When I was a kid, we had these massive trash cans in our garage, each roughly the size of a rhinoceros, where we would keep empty cans and bottles. These bottomless containers would collect cans and bottles for months at a time, their capacity mysteriously incongruous with their apparent size.
One of my favorite things about growing up in Iowa was that these empty cans and bottles were each worth a nickel. (This should show you how few noteworthy things there are about growing up in Iowa.) Legend has it this policy was the remnant of some long-forgotten state initiative to cut down on littering, or something like that.
When those preposterously large trash cans finally filled up, we would make pilgrimage to the local grocery store and insert all of our cans and bottles, one by one, into a machine that would count them for us and then give us five cents for each empty. This interminable parade of plastic, glass, and aluminum nickels routinely took the better part of an hour, and the machines were notoriously temperamental -- a slightly-too-crunched can or a bottle without the label could set them off, blinking and hollering and causing a scene. In the end, though, and after much drudgery, we floated on a feeling of ragged and hard-won triumph to collect our reward.
(My parents would often send us kids to make this menial sacrifice to the recycling gods, promising us that we could keep whatever money the machine gave us. I’m fairly certain that, when our miniscule profits were split three ways, we were barely within shouting distance of minimum wage. My parents, in their desperate desire to get us out of the house, were from time to time somewhat unscrupulous.)
Once, though -- and for the life of me I cannot remember what movement of heaven and earth prompted this deviation from the norm, though I know for a fact it was once and only once -- we took our semi-annual stockpile of cans and bottles to a redemption center on the other side of town.
We hauled these great massive balloons weighed down with empty pop cans and wine coolers in from the trunk of my car, prepared to do battle yet again with the electronic receptacle.
Only there was no receptacle, or at least not an electronic one. Instead there was a man, a lone grizzled warrior who seemed to live behind his work station. He heaved the elephantine sack of empties up, nearly over his weathered head, and dumped the entirety of our collection out onto the table before him.
I’ll never forget what came next: this old man, the sort of man who communicates largely through grunts and vague gestures, began rifling through the empties, sifting and sorting with hands like hummingbirds. I remember staring at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as he performed a one-man symphony -- aluminum there, glass there, plastic there -- barely seeming to allow the dang things to touch his fingers before they were flying through the air to their proper places, and always finding their proper places.The entire ritual lasted for less than five minutes, and then we were left to shuffle back to our car in dazed silence. It took longer for me to process what I had witnessed than it took for him to sift and sort six hundred containers and pay us our thirty bucks.
* * *
Most of the time, I treat the stories of my life like empty cans and bottles -- once they’ve been duly enjoyed, I toss them into a mammoth container in the garage, and once or twice a year (usually at the behest of a particularly zealous retreat director) I begrudgingly work my way through them, one at a time, in search of whatever value they might still have. The payoff usually doesn’t seem worth the effort.
My first experience with spiritual direction was not entirely unlike that fateful childhood trip to the redemption center. Instead of shoving one beleaguered story through the machine at a time, hoping it didn’t cause me too much trouble, I watched as a trained master dumped all of them out on the table at once, and began the hypnotic ritual of sifting and sorting.
It is a scary thing, to offer all my empties to somebody else and trust him to sort through them with me.
But, my oh my, what a marvel it is to watch. And I’ve discovered things I didn’t know were there, discovered numerous forgotten stories that have subtly shaped who I am. Armed with the knowledge of what my life has been, and the understanding of how each story connects with the others, I have come to see my life in a brighter light. It’s marvelous.
Spiritual direction isn’t therapy, and it’s not just for “holy people.” Anyone who has empty cans in their garage could use some help going through them. Sure, you could try trudging through them all by yourself, one-by-one, and you might even get something out of it. But entrusting an expert with your junk -- that’s when it really pays off. Those empties are valuable, you know. Even if you didn’t grow up in Iowa.
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