That's what I'm trying to figure out.

For a while now, I've been able to pray, "Do with me as You will," without being completely terrified, but I read something a few weeks ago that said we ought to pray everyday, "What would You have me do?" For some reason that's not entirely clear to me, that's a lot more difficult for me to pray. It's one thing to surrender yourself to something that is happening, and that you probably don't have any control over anyway. It's another thing to be given marching orders, especially when they are seldom very clear, and you aren't really sure if they are coming from the right direction. It was easy to renounce the books when I thought they were going to be destroyed anyway, but not so easy when I have to choose to do it.

So, after weeks and weeks of dusting and arranging, I've managed to get rid of something like 350 books and four bookshelves. Of course, this was only about a quarter of the entire library, but at least the books are no longer double-shelved or stacked on the floor, and some of the shelves could actually hold more books, but I hope not. I'm having to ask myself if I really need 30 volumes of the Church Fathers, or two different 10-volume surveys of world history or whether someone else could make better use of them. I just don't know.

AMDG