Over the last week or so, as the weather has taken a turn for the heat and humidity, I’ve moved the focus of my time on work projects from landscaping to some neglected rooms in our home. Last week I spent a day facing and taming the utility room, the repository of the clutter and debris that falls from consumer electronics like leaves from a tree in autumn. It is truly astounding to see the number of cables, connectors, installation disks, and power adaptors that accumulate over time.

I had a range of feelings pass over me while I was working. On the one hand it felt satisfying finally to be dealing with a deferred pile of work. On the other hand, I wondered at my tendency to save things on the odd chance that I might need that seventh USB cable at some point. And on still another hand, I was struck by the irony and the sadness of realizing that I had now become a servant of the very technologies that presumably were created—and which I invited into my life—in order to bring ease and convenience. In the end, they had brought complexity and inconvenience.

So when I opened The Rule of Benedict this morning, it seemed fitting to read a chapter entitled, “Whether a Monk Ought to Receive Letters or Anything Else.” The main point of the chapter appears to be that the monastery preserves its community by recognizing that the commitment to own nothing personal, but to share all things, includes the expressions and favors that might come to an individual monk from a relative. For that reason, the abbot decides what ought to be done with any incoming items.

This sounds foreign and harsh, but only because it is hard for me to set aside the unexamined premise that I have a right to my own personal property. The monastic life does not assume this same premise, so the system in the Rule is not an affront to that third Lockean right so dear to us and so crucial to our modern way of living: “the pursuit of property.”

What I had confronted in the utility room—and again yesterday in the garage—is the reality that the pursuit of property takes an (inevitable) turn to possession by property. And possession is exactly the right word. Saint Benedict, it seems to me, clearly sees the spiritual issues underlying possessions. And so he writes, “The brother to whom [the gift] was sent should not be saddened, in order not to give the devil an opening” (RB 54:4, citing Ephesians 4:27). This seems to be the wisdom underlying the traditional vow of poverty and the oblatial adaptation of the vow as a promise of sufficiency.

This gives me a new way to look at the accumulations of possessions I will face when I return to the garage or the cupboards in my office or …. I can ask myself whether an item leads to sufficiency or to a spirit of possession. And if the answer is the second, can I let the item pass through my fingers without sadness, “in order not to give the devil an opening?”

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.