Hoarders and Vacuums

I don't watch much TV but the other day I ran across a program  about the lives of hoarders that completely drew me in.  Over the years I've read articles about the occasional New York spinster found dead in her apartment underneath piles of newspapers she collected.  One story that stuck out in my mind was about a man who died in his stuff but no one found him for three years because no one cared enough to check on him.  These incidents were anomalies, I assumed.  Surely, no one was really living this way.  Apparently, I was wrong.  According to the show, it is estimated that about 15 million people are completely encased in their posessions.  Many of them are not hermits or spinsters but have spouses, children, friends and co-workers.

The first time I watched one of these shows I sat there with my mouth wide open for the entire hour.  I just couldn't get over the amount of stuff these people had accumulated.  More shocking was the quality of the stuff.  Most of it was worthless trash.  Empty wrappers, old magazines, used items that were outdated or broken, all piled shoulder high.  These folks went to incredible lengths to move from one room to another, making little paths and climbing over their posessions.   Some of them had entire sections of their houses that were inaccessible.  One man ironically had to climb out of his fire escape and back in another window to get upstairs in his house because the stairway was impassable.  Important areas like kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms had lost their functionality.  The hoarders were washing their dishes in the tub, eating with plates on their laps in front of the TV and sleeping in makeshift chairs or on the corners of bare mattresses while fleas, flies, roaches, mice and rats ran rampant throughout the house.

I must admit, my first reaction was one of disgust.  How could people allow themselves to get to this point?  I thought that compared to these homes, my piles of clutter made me seem like a minimalist from IKEA.  After this initial smug response, however,  my senses got ahold of me and I realized that these are real people, living in real houses, with an enormous amount of stuff and hurt.  It also dawned on me that at the heart of this disfunction was a feeling of utter emptiness and despair.  All hope and meaning were lost for these folks.  They felt unloved and helpless even when surrounded by friends, co-workers and family members who DID care.

Each of these shows follows a common pattern: they identify the hoarder, highlight their disfunctional lifestyle, identify past trauma and hurt as causes and then offer help to the hoarder change their life patterns and responses to the stress or grief that originally set off this behavior.  Hoarding is a very complicated problem and I don't have the medical background to analyze all of the causes and effects.  I can only see that the outcome of hoarding is the destruction of homes and more importantly, souls.  None of the hoarders I've watched claims to have peace.  They may say that they are comfortable with the filth, deception, disorganization, ludicrous work-arounds and constant aquisition of things but they never say they have peace.  All they say is that they feel compelled to obtain and hold on to stuff.  They are prisoners of their posessions.

This bring me to the root of it all: hopelessness and the search for meaning.  The desperate attempt to obliterate the emptiness and futility of life under piles of stuff.   Blaise Pascal said “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”  The hoarder is an explicit example of this but I am really no different than he.  At one time in my life I had a God-shaped void  as well.  I filled it with other things- not nearly so obvious as the hoarders I've seen but no less futile.  Left unchecked my quest to find hope where there was no hope could have led me down a path of destruction that would have been very obvious to others- like hoarding, substance abuse or materialism, exercise, eating, shopping, watching TV, improper relationships, any number of meaningless roads that lead to destruction.   In the end, the only lasting peace I found was in Jesus.  


Since I started thinking through my emotions about what I was witnessing on these hoarding shows, my heart has softened to these folks.   I see them as people who need what we all need: redemption, hope, peace and meaning for life.    There are not enough dump trucks in the world to haul away the sin we all bear.  No amount of human impetus and  effort can make a person's soul clean for all of eternity.  There's not a therapist in the world who can untangle all of the hurt and disfunction in the heart of men.   These things are found and freely given away for free in the only One who can fill up our hearts and set us free: Jesus Christ.