Live Simply

Last updated on: December 8, 2016 at 12:10 pm by Marilyn McEntyre

Live Simply 2016-12-08T12:10:35-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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“Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” “All the fun is there, in the simple life!” “Less is more.” “Live simply that others may simply live.” “Consider the lilies of the field . . . .” Every faith tradition and a wide range of secular writers teach the wisdom of simplicity. The popularity of periodicals like Simple Living and Yes!, and of books like The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Voluntary Simplicity, Choosing Simplicity, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle testifies to how many of us long for a little less.

Every year, though I welcome Advent as a season of reflection and hope, I also regard its approach with a certain ambivalence. The tide of ads beginning before “Black Friday” rises to a tsunami even as Advent candles burn. Hospitality, festivity and travel to and from family folk are good and fitting impulses, but also fraught with organizational complications and detail and expense. This year the season also comes in the wake of an election that has, for all its ominous effects, also involved us in a much-needed conversation about climate-change, privilege and overconsumption, and the radical inequities of a polarized economy. It’s not a simple conversation, nor a comfortable one. This is a season that unsettles the conscience and invites us to take a long look at our hopes and our habits.

It’s a good time to clean out the garage and contribute to the local coat drive. It’s a good time to reread the Sermon on the Mount and remember the rich young ruler. It’s a good time to read Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben and even pull Walden down off the shelf where it may have been gathering dust with the Norton Anthology and other reminders of old English classes. Each of these writers helps keep me accountable: they encourage me to keep asking myself hard questions about what I buy, what my dollars support, what difference my eating habits make to the health of the earth.

Some of these arise in the aisles of stores, some as I prepare meals, some as I read the New York Times: How can I be generous and also prudent? Hospitable and also contemplative? Hopeful and also realistic about the threats we face? Broad in my sympathies and focused in my efforts to take effective action? How can I respond to the urgencies around me and also live simply, quietly, thoughtfully, locally, kindly, making space for each encounter and for the prayer and meditation without which I have so little of value to offer?

These are not questions that lend themselves to simple answers, though they direct me toward the ideal and ethic of simplicity Jesus preached and embodied and inspired. They do serve to keep me in a place of ongoing discernment and help me to look at the calendar a little more calmly. I don’t need rules (though St. Benedict’s Rule is helpful). I need to stay attuned to the Spirit who is available when I ask: Is this a moment to give or to withhold? Is this a call to offer an extra measure of kindness or to protect myself from squandering my energies? Is this a time to wade into complex, emotionally fraught negotiations or to remain quiet and return to center?

Moment by moment we receive the guidance we need. A lot of prayer is a matter of staing tuned in. Living simply, I have come to believe, is largely a matter of asking, and then listening for instruction about what to take on and what to leave alone, and for what purpose, and for whose sake. And then acting with “gladness and singleness of heart.”

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