News From The Rectory

RECTOR’S PINT - July 2025

Cath and I are beginning to organise our move, scheduled for the late autumn, and we

find we have to downsize significantly. In fact, we started ridding ourselves of unwanted

clutter some months ago, and it’s beginning to feel as if some progress is now being

made. Getting rid of many of our books was a wrench but having done it, I find I can’t

remember most of what has gone! I have cleared and emptied drawers in my study, and

filled bags with paperwork going back years that will be taken for recycling. I can even

see the surface of my desk! The desk has to go as well of course. I’m delighted that we

have found a local home for our dining table and chairs, which will be the hardest to let

go of; they were given to us at just the right moment in our lives as I started my ministry

and they have many stories to tell, having seen many family, friends and parish

occasions. We can’t take them with us, but they are going to a local family home, to be

taken on at just the right time for them.

We ‘re really looking forward to living in a far less cluttered home, and the truth is we

have allowed things to get out of hand. Living with less space to fill, we will be forced

to organise far better. It is actually a great feeling to finally get rid of things we haven’t

used for decades. Inherited family photographs will be a problem, and hard decisions

will need to be made about these and other things, but I think we are on a journey from

‘what must we get rid of?’ to ‘what do we really need to keep?’

But behind all of this, there is another lesson. A distant cousin of Cath’s, who is a very

committed Christian, lives in another country, returning to Oxford annually. He lives

quite simply, and I remember him once saying: ‘don’t sit too heavily on the things of

this world.’ Jesus once taught us “do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where

moth and rust destroy… but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6: 19-

20). Clearing away the clutter in our homes can be a spiritual exercise, a kind of

metaphor for the need to examine the clutter in our lives.

I came across a prayer for such an occasion and I believe the final part of it is quite

helpful.

“May this culling become more than a physical act of decluttering. May it also

be for us a season of glad examination of our own hearts and habits, of the

ways in which we have stewarded all that has been entrusted to us. Let us learn

better this day what it means to travel light through this short life, holding

loosely our material possessions, storing instead our truer treasures in heaven,

and directing the increase of our devotions more constantly toward you”.

Simon