Think Mahatma Gandhi: we live simply so that others may simply live. Helen and Scott Nearing: Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation. Or E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful… The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all of us; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; if we are competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery.
Forty years later, simple living has become more about aesthetics and decluttering than the ethics and spirituality of sharing. Right-sizing guru, Kathy Gottberg, writes that: Real luxury is not working like a maniac to take an expensive vacation—it is living a life you enjoy every day. And Marie Kondo, whom I have only recently become acquainted with, suggests that tidying and de-cluttering our homes are essential to constructing lives of value: what you want to own, she writes, is a question of how you want to live. That’s a fascinating shift of emphasis, don’t you think: social ethics and spirituality giving way to personal aesthetics and market driven consumption? I was genuinely shocked rereading Fr. Ed’s words forty years after first encountering them because so much had changed. Back in the day he was speaking to a post-Vatican II Roman Catholic cadre of socially engaged people of faith who were seeking spiritual guidance in an age of material abundance. “Let’s examine simplicity,” he wrote, “in light of the search for satisfaction. Daily we are told by a multitude of media about 1001 objects, which if purchased, will bring satisfaction. But DO they make us satisfied? What about the needs of others, especially those on the other side of the earth: are their needs of any concern to us?”
+ His intent was spiritual formation that was transformative: how can we live into the way of Jesus as affluent 20th century beings? “We Americans,” he notes, “are not by nature more exploitative than those who have lived in previous ages. They, unlike us, simply lacked the technology and modern means that make it so easy to be so. Consumption is so effortless it becomes unconscious. We don’t think about waste as unethical or anti-natural because it is so easy.”
+ Forty years later spiritual formation is barely implied in the simple living conversation: to-day it’s all about decorating trends and resources to declutter our abode. I confess that I’m not up to date with popular culture and way out of the loop when it comes to lifestyle trends. Visiting my dad about a year before he passed away six years ago, he said to me with visible excitement after supper, “James, we HAVE to watch my two favorite shows tonight, ok? Hoarders and Pawn Stars.” My old man gave me quite the education that night as I watched how taken he was with the unhealthy, conspicuous consumption of total strangers.As I drove back to Massachusetts, I realized how monastic my heart had become after all these years and I kept playing the old Brian Wilson song from Pet Sounds: I Guess I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.
Look, I have no interest in judging the new decluttering gurus: clearly their insights resonate with millions of modern individuals all over the world. It’s true that most of us DO have too much stuff that could be discarded. When I retired, I went through my books and music two or three times getting rid of hundreds and hundreds of titles that no longer brought me joy. And I must go through my clothes yet again to pass on pants and shirts I’ll never wear. So, I get that self-help experts have their place, ok?
But after 18 months of solitude in solidarity, It seems that we’re at a moment in history when reclaiming the ethical, spiritual, and social aspects of simple living has taken on a new urgency. Ecological civilization, living within the rhythm and wisdom of God’s first word in nature, renewed compassion, and strengthening the common good have once again become fundamentals as the pandemic portal calls us towards a brave, new world. I find Arundhati Roy’s commentary insightful today just as I did at the start of the pandemic when she wrote:
Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Zenobia Jeffries Warfield and her cohort at YES Magazine have also taken up the challenge of what it might mean to move through the pandemic portal with a renewed commitment to simple living. She writes: As we live into and beyond the reality of Covid-19 and future variants, the time has come for us to explore a vison of the world that is healing: “Ecological civilization moves us from an uncivilized society based on selfish wealth accumulation to one that is community oriented and life-affirming. It is a movement that unites climate, racial and gender equality, economic fairness, and a love of life into a conscious commitment.” Fr. Ed calls this type of commitment mysticism – the sacramental expression of our deepest values – quoting St. John he says: “If a person has enough to live on, and yet sees a brother or sister in need and shuts his or her heart against that soul, how can it be said that divine love dwells within.”
Can we close our hearts and eyes to how we live, eat, dress, or entertain ourselves and at the same time seek to be fully one with God? To include simple living into our spirituality makes us mystics where spiritual encounters integrate the seen with the unseen on behalf of the common good.
It ‘s what Jesus told his friends in St. Matthew’s gospel just before choosing the Way of the Cross:
But after 18 months of solitude in solidarity, It seems that we’re at a moment in history when reclaiming the ethical, spiritual, and social aspects of simple living has taken on a new urgency. Ecological civilization, living within the rhythm and wisdom of God’s first word in nature, renewed compassion, and strengthening the common good have once again become fundamentals as the pandemic portal calls us towards a brave, new world. I find Arundhati Roy’s commentary insightful today just as I did at the start of the pandemic when she wrote:
Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Zenobia Jeffries Warfield and her cohort at YES Magazine have also taken up the challenge of what it might mean to move through the pandemic portal with a renewed commitment to simple living. She writes: As we live into and beyond the reality of Covid-19 and future variants, the time has come for us to explore a vison of the world that is healing: “Ecological civilization moves us from an uncivilized society based on selfish wealth accumulation to one that is community oriented and life-affirming. It is a movement that unites climate, racial and gender equality, economic fairness, and a love of life into a conscious commitment.” Fr. Ed calls this type of commitment mysticism – the sacramental expression of our deepest values – quoting St. John he says: “If a person has enough to live on, and yet sees a brother or sister in need and shuts his or her heart against that soul, how can it be said that divine love dwells within.”
Can we close our hearts and eyes to how we live, eat, dress, or entertain ourselves and at the same time seek to be fully one with God? To include simple living into our spirituality makes us mystics where spiritual encounters integrate the seen with the unseen on behalf of the common good.
It ‘s what Jesus told his friends in St. Matthew’s gospel just before choosing the Way of the Cross:
Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you or thirsty and gave you drink? When was it that we saw a stranger and welcomed you, naked and gave you clothing? When was it that we saw you sick or in prison and came to you?’ Whenever you did so for even ONE of these my sisters and brothers, you did it to me.
Mysticism is choosing to make the words and ideas of the sacred flesh. It is embodied prayer. Deciding that our choices about time, resources, attitude, culture, habits, and politics all give shape and form to the holy or the unholy within our humanity. So, one truth about renewing simple living as mystical, incarnational prayer for the 21st century rather than mere style, fashion, or fad is the scope of its vision: instead of personal preference, simple living in the age of pandemic asks us to consider the whole human family as integral to our well-being. WHEN did we see thee, Lord…?
Now, this is will strike some as all too obvious, but right now we in the United States are facing the deadly consequences of favoring too long personal aesthetics and free choice over shared compassion when it comes to vaccinations. Fully vaccinated adults make up barely 49% of our citizens with huge discrepancies between states buying into the fascist big lie of the 2020 election and more socially reasonable places. Where I live in the great commonwealth of Massachusetts 71% of us are vaccinated versus 41% in Missouri and 38% in Mississippi. It is no accident that the majority of new covid deaths and the over-flowing hospital emergency rooms are taking place in precisely those places that have refused to boldly advance vaccinations in their addiction to personal preference. And let me suggest another troubling aspect of this hyper-individualism: as more and more of our polarized neighbors become increasingly frustrated and angry with the anti-vaxxers among us, it is just a matter of time before physical violence takes place in our all too gun crazy country. It’s already adding fuel to our culture wars, as states, schools, businesses, and municipalities come under increasing pressure to mandate vaccinations. The New York Times reports that:
On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City ordered that all municipal workers be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the time schools reopen in mid-September or face weekly testing. Officials in California followed suit hours later with a similar mandate covering all state employees and health care workers. The Department of Veterans Affairs on Monday required that 115,000 on-site health care workers be vaccinated in the next two months, the first federal agency to order a mandate. And nearly 60 major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association, on Monday called for mandatory vaccination of all health care workers as well.
Consciously going through the pandemic portal means we MUST look beyond personal choice to-wards the common good and reclaim the social dimensions of our faith that implore us to see the face of Jesus n all that is broken, suffering, and in need of love and healing. This would be a genuinely counter-cultural spirituality that is no longer co-opted by consumerism. If St. Paul wasn’t kidding in the first century CE when he wrote to the church in Rome from the chains of prison, he REALLY isn’t now: “Do NOT be conformed to the ways of this world – do not be squeezed into the mold of the status quo – but, rather, by becoming grounded in the love of Christ, let your heart and mind be renewed by grace so that you may share God’s love as is your true spiritual worship.”
I sense two other truths to be true in our embodied spirituality of simplicity: first, this is a time when preaching to the choir is critical; if you’ve ever been a part of a choir you know that choirs need encouragement and support in hard times, too; and second no matter how gentle and tenderhearted we live into this spiritually of social nonconformity, it’s going to cause conflict and discord because the old ways of self-interest and privatized prayer won’t give up without a fight. Rebecca Solnit put it like this: “Do you win (in changing a culture) by chasing only those who don’t share your views, or by serving and respecting those already with you?
Is the purpose of the choir to sing to the infidels or inspire the faithful? What happens if the faithful stop showing up, donating, doing the work?” In a 2017 Harper’s Magazine essay, Solnit spoke presciently about what it will take for us to consciously move through the portal of this pandemic rather than be sucked into the undertow: The phrase preaching to the choir (usually) means hectoring your listeners with arguments they already agree with, and it’s a common sin of radicals, the tendency to denounce others as a way of announcing one’s own virtue. But it can be applied too widely, to malign conversation between people whose beliefs happen to coincide. The phrase implies that political work should be primarily evangelical, even missionary, that the task is to go out and convert the heathens, that talking to those with whom we agree achieves nothing.
But that isn’t all that’s necessary in moments like our own: one of the reasons I took up the mantle of doing this on-line reflection every week was to encourage friends to remain faithful and grounded in the way of compassion during this unraveling. It was and is my sense that bringing solace to those struggling to choose love over fear and trust in this present darkness matters. Preaching to the choir helps us live into the ambiguity before clear solutions come into focus.
That’s why I regularly turn to poets like Rumi, Oliver, and Rilke: Women and men who wisely celebrate patience and quiet vigilance as we learn to live the questions during the reign of social anxiety. In another perplexing era, Rilke wrote this to a young student: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
More than at any other moment in my lifetime, THIS feels like the era of living the questions. Dr. Rochelle Wilensky, for example, said on Tuesday that the Delta variant will not be constrained by previous rules: that’s why it looks like we’re always playing catch-up; we’re not flip-flopping, but learning more and making necessary changes. Dr. Fauci said much the same thing. So, while I’m not ecstatic about wearing masks again, and my region is not among the most dangerous, I’ll do it be-cause I trust the truth. Not MY truth nor my prejudice, but the empirical, quantifiable facts of the experts. But 30% of our body politic does not trust the facts because collectively we’re now reaping the consequences of 50 years of disrespecting and violating our essential public institutions by a well-organized cadre of ultra-conservative power brokers still yearning to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society.
Think about it: starting with Richard Nixon and his Watergate enemies list, America’s right wing has been relentless. After Nixon, they moved on to craft the sanitized cultural memes of the Reagan-Bush Southern strategy where buzzwords like entitlements, big government, and the undeserving poor communicated a message “every bit as powerful as the Confederate flag or a lynch mob’s noose.” This same cabal went on to manufacture and finance public fury during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, they literally stole the election from Al Gore by intimidating Florida’s election workers, they enacted a cynical and vicious manipulation of the media and Congress with the lies of the phony Benghazi hearings, and they gave license, dollars, and encouragement to the fascist agenda of the previous administration and its groper-in-chief. David Brooks outlined precisely this ugly history last week on the PBS Newshour when asked by Judy Woodruff, “What can we do about the anti-vaxxers and insurrectionists?” It was sobering to watch Brooks sadly but honestly shrug his shoulders and remorsefully confess that, “There really is NOTHING we can do right now except ride out this storm.”
This is an era of more questions than answers, more uncertainty than clarity, more focus actions than broad movements: a time clearly intended for preaching to the choir about how to live our questions. And I rather think that Rebecca Solnit is on to something when she tells us that in a culture shaped by speed, where instant news, fast food, immediate opinions, and hyped-up analysis that often sounds impressive but turns out to ring hollow, preaching to the choir makes good sense. Being together as a choir– even virtually – gives us time and space to slow down, listen to one another, sort out what is true, and practice singing in unison and in harmony.
+ St. Paul is once again instructive. Philippians 4 tells us that our non-conformity must be guided by what is true: Whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. In a maelstrom of discord where violence and hyperbole rule the day, a spirituality of simplicity suggests to me that it will take some practice to see God offering us gifts of truth, beauty, noble sacrifice, and integrity. And if we’re to grasp that the holy shares these gifts with us intentionally so that our hearts might ripen into trust, I know I must be reminded that every sunset, rainbow, flower, song, work of heart and act of tenderness is God preaching to the choir.
+ In this complex age, what God asks of us is simple, too: Trust that the Lord is God – and we are not. Psalm 131 is perfect: My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. For I have calmed and quieted myself like a small child with her momma’s breast. This is what the Sabbath asks: learn to rest for a day just with those you love. This is what the Lord requires. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Heschel added that if we can learn to rest and waste time by trusting God for a day, then maybe we could try to do it more often. For if God can take care of the world while we rest for one day, perhaps that’s true for the rest of the week as well.
We all need to hear this, we all need this encouragement, we all need a little preaching to the choir in this age of living the questions. Fr. Ed also senses that we need to hear it is time to give up our American fascination with super sizing everything. “Super means great, large, powerful, big, and independent.” But what we need right now – and more so in 2021 than when he first wrote it in the 80’s – is an appreciation for all that is simple, small, little, and interdependent.
We need a new type of hero,” he suggests, “not a superman or superwoman, but simplemen and simplewomen who aspire not to climb the highest mountain or become millionaires overnight but rather those who can live in harmony with creation and with all people on this planet Earth, who by lives of simplicity can show us how to live with techno without losing touch with our inner selves. These persons will be political mystics whose lives, filled with the satisfaction of human relationships and the Spirit of holiness, will heal the world.”
One of those mystical heroes for me is the poet/farmer Wendell Berry. His poem about hope – which I’ll close with today - rings true to me on so many levels. As the fires in the West ravage the land, incinerate the wildlife, pollute the air as far away as New York City and the Berkshires, and melt parts of the polar ice cap, he asks us to stay connected because this tragedy is part of our brave, new world on the other side of the pandemic portal. We’ve arrived at that nebulous tipping point we’ve heard about for the past 20 years – and there’s certain to be more fire, flooding, and destruction in summers to come. Berry’s poem rings true to me, too watching the Capital Police give testimony about the paramilitary zealots who staged the January 6th insurrection in the nation’s capital. They are clear that our domestic terrorists have not been vanquished: they’re simply plotting, hiding, and rearming themselves for another more deadly attack. So while we can stand in resistance, yes; prepare for the worst, of course; and hold the hit-man in charge account-able. But as people of truth we must know that the violence is going to get worse before it gets better: insurrection has become like a religion for some said on officer.
Add to this mix both the war on voting rights for black, brown, and poor people and the carefully orchestrated attack on a woman’s right to control her own body and health care: and the call to live into the questions is clarified. Today the protections hard won by previous generations are being dismantled by what the Reverend Dr. William Barber calls the work of Jim Crow, Esquire: the high tech, well-financed, and legally sanctioned prohibitions that advance only the well-being of that same wealthy, ruthless, conservative white elite that’s been opposed expanding democracy since the Great Depression.
Earlier this week I woke up thinking: Never could I have imagined that I would actually be living into a post-apocalyptic world where Blade Runner was the new reality. But it’s happening now – and is our new normal as we move consciously through the pandemic portal. Arundhati Roy urges us to enter the pandemic portal as humble spiritual non-conformists: Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Our nonconformist stories are worlds different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. So, remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. I hear a’borning in Berry’s poem:
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
For hope must not depend on feeling good
And there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
Of the future, which surely will surprise us,
…And hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
Any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
Of what it is that no other place is, and by
Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
Place that you belong to though it is not yours,
For it was from the beginning and will be to the end
Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
Your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
In the trees in the silence of the fisherman
And the heron, and the trees that keep the land
They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
And how to be here with them. By this knowledge
Make the sense you need to make. By it stand
In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place
Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
Before they had heard a radio. Speak
Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.
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