Vigil at the shredder

The past few days has been taken up with packing and taking redundant stuff to the rubbish dump. All our paintings and electronic kit has been shipped over to the new house by car, to avoid any possibility of damage during the move. There's just one more thing to tackle, and that's the remains of work materials archived in boxes up in the attic. I made a start on this a month ago, and lost heart after dumping a third of what I had. Now most of the rest has to go as there's not room to keep it where we're going. There's so much correspondence, decades of it, also minutes and reports and study materials generated in different jobs for different people and needs. Stuff from the past 20 years I have digital versions of, so it's the older stuff that has to go. So finally, I spent three late hours with the shredder in the kitchen, filling green sacks for recycling.

In the course of doing this a sermon text dropped out of a pile of correspondence, dating from 1983. It was one of few I preached at St Alban's Westbury Park in the year we lodged in the Parish's empty Vicarage while I did a teacher training course. I was preaching about the WCC General Assembly in Vancouver, just opening, but the opening section of the sermon was all about moving house. I preached it, in fact, on the evening before the removal van arrived to ship our worldly goods across the River Severn to Chepstow, where we lived during the seven years I worked for USPG.

What an extraordinary co-incidence. Also a revelatory one. It read as if I could have composed it this morning. My thoughts and feelings about carrying all this baggage around in life had not really changed in the course of 27 years since preaching, and sixteen house moves since we got married.

Going through lots of old stuff awakens memories both pleasant and painful. Some of the shredded material I was glad to let go of because of the unhappiness associated with it, things I'd been happy to put behind me. Why keep it until now? Essentially, it's the fear of losing contact with all those many buried memories, the fear that what I choose to remember will be a distortion of the truth and therefore a failure to learn from my own past. You have to put this in the context of believing that one day I will write a full memoire of my years in ministry through four decades of rapid change. This is less than likley nowadays, however. The critical editor's question - who's your audience, who'd be interested in anything you have to say? has stalked me increasingly during this past decade. Thankfully, blogging provides me with a constructive alternative to sucking up to powerful publishers or wasting time and money on trying to produce my own book.