Marie Kondo-ing My Way Through Lent

Lent is just around the corner, with Ash Wednesday on March 2. Lent is a time of self-examination, of letting go of things that clutter our lives, things that make it more difficult to see what really matters.

Marie Kondo has provided a map that many have found helpful in decluttering their homes. I have found aspects of her emphasis useful as a Lenten practice.

I take ten minutes a day during the forty days of Lent to enter into my own piles of accumulated stuff to decide what it is time to let go of and what needs to stay.

The spiritual gifts in this concrete, everyday discipline, are many.

• “Look, I can see the desk top again!”

Lots of unnecessary clutter is removed from my life.

• “And yesterday I let go of ten things I hadn’t touched in two decades.”

The practice is concrete. I can actually see that this is not in vain.

• “Jerry would love this sweater which will never fit me again.”

Some stuff can be redirected to someone who needs it.

• “Hey, I missed that deadline and the world continued to spin!”

I often discover evidence of things that once obsessed me with worry, only to realize that I had forgotten completely about it. What once loomed was doomed to disappear eventually.

• “Look, my ukulele. It is finally time to pick that up again. I need music in my life.”

I also discover signs of past joys worthy of reviving.

• “Yes, my love, I do know where that receipt resides!”

Even borderline stuff kept is now kept in a place I can remember.

• “Kathy gave me this. What a gift she was in my life.”

Some of my stuff is sacramental, tied to people and events that were holy as I experienced them. Remembering, those moments become present again.

• “I will never, ever use these leg weights again.”

In the sorting are moments of honesty.

• “And this month, I finally began to read Middlemarch.”

In the sorting, what matters can be restored to a place of prominence.

• “So, how many of my these three hundred beanie babies do you want?”

Lent is an act of mercy, and each thing I discard is one less thing my children may have to sort through when I die!

By Easter I will no longer look to the mountains of clutter, praying about from whence my help will come.

I will have a clear view of the joy that arises.

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...