|
Column Clearing the clutter of a basement, a soul
By JEANNETTE BATZ
For eight years I watched the smooth
forest-green top of my old Ping-Pong table bow under the combined weight of
matrimony. His old Abba records, my stuffed owl, our new garden trowels, the
30-pound adding machine my father-in-law used his first year at the bank --
sentiment and necessity layered themselves on that table like garbage in a
Roman fort. I began to get a little panicky when I went down to do laundry.
Then I began to get a little resentful. Id fantasize about slamming the
little plastic ball diagonally, then gently dropping it over the now-obscured
net to win the point.
Sensing obsession, my husband offered help. Then his own passion
for order kicked in. Done right, Project Free-the-Table would mean
re-configuring the entire basement, which would mean reorganizing all the stuff
in the attic.
Four Saturdays later, our backs aching and our noses smudged with
dust, we gazed upon a miraculously flat Ping-Pong table, an oasis surrounded by
shelves of neatly labeled see-through storage boxes. Every extra, outgrown or
absurd object had been given away. Everything else was in a place that made
sense. At breakfast the next morning, I ran gaily downstairs for the
waffle-maker, sure where Id find it. The following weekend we had friends
for dinner, and I invited them downstairs to choose a bottle of wine. Even the
notion of someday moving ceased to terrify me. In this lightened, orderly
world, all things were possible.
An odd thought occurred to me. If freeing a Ping-Pong table was
this empowering, what would happen if I put my spiritual house in order?
The prospect of venturing with scrub brush energy into the nether
regions of my soul made me feel like a reluctant Hobbit. I know what its
like in there. Castoff ideas have piled into chaos. There are old guilts and
bitternesses, and bursts of scrupulosity I drag out every Lent, even though I
no longer believe them necessary. Theres a whole trunk of childish hopes
and tricks: If I just think the worst, it wont happen; if I bargain with
God, I wont have to trust God. And on the bottom shelves lie the
assumptions -- Im not the activist type, Im just not political --
and smashed beneath them, all that courage I forgot to use.
In the darkest corner, Ive stacked up questions about evil
and suffering; opposite them, theres a pile of answers about brokenness
and love and inevitability. Maybe they should be kept together? I should have
been sifting and sorting all along.
Of course, we should have been working on the basement, too. But
this was our first house, and for a long time it felt like a container, a big
hollow shell where we piled up the accumulations of our lives. Now it had
dawned on us: A home isnt a shell, its a process, a way of
constantly discerning and reorganizing the stuff you need to live your life.
You make a home, and you remake it in little ways every day.
A soul, on the other hand, had always suggested a
swirl of purple ether, trapped somewhere inside my rib cage, patiently waiting
to live forever. This soul was a mysterious spiritual stuff, paradoxical as
light, which perhaps existed in different degrees in each of us -- transparent
to God, yet with our personal details sewn into the label. I knew Willie Akins,
an old St. Louis saxophonist, had soulful eyes, and I had no trouble
pronouncing a friends 5-year-old an old soul. My hope for my
own soul was that it would deepen over time, glowing more brightly as flesh and
desire wore away.
But Id never considered participating in the process.
Then I read Love and the World, in which Robert Sardello
defines the soul as the capacity for life to be meaning, and
indicates that soul is not a static presence, but a deed we humans
do.
A deed? A deliberate, ongoing activity? My soul was a noun, not a
verb. It sat there, divine and immutable, watching me live my life. It was the
only part of me that would persist. This notion of flux was therefore doubly
unsettling: Did Sardello mean Id enjoy eternity only to the extent that I
had lived soulfully in this world?
You cant mete out eternity, I consoled myself. You either
have it or you dont. Which was why it was always so easy to see my soul
as a possession, a key to the kingdom locked away in a spiritual safe-deposit
box. Rethinking soul would mean clearing away a lot of clutter, and making
meaning, tirelessly, from what was left. Done right, it would probably mean
reorganizing my heart and mind, too.
I wonder what Id free.
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer for The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis. Her e-mail address is
jeannette.batz@rftstl.com
National Catholic Reporter, February 15,
2002
|
|