Mutationes: Moving Out

It's been a full week: our Guidelines for the National Crisis have been finalized and released; the new novices have been accepted; the Status (the list of new assignments for Jesuits for the coming school year) has been published; and the Ateneo de Manila Baccalaureate homily has been written and delivered. My work as Provincial is winding down. Deo gratias.

I now have to face a more mundane concern: moving out of De la Costa House. I have about two months to do this, which seems like a lot of time, but is really not, considering all the things I will have to attend to still in my last two months as Provincial.

From one point of view, I have been practicing mutationes (moving out of one's room), a typical Jesuit exercise of detachment, since novitiate. On the other hand, this time, I am not just moving out of a room and an office, but out of the country. And for an assignment of no determinate time-period: I may be gone for two years or ten years. It will therefore be much more difficult, not to mention expensive, to take things with me.

Part of me really welcomes this invitation to detachment. I have, over the years, accumulated many, perhaps too many, things. Most of the stuff has "apostolic justification": it's needed for my work (or for keeping me sane enough to do my work). Still, there's an awful lot. And most of it cannot accompany me to Rome.

So, what to do? What to do with the albums, pictures, journals and letters that are the repository of twenty eight years of memories? What about the folders of notes, class lectures, retreats, spiritual conferences given over the past twelve years? What about the about three hundred theological articles, each stored in a separate folder, that I have collected from the years when I used to teach? What about the CD's that have kept me sane since graduate studies twenty years ago, but which, in fact, I hardly have time to listen to anymore (which include operas of Purcell, Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan)? What about the books--mostly justified as aids to my "learned ministry," to use a Jesuit phrase--in my office and bedroom (not to mention the two cabinets of books in the library of Loyola School of Theology)? Most of these are in the areas of theology, spirituality, homilectics and Scripture, but also include my "special/personal interest books": a collection of Victorian authors (Dickens, a lot of Trollope, George Eliot, 19th century or early twentienth century editions of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold) that has crossed oceans (from England to the United States to the Philippines) with me; my books on Byzantine history and culture; my books on leadership and management; a few volumes of poetry (T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, R. S. Thomas, Hopkins, Chesterton, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold); newer novels such as the "academic" novels of David Lodge, the complete No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, Tolkien's Lord of the Ring trilogy, the Narnia chronicles (dating back to college days), and the complete Harry Potter.

Our new General spent much of the Paschal Triduum moving out of his rooms in EAPI, tearing up a lot of stuff, including pictures and notes. Is that the way to go?

Should I give my books away to a library or some libraries? Which libraries would need or benefit from such an eclectic collection? Or would there be individuals out there who would benefit from some of this stuff--that is, be able to put to "apostolic use" some of the things I might hand on to them?

Maybe a garage sale?

Suggestions are welcome: how do I dispose of things that have, honestly speaking, been helpful or beloved companions in the last two decades of my life and ministry, so that I can emerge, lighter, less encumbered, freer?