Holding on and letting go

My children have a hard time letting go of things.

I have the basement to prove it. There are boxes and boxes of hockey trophies, art supplies, sweatshirts that will never fit anyone in our family again, school projects from going on 20 years ago and books — so many books.

And while the kids show no interest in sorting through the boxes to decide what they might actually want or need, they also aren’t ready to dump them in the trash. There might be something there that they will want again, tomorrow or next week or two weeks shy of never.

It’s OK. I did the same thing to my parents, who, to be fair, hauled boxes of my things from my childhood house to the home they built when they retired. I have no right to cast stones.

Neither, for that matter, does my husband. All those DVDs and CDs? They didn’t all belong to the kids.

But no one is using the things that are in all the boxes in the basement. I can see holding onto a favorite stuffed animal, one that still has pride of place on your bed all through high school, or a favorite poster that stays on your wall.

Some of the items could probably be donated. Did I mention there’s lots of books? Others have probably finished their useful lives. I’m not sure anyone wants a Fisher-Price Noah’s ark set in which more than half the animals have lost their partners.

Instead, the old clothes and toys and other flotsam and jetsam of childhood just sit, taking up space.

That’s what the past does, especially in a culture that is always looking for the next thing, the new toy, the hottest fast fashion trend, without taking stock of what came before and deciding what should be kept, what should be jettisoned and what should be preserved only in memory.

The church now is at a moment of change, mourning the loss of Pope Francis and then, less than three weeks later, celebrating the election of Pope Leo XIV. As close to Pope Francis as Pope Leo was, people are watching him closely, trying to figure out what this new pope will be about. How much will he follow the path of Francis, a very different pontiff than his immediate predecessors? Will his be a more traditional pontificate? What new trails will he blaze?

For those of us in the Archdiocese of Chicago, unaccustomed to hearing English with a Midwestern accent from the Holy See, it’s a whole other level of adjustment. It’s strange to think that so many people here know the pope, or, at the very least, know someone who knows the pope. Chicago famously doesn’t want nobody nobody sent, so who you know is important.

Now we have sent a favorite son to the Chair of Peter, by way of decades of service in Peru and in religious leadership. Somewhere, though, buried not very deep in the back of his mind, I expect there’s a box of memories of his time growing up here, a place that values the practical, that admires the humble (as long as we’re not talking about the city) and that knows both suffering and rebirth.

Here’s hoping those things he brought from Chicago serve him well.