You Can’t Marie Kondo Your Way into Heaven
Originally presented Oct. 13, 2024
In the words of the great philosopher and poet M. L. Ciccone, “We are living in a material world…” In today’s gospel lesson, we’re being told that God wants us to let go of those things we have mistakenly held dear, and hold on to God and God’s will instead. Part of this lesson has to do with accumulation, part of it has to do with ownership, part of it has to do with money, and part of it has to do with care.
I’m a bit of a hoarder of stuff: I hew to the old farmer’s maxim that if you get rid of a thing today, you’ll need it tomorrow. I like to keep things so that I can either use them in their current state, or take them apart and use the parts for other uses, or for repairs. I see that you’re all completely shocked by this revelation. I also love tools, because they allow me to do things that my two hands alone wouldn’t be able to. I have an affinity for collecting tools, especially because I tend to make kits of them to take to various jobs in various places, but eventually, I start paring down for just what I need in that kit for that job.
Tools are important, as they allow the division of effort and multiplication of effective work. Another old saw (as it were) says that it’s a poor craftsman what blames his tools, but the converse is also true: good tools make work easy. We’ll come back to this soon.
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The Japanese organizing consultant, author, and TV presenter, Marie Kondo, has become a household name, and, by turns, her name has become a verb. Kondo’s approach is to get rid of anything that doesn’t “spark joy”, or tokimeku in her native Japanese. The more literal translation is “flutter, throb, or palpitate”. Her method is intended to pare back the accumulations of objects that fill our homes to something far more spare and Spartan, so that those things which have positive associations are all that are left, treasured items prized for their sentimental value, their impressive usefulness, or other superlative traits. What must be discarded, donated, or sold is the dross and flotsam of consumerism, the useless and unused, the valueless and sometimes the negative reminders of bad times. Anyhow, you may have heard someone say that they need to “Marie Kondo” their house. I want to tell you, though, that despite what you may think from today’s lesson, you can’t Marie Kondo your way into heaven.
As you accumulate things, you less and less own them and they more and more own you. This is true insofar as storage of stuff, this is true of trying to find things, this is true of maintenance of any large bevy of objects. I don’t care if you have two stand mixers or fifteen power drills; a large fabric collection, or a walk-in closet full of shoes: if nothing else, you need to take the time to choose which of the set of items you want to use. You need to store them somewhere, be it yet organized or not. You are pulled in multiple directions by this stuff. This stuff anchors you to the mundane world, and pulls your mind away from other pursuits. However, their use is still a good thing, and having choices is good, too. It’s a matter of balance.
God’s message for the rich man in today’s gospel isn’t just to get rid of his stuff: it’s to convert his accumulation into liquid cash money, a means of exchange, and give that directly to the poor. This is Marxist-level wealth redistribution, done with nothing less than the entrance to heaven as its prize and justification. And yet what does the man do? “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
Money, we can take from this, is not inherently evil, but the stagnation and hoarding of it, be it in its native form as cash, in the form of accumulated wealth in various investments, or be it frozen in assets, is. The men and women who garner profit for themselves, for their own sake, and don’t reinvest it in their fellow humans, are poorer than those who don’t have money, for they are showing their poverty of spirit. The accumulation and hoarding that first led us to have the scourges of society known as millionaires, and now even more so billionaires, are forces that spit directly in the face of God.
Let’s break down what a dollar is, and see what they’re actually amassing in such large quantities. I’m a physicist by training, so here’s what this problem looks like to me: as of the beginning of this year, most of New York State had a minimum wage of $15 per hour. Assume, if you will, we have a day laborer shoveling manure. You can get fifteen minutes of shoveling at a rate of 500 kg/15 minutes if moved to a height of 1 m above the ground. This makes the math easy for us, as this means that 500 kg*10 m/sec²*1 m/15 min (according to the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety). You also have to pay the laborer to rest for fifteen minutes after that sprint, so let’s say it’s actually 5000 J/30 min. At 30 minutes, we’re at $7.50 for the work performed, so the person in question has expended… wait. This can’t be right. They’ve expended 666 Joules of energy for $1. That’s also four minutes of work at that rate of pay. So if you have one million dollars squirreled away in your bank account, you have 7.6 years of someone’s life of continuous labor at minimum wage in NY. If you have one billion dollars, you have seventy-six centuries of the same labor. This can’t be right in any sense. How can anyone’s time or effort be worth so much more than anyone else’s? It’s fundamental inequality at its very heart, and an affront to the God who made us all Their children.
If we are not all loved by God, equally, then you can make claims of worth and time being unequal, but that was never God’s intent. And this is the last part that I mentioned: care. God cares about all of us, and wants us to care about each other. Why else give the order to the rich man to divest himself of his possessions, the things owning him, and give the money, through a gift, to the poor? The poor know far better than the rich how to use money, how to stretch every cent or talent given them to feed the most, clothe the most, and house the most for the least. The rich like to roll around in the perceived good news of the amounts of their accumulated money, not even using it for their own good. The poor know the only way to sublimate money, and turn it from the grievous harm of accumulation to the life-giving transfer of energy from one person to another, is to spend it, and to do so on the constant needs of life: food, clothing, housing, the necessities that require a constant flux of effort to maintain.
I said that I’d come back to the thing about tools, and here it is: money is a tool for us to use to get things that we need. We are tools for God to use to get what God needs. More to the point, we are called through the Spirit to expend our treasure and our time for the good of all. So sell what you need to and give the proceeds to the poor, whether literally or figuratively. In any sense, when you give of yourself to others, you’ll get closer to God.
