By Rajmund Dabrowski
My wife doesn’t really like my room. Once, when I offered to exchange rooms with her for a couple of hours so I could watch a TV program that evening (which I knew she wouldn’t want to watch), she said, “I don’t like to go to your study. It’s cluttered.”
Naturally, I was hurt.
My next journey was to take a look and see whether there was a good reason for such a judgment.
No. I will not apologize for my study. Everything I need is there, and there is still plenty of room to add more. No mess—just a collection of things, neatly placed, meaningful, and full of memories. Not cluttered. Clutterful. Like beautiful. And go ahead and add to that plenty of nostalgia.
An observer would quickly note that someone who deals in religion must occupy this room. Symbols are everywhere. Many of them relate to a bygone era of Jewish culture and its religious journey. The bookcase displays volumes about Hasidic life and theology—hobbies of mine.
Robert Eisenberg, author of an enchanting book Boychiks in the Hood, writes about the Satmar, one of the Hasidic sects. This group operates a food bank that is a model of discretion. Vans drop boxes of food on the doorsteps of the disadvantaged late every Thursday night. The vans are camouflaged as legitimate grocery store delivery trucks so as not to embarrass anyone. The elderly stay with their families. Homes for the aged are considered an abomination.
A person who is hospitalized is never at a loss for visitors. Suicide, child abuse, divorce, along with a litany of other modern problems, are relatively rare in the Hasidic world.
Nostalgia: the strange world of comparing the “now” with the “then.” Nostalgia: that’s what my room offers me as I look back in time and reflect on what I should reclaim for my own world, wherever I am, and whenever I meet with the delights, laughter, pain, and arrogance of today.
“I remember the days of long ago . . .” (Psalm 143:5 NIV). That refers to “then,” but it pushes me toward something new. My nostalgia pushes me forward. It reintroduces me to a day when I get to create something new, and the only time I can form a future for myself, and for those around me.
That’s why I love the clutter of my room. It provides the symbols that sustain my faith, ignite my imagination, and keep me moving among people who are great and amazing, bland and indifferent, funny or sad—and all to be loved.
Every worship service at my local church ends with the same phrase. It offers a serious challenge for the days ahead: Go and live love, the pastor says. As we drive home, or meet with friends or strangers, “live love” points to each woman, man, and child—every single one of them a brother, a sister, each a child of God.
–Rajmund Dabrowski is RMC communication director and editor of Mountain Views.