Making Room for God: Decluttering and the Spiritual Life
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
If cleanliness is next to godliness, do our closets have anything to say about the state of our souls?
Decluttering became trendy with the 2014 release of Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And while there’s no shortage of secular books promoting the practice, Making Room for God is the first book on organization from a Catholic perspective. Self-proclaimed pack rat Mary Elizabeth Sperry will help you make decluttering a prayerful, peace-filled, and soul-expanding experience.
Popular Catholic speaker and Bible expert Mary Elizabeth Sperry explores the relationship between our stuff and Catholic beliefs about grace, sin, repentance, prayer, and the common good. She boldly affirms the goodness of our stuff and of God’s abiding presence in the worldly goods all around us. She also reminds us of how sin can distort our relationships, including the ones we have with our possessions. Through spiritual disciplines—especially prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—we can protect this relationship so that we own our possessions but they don't own us.
Making Room for God offers an enticing and entertaining approach to decluttering, discipleship, and the spiritual life that makes tidying up seem almost fun. Writing from an unabashedly Catholic perspective and with convincing practicality, Sperry looks at the role of material goods in the life of a follower of Jesus. Each chapter includes humorous and often self-deprecating details of the author’s own journey through decluttering to help us believe that we, too, can simplify. Alongside these adventures are Sperry's rich spiritual insights gleaned from extensive knowledge of the Church’s tradition and helpful exercises for freeing ourselves from clutter and the temptation to sin it so often harbors.
Sperry draws liberally from the Bible, liturgy, Fathers of the Church, lives of the saints, and Church teaching—especially that of Pope Francis—as she explores the relationship between our stuff and our spiritual lives. Practical elements offer a step-by-step approach to decluttering living spaces, getting rid of unused and excess items, and limiting future accumulation.
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- Looks at the role of material goods in the life of a follower of Jesus
- Offers self-deprecating details of the author’s own journey through decluttering
- Provides rich spiritual insights gleaned from extensive knowledge of the Church’s tradition
- Why Declutter?
- Memories and Materialism
- Clutter and Sin
- Clutter and Repentance
- Clutter and Prayer
- Clutter and the Common Good
- Clutter and Spiritual Discipline
More than a how-to book, Making Room for God offers Mary Elizabeth Sperry's expertise on scripture and the teachings of the Church as organic elements of her writing. Her purpose is to not only save us money and time but also save our souls. By sharing her own journey with wit and humility, Sperry becomes our companion for a process that can be overwhelming yet rewarding because it’s life-changing. This book will revolutionize your life. Let it help you take your stewardship of God’s gifts seriously.
Lisa M. Hendey, Founder of CatholicMom.com and author of The Grace of Yes
Mary Sperry does so much more than demonstrate how to organize our sock drawers and kitchen cabinets. By acknowledging that the spiritual touches each part of our lives, no matter how small, Sperry guides the reader through an examination of the heart. While our worldly goods may be a mess it's our souls that need the real spring cleaning and this little book is ready to guide you through each step.
Haley Stewart, Catholic writer, speaker, podcaster, and blogger at Carrots for Michaelmas
Mary Sperry's purifying confessions and practical suggestions about what we can do to make room for God and others by decluttering should be required reading for every Christian seeking to make the world a better place. Too much stuff is a spiritual problem that Sperry's wisdom can help us deal with, manage, and in the end overcome.
Sr. Rose Pacatte, F.S.P., Author of Martin Sheen: Pilgrim on the Way
- Title: Making Room for God: Decluttering and the Spiritual Life
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Sperry
- Publisher: Ave Maria Press
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Pages: 128
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9781594717970, 1594717974
- Resource ID: LLS:MAKINGROOMFORGOD
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T20:19:27Z