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Monday Menagerie IV

PyroManiac devotes Monday space to esoteric and offbeat things, in the
hope that these will supply learning experiences for us all.

The Sad Case of the Collyer Brothers



The following is an excerpt from John MacArthur's 1991 book Our
Sufficiency in Christ.

Homer and Langley Collyer were sons of a respected New York doctor.
Both had earned college degrees. In fact, Homer had studied at Columbia
University to become an attorney. When old Dr. Collyer died in the
early part of this century, his sons inherited the family home and
estate. The two men-both bachelors-were now financially secure.

But the Collyer brothers chose a peculiar lifestyle not at all
consistent with the material status their inheritance gave them. They
lived in almost total seclusion. They boarded up the windows of their
house and padlocked the doors. All their utilities-including
water-were shut off. No one was ever seen coming or going from the
house. From the outside it appeared empty.

Though the Collyer family had been quite prominent, almost no one in
New York society remembered Homer and Langley Collyer by the time World
War II ended.

On March 21, 1947, police received an anonymous telephone tip that a
man had died inside the boarded-up house. Unable to force their way in
through the front door, they entered the house through a second-story
window. Inside they found Homer Collyer's corpse on a bed. He had died
clutching the February 22, 1920 issue of the Jewish Morning Journal,
though he had been totally blind for years. This macabre scene was set
against an equally grotesque backdrop.

It seems the brothers were collectors. They collected
everything-especially junk. Their house was crammed full of broken
machinery, auto parts, boxes, appliances, folding chairs, musical
instruments, rags, assorted odds and ends, and bundles of old
newspapers. Virtually all of it was worthless. An enormous mountain of
debris blocked the front door; investigators were forced to continue
using the upstairs window for weeks while excavators worked to clear a
path to the door.

Nearly three weeks later, as workmen were still hauling heaps of refuse
away, someone made a grisly discovery. Langley Collyer's body was
buried beneath a pile of rubbish some six feet away from where Homer
had died. He had been crushed to death in a crude booby trap he had
built to protect his precious collection from intruders.

The garbage eventually removed from the Collyer house totaled more than
140 tons. No one ever learned why the brothers were stockpiling their
pathetic treasure, except an old friend of the family recalled that
Langley once said he was saving newspapers so Homer could catch up on
his reading if he ever regained his sight.

Homer and Langley Collyer make a sad but fitting parable of the way
many people in the church live. Although the Collyers' inheritance was
sufficient for all their needs, they lived their lives in unnecessary,
self-imposed deprivation. Neglecting abundant resources that were
rightfully theirs to enjoy, Homer and Langley instead turned their home
into a squalid dump. Spurning their father's sumptuous legacy, they
binged instead on the scraps of the world.

Too many Christians live their spiritual lives that way. Disregarding
the bountiful riches of an inheritance that cannot be defiled (1 Pet.
1:4), they scour the wreckage of worldly wisdom, collecting litter. As
if the riches of God's grace (Eph. 1:7) were not enough, as if
"everything pertaining to life and godliness" (2 Pet. 1:3) were not
sufficient, they try to supplement the resources that are theirs in
Christ. They spend their lives pointlessly accumulating sensational
experiences, novel teachings, clever gurus, or whatever else they can
find to add to their hoard of spiritual experiences. Practically all of
it is utterly worthless. Yet some people pack themselves so full of
these diversions that they can't find the door to the truth that would
set them free. They forfeit treasure for trash.