c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I returned from a business trip to find half of our furniture gone.

In moving from a suburban house to a Manhattan apartment, we have shed three sofas, three dining tables, three desks, numerous chairs, hundreds of books and roomfuls of stuff.

This excess reflected closing up two family homes in recent years and three decades of marriage with plenty of attic space.

The one missing piece that troubles me is the kitchen table that was the center of family life for 20 years. At that table, we shared reports on our days, gave counsel to each other, and did school projects.

Our Manhattan apartment’s breakfast nook is slated to be my home office, so some buyer at a family resource center sale will take home a table, four chairs and, I hope, an aura of family love.

Families are about people, of course, not things. Still, some possessions do tell stories.

The breakfast table, for example, bears scars made by a bored pre-adolescent boy bouncing a knife. Behind discoloration of a maple dining table lie many hours of leaning forward to talk.

A church bench testifies to a farmhouse in New Hampshire, a leather-inlaid table to my great-aunt’s favorite window in Indiana, and discarded prints to our early-marriage days of walls to fill but no money for art.

I kept the genealogical treasures that my mother assembled, as well as the sea chest that ancestors brought from Norway and a table made from 18th Century barn siding.

I suspect even items that made the cut won’t stay with us for long. Our youngest son’s departure for college in three years will bring another round of downsizing, but I sense that this move’s shedding of load is about more than adapting to smaller space.

I think some new moment has arrived, in which we want to be less encumbered by stuff, less trapped in the inevitable burden of owning, more nimble for seizing new days.

I think we have wanted this moment for some time, but felt obligated, if only by social custom and personal habit, to keep accumulating. After all, isn’t success about owning?

Now, perhaps because of the current furor over immigrants, I find myself appreciating my immigrant ancestors, who came here seeking religious freedom, economic opportunity and hope, and carried hardly anything with them. Both then and now, people gave up their possessions in order to gain their lives.

I’m aware of a growing impatience with automobiles and houses, two mainstays of American life. I wonder if the persistent malaise in U.S. car and home sales is about more than a sagging economy. Maybe we sense that the extra 2,000 square feet or 200 horsepower are costly burdens that won’t give back in equal measure.

I might be the last person to see it, but I do see that this “land of plenty” has become a “land of too much” _ too much food, too much foreign oil, too much stuff, too much debt, too much division over who gets to own the most.

Having too much _ especially when more and more neighbors have far too little _ has left us divided from each other and vulnerable to manipulation.

Perhaps without intending it, our family’s move has given us the gift of shedding load. And that shedding, in turn, has opened our eyes to the downside of owning.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest in Durham, N.C. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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