Trashed Some Old Friends

My father worked for a couple of years travelling as a salesman for D.C. Heath Book publishing company. Freud might say that my interests in books came from my longing for my father. But I have enjoyed books for a long time. I worked at Princeton Theological Seminary at the Theological Book Agency for all three years of my Seminary education. I managed the Book Agency my senior year. I got a lot of books at Seminary cost. I spent a lot of money on books.

One of the major expenses in each of my calls was the moving expenses. Each calling church was shocked by the moving expenses because there were so many books. When I put them all up in the library of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, one of the male members of the church, an intellectual himself, said, "That is a fabulous library you have there. Too bad this congregation is not interested in that sort of things." Ouch!

So now one of the biggest issues I have is what to do with all of those books now that I am retired. There are many great scholarly books that I have seldom looked at but which I always kept so that I would have resources to look up the answers to questions that somebody might ask me. My intellectual security blanket. There are lots of novels and books that I have read, and I doubt that I will ever re-read. There are commentaries and Biblical study material that I still may want to use as I get invited to preach from time to time.

But this morning for the first time, I took a box of books to the county dump. They were old friends, but I had no need for them. There was my Freshman-in-college English anthology. But I had carried it with me for forty years. There were some other books that just did not measure up. I am sending to third world seminary many of the "classic" books, like the Theology of the New Testament by Bultmann or some of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. I am giving to the local library many of the novels and good history books.

But I trashed some of my old friends today in the dump. It has to be done. I guess even now I find it hard to let go of that security blanket. Those books were a part of the self-imagine, part of my self-concept. But they have to go. They may have even been idols as I may have been tempted to put more importance on them than on the reality that I was a child of God who mattered even without books or even if I did not know the answer, or even if I was wrong. Maybe it is a good thing I have to start getting rid of all those books, and I can finally begin to be free to be a simple child of God who matters. But it sure was hard tossing that box into the dumpster. I still got a lot more to dump.