Another Oasis

The world in 2011 is a place cluttered with things that make is difficult to be a young person. 26% of children are being raised in single parent homes. Depression affects 20% of Canadians, suicide is the second most common cause of death in the 15-35 age range. 15% of children are living in poverty. 1% have been direct witnesses of domestic violence. In a world like this, all of us, especially children, need a place where none of that is true. We need an oasis that shelters us from the violence and depression that envelops the world.

                The Fresh Air Fund was founded in 1877 by a pastor (Willard Parsons) who wanted “to allow children living in disadvantaged communities to get away from the hot, noisy city streets and enjoy free summer experiences in the country.” It is focussed on children from New York City and has helped 1.7 million children since its inception. One such child is a girl who comes to stay with us once a year for a few weeks in the summer.  It is one more way in which we can seek to be a blessing to those around us. I have spoken of designing our home to be an oasis to help rebuild and refresh us for the battle, but it can also be an oasis of blessing and refreshment for others. An uncluttered home leaves room to be a blessing to others.

                New York City, the base of operations for the Fresh Air Fund and where all the participating children live, has a population density fifty times that of Niagara. Open spaces are therefore rare and grass and trees are an occasional sight from a distance. The background noise is always at least as loud as a loud television and violence is much more prevalent.

                From out of this world, our guest comes to us via the Friendly Town program of the Fresh Air Fund. We enjoy having her and I think she enjoys being here. We are glad that for a few weeks each year we can provide a place that is decidedly unlike New York: quiet, green, not crowded, safe and filled thanksgiving, joy and contentment.

                In a world that is thankless, filled with sorrow and violence, we are thankful our home can be an oasis in which we bless others and seek to inspire them to live lives of purpose and commitment to God.

The Simplicity of Advent

          G.K. Chesterton, the British novelist, poet, satirist and Christian of the early 20th Century, said that “Weak things must boast of being new, like so many new philosophies. But strong things can boast of being old. Strong things can boast of being moribund.”

As my wife and I have established our seasonal traditions, we have slowly realized that, like Chesterton, it is the ancient customs that most speak to our hearts. Further, I am convinced that it’s often the small matters than can be the most important, or significant, or linger longest in the memory. So, we have constructed our holiday traditions based on the Middle Age custom of Yuletide which combines history with a counter-cultural simplicity. The Yuletide season, as traditionally constructed, begins four weeks before Christmas Day with Advent. This is meant to be a time of preparation for Christmas.

Now today, preparation for Christmas may typically involve detailed plans for the holidays, rushing about and purchasing presents, visiting family and friends, transporting children to this program and that and trying to fit everything before the end of the year.

But that is not the old tradition. The old tradition is, I suggest, a better tradition, a quieter tradition. When it was first observed, Advent was meant to be a time of quiet preparation and reflection upon Christmas and what it means and why we need it. So our Advent preparations happen early and are designed to create an atmosphere of reflective, joyful anticipation in our home. Once these things have been done, regardless of how busy the rest of the season starts to become, we know most of the preparations for Christmas are complete.

Advent begins as we mean for it to continue: in simplicity. We hang mistletoe by the front door. Now, mistletoe has long been used for its medicinal properties and even when everything else was dead in winter, despite the wind and snow, the mistletoe plant was still there and ready with its healing, life-giving berries. It therefore became, a symbol of God’s provision and grace and a sprig of was hung by the door as a reminder. Over time it became a custom for husbands and wives to kiss underneath it as a reminder of the gift each was to the other. With each kiss, a berry would be plucked and the bare sprig in spring would be a reminder of God’s covenantal blessings and the love present in the home.

To further that love and togetherness, we also construct a gingerbread house. Though, to call it a house is not always accurate: we have built houses, barns, a three foot condominium and a scale model of the Woolworths Building! Together, we design, bake, construct, decorate and display it in time for our next tradition, a tree-trimming party.

                The Christmas tree is another old tradition that is meant to symbolize the Christmas story with its lights, decorations, fragrance and angel or star on top. Each year, on the first Saturday of December, we invite our friends to gather at our home for food, singing and to help decorate the Christmas tree. It has become a tradition not just for us but for every one of the 60 or so people who attend. Our tree then becomes a reminder to us, not just of Christmas, but of the love, and friendship and warm feelings of fellowship that takes us all the way through to Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve represents, for us, the culmination of Advent. After weeks of quiet, reflective preparation, we loudly celebrate with the French Canadian tradition of the tourtierre. I was unaware of what a tourtierre was until I was reading a history of New France and discovered this savoury meat pie made with a variety of delicious ingredients deep with symbolism: the meat, representing material blessings, potatoes, things of substance and the rich variety of spices, the nuances of life together. It is thus a meal to be taken with family or close friends in thanksgiving and anticipation.           

                So, in the Marsh house, we have developed our own traditions, but based them largely on the ancient traditions, to prolong the holidays and keep them focussed on what really matters to us: simplicity, love, family, hope, reflection, faith in God and thanksgiving for Jesus. So, to me, Christmas is just a day, but Yuletide...Yuletide is the best season of the year.

An Oasis

           The world is cynical. It seems filled with people who are bitterly distrustful of those in authority, their neighbours, and even their heroes. They are sneering and contemptuous of anything or anyone too earnest, too dedicated, or too naïve to follow them in mocking the noble and pure aspirations of the generations before them. There almost seems to be a pervasive desire, to not only avoid striving to be all we can, but to actively seek to be less than we are. I may elaborate on these ideas in a latter post, but for now I will assume that we agree the world is very much characterised by cynicism and detached irony.

Last week I wrote about our goal, as a family, to glorify God and present an accurate image of Him to those around us. It sometimes feels as though everything in the world exists to discourage our pursuit. That is, of course, an exaggeration, but there is no escaping the many messages we encounter every day that try to dissuade us from our objective of glorifying God.

This is the context of the next statement on our wall:

We desire our home to be an inspiring oasis of thanksgiving, joy and contentment.

                Thanksgiving is a cornerstone of the Christian life. How much of our anger and frustration would melt away if we were thankful? Unfortunately, as a family we have an inflated sense of what we deserve. We have been blessed in many ways so we begin to act as though it’s because of our righteousness or merit we have been given a warm home and good food and material things. Everyone should be able to live in a free country of ample opportunity like Canada, but we so easily fall in to the error of thinking that there is something intrinsic to our character that has made us more deserving of our blessings than others. So, despite the inevitable setbacks and frustrations in our lives, we want to give thanks in all things (I Thess. 5:18).

                Of course, when our lives characterised by gratitude, we can’t help but feel joyful for the things we have been given. When our home lacks clutter; when it has been carefully planned and our possessions have been selectively chosen, we will be surround by things that truly bring us joy. Being able to reach for any book on our shelves and know it will be a source of comfort or challenge or inspiration is a cause for joy. Having possessions that serve us and our needs and our goals instead of demanding time and attention because of a sense of duty or obligation is a source of joy and something we are striving for in our home.

                Finally, with thanksgiving and joy comes contentment. Contentment is at odds with the consumerist promptings of our culture and the impulses of our hearts, but it is what will ultimately lead to a satisfying family life. We hope that, with the Apostle Paul, we can truly say we have learned to be content with little and with much (Phil 4:11). We hope to strive, not for more or different things, but for God’s glory and a home that helps us fulfill our calling.

                We believe our home can be a refuge from the world for us, by embracing and reflecting counter cultural values and priorities. In a culture of selfishness and criticism, we want to be thankful to God. In a society that seems to take pride in nihilism, we want to present the joy of the Lord. In an environment that encourages consumerism and the promise of one more thing to make us happy, we want to cultivate an attitude of contentment. In all these areas, we want our home to offer a respite from the pressures of the world around us and inspire us to be all that God intends us to be.

Glorifying God

Clutter in our home is a spiritual issue, not primarily a practical or physical one. Uncontrolled clutter is suggestive of a number of spiritual concerns, two of which were identified in last week’s post. I talked about two spiritual shortcomings that are revealed by clutter, but a more significant cost to clutter is the impediment to full obedience it can be. God has called us all to glorify Him (I Cor 10:31) and enjoy Him forever (Rev. 21:3,4). We want to rest in perfect peace, but it’s difficult to do when we can’t find our Bibles or we are tripping over last month’s newspapers on our way to our armchair. Not only so, clutter can invert our purpose. Instead of our home being a place that enables us to serve God in the manner He has called us, we serve our home despite how God has called us. We serve our home by the constant maintenance that’s required to keep it in a sloppy, cluttered mess.

                But how do we keep God’s purpose uppermost in our minds as we live each day in our homes with all the distracting voices offered by the world around us?

The Marsh family has written our aspirations for our family and our home and placed them on the walls of our house as a continual reminder of what purpose we serve:

As a family we want to glorify God in Jesus Christ in all of life, presenting an accurate portrait of the Godhead to the world around us.

                We know God has plans for each of us as individuals, but we also recognize that He has called us to fulfill His plans within the context of our family. We further know that other people are one of the main mechanisms God uses to mould us and transform us into the image of Jesus so not only are the other people in our family helpful in fulfilling our calling; they are necessary.

                We are a Christian family and so we not only want to glorify God, but also Jesus Christ His son. We want all of our lives: our home, our leisure, our interactions to glorify and reveal all three aspects of the Trinity. This is characterized by singleness of purpose, a harmony of goals and submission to the greater good by all of us. We want to maintain our individuality, but also have a family identity that allows us to flourish as individuals in a loving, supportive environment. Our hope is that we will reflect the mutual love and purpose that is evident in the Godhead.

                These are high and challenging aspirations but we are all committed to seeing them realized in our family. They inspire us when we are feeling defeated or questioning the purpose of maintaining a clutter-free home. Too easily we get caught up in keeping clutter at bay and a neat house for its own sake instead keeping it that way to help us serve God and obey His purposes for us. The tangible reminder on the walls of our home is a great help in our journey to a more stream-lined home.

Why So Much Clutter?

Getting rid of clutter seems to be a consistent problem with North Americans. There are at least ten magazines on the rack right now claiming to hold the secret to getting rid of clutter. I have read some books on the subject and in discussion with other people have been interested to hear some of the strategies they have adopted to deal with it. While I will be covering some of the approaches that help with clutter in subsequent entries, what has most interested me is the way people concentrate on the physical, practical aspects and avoid the spiritual facets of the problem.

When we first began more effectively dealing with clutter in our house, it was because of concern for the spiritual dimension of the issue.

It seemed to me that there were only two reasons there was clutter in our home: we had too many things and not enough space to store them all, which suggested an unhealthy attachment to material things, which was a spiritual issue. Alternatively, everything did have a place and we chose to leave things strewn for multiple reasons, which suggested a lack of gratitude for the things we`d been blessed with, which was a spiritual issue.

Either way, there were some spiritual matters that needed to be addressed before we could consistently overcome the clutter in our home. Beginning to view it as a spiritual issue, rather than one of “mere” house-keeping has made all the difference in how we approach clutter.

First Post

Over the past number of months I have been increasingly convicted of the spiritual consequences of our physical environment and how easily the things we obtain to help us can become snares and traps. To that end, I have been slowly reorganizing our home and scaling down our possessions: to free us to God’s purpose for our lives.

Over the coming days I will be posting commentary and reflections on some of the steps we’ve been taking to streamline and focus our lives as well as the philosophy behind some of our decisions.