An Earth Day Reflection

Why Are Your Clothes in My Closet?

The last visit she would make home before the Alzheimer’s that would take her life made travel an impossibility, my Aunt Lucie spent hours packing and unpacking my mother’s clothes into her suitcases, believing them to be hers.

It was a harmless past time, but no amount of persuasion or reason could change her mind that these were her clothes.  As she expressed to her sister, my mother, in what Aunt Lucie saw as the end of the matter, “Well, tell me this Harriett: if these are your clothes, what are they doing in my closet?”

Through the tears and the pain of watching the departure of mind in someone so dear, so vital, there were sparks of unintended humor, making the laughter all the more sweet.

Seaweed left on the bottom of God's closet
on the beach at Ayr

I wonder if God laughs even as She cries when Her children, seemingly bent on the destruction of Her earth through war and neglect of stewardship and wilful destruction of nature’s bounty, look Her in the face and exclaim, “Well, tell me this, God: if these really are Your things, why are they in my closet?"

I wonder how things might be different on this earth if we understood that the closet in which we stand looking for the next thing to wear, to use and to discard, is God's, and not our own?