Over the last week or so, I've been taking apart our basement. Twenty five years ago, when we launched into the joy that is American homeownership, one of the very first things we did was replace the basement carpeting.
Our predecessors in the house had a sweet old dog, and, well, the basement smelled of elderly dog and mildew. Out came the ratty old carpet, and in went brand new high traffic Berber, ready to face the challenges of our growing family. Two boys grew to adulthood in that basement, tracking in the dirt and debris of life. There were two decades of spilled wine and dropped plates of food and that one time my I tried to move a leaky chainsaw from the workroom to the yard. We got a puppy of our own, who lived out her fourteen years of life almost entirely housetrained, except when she wasn't. When she passed on, we got a new pup, whose whole life in shelters meant he wasn't quite clued in to what to do in a house. He figured it out after a few haphazard months, at which point we looked at our carpet.
The "new" carpet looked, well, it looked worse after two decades than the one we'd inherited. It was a ruin.
So we bit the bullet, wandering over to a nearby strip mall where a genial middle-aged Lebanese salesman with a smoke-graveled voice soft-sold us through the process.
But to get that installed, everything needed to come out of the room, and that's where we keep most of our books. Seven bookshelves laden with books, gathered over a lifetime. Books from college courses, not touched since I was younger than my children. Books that neither my wife nor I can remember reading. Books neither of us liked. Books so devoured by time...or my father-in-law's dog...that they were functionally unreadable.
On the other hand, there were magical books. Brilliant novels. Insightful nonfiction. Children's books imbued with memories of little boys right before bedtime. Books that belonged to my grandparents, some of which had notes written on slips of paper within, little echoes of voices long silent.
So for a week, I went through all of it. That which had value, we kept. That which might have value to others, we donated. That which was worthless, we discarded. For the latter two categories, a quick check by the missus, to be sure I'd not consigned a beloved book of hers to oblivion. Even with both eyes over all of it, there was a whole bunch of worthless stuff.
Every single tome in that room was considered, reviewed, and sorted. I dismantled every shelf.
Reflecting on that this last weekend as I recombobulated the recarpeted room, I found myself thinking about deconstruction with soft new carpet beneath my feet.
"Deconstruction," or so it's called in certain faith circles, describes the process of taking apart one's faith.
Challenge every assumption! Tear it all down! In doing so, or so the argument goes, you'll end up with something that's more authentic. Unless you're willing to abandon every presumption, you're not really deconstructing. Embrace the utter uncertainty, and from the shadows of the unknown, a new and more genuine way of being will emerge. So the argument has gone, ever since I first heard it many moons ago in my days amongst the Emergent tribe.
There's a certain logic to that, to the application of criticism to everything.
But whenever I consider deconstruction as a methodology of the faithful, it falls short. Forget everything you have learned, cries the Dismantler of All Things, and I say, no, I don't think I'm going to do that. That's a fool's errand, quite literally. There are hard-won truths that shouldn't be set aside, values that can't be cut away without savaging one's integrity as a person. Those truths, once discovered, aren't something you abandon. You refine them, sure. But you don't start from scratch, over and over again. You don't pull the rug out from under yourself.
Take our basement, for obvious metaphoric example. Change happened. Hundreds of books vanished, along with old dead electronics and useless bricabrac. Dust was cleaned from everything. A table that served no purpose but to clutter up the space was moved into our storage area.
But I didn't just toss everything away. Every change was a considered choice. And the process of change was measured against a clearly defined goal. We love books, and want them in our life. We like the way the space has come to be. That's not to say that change shouldn't happen, but insofar as we are the agents of that change, it should reflect what matters to us. It is a guided process.
With intention, our books and our home theater system went through a sorting and staging, everything placed just so. When time came to reassemble the room, it came back together quickly and neatly, newer, better, and yet at the same time familiar.
Whenever we change the place that we call home, we must do so with an end in mind.
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