Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective

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Overview

Essays on the spiritual power of an uncluttered life from Henri Nouwen, Richard J. Foster, Juliet Schor, and others, with an foreword by Bill McKibben. 
 
Every day we are bombarded with messages that imply we need more: more money, more clothes, more food, more cars, more everything. But despite technological advances, proliferation of resources, and a general increase in what the average person has, our happiness has not grown at the same rate as our stash of stuff. Perhaps the key to a good life isn’t found in quantity but in quality—and in a simple, honest approach to existence.
 
In Simpler Compassionate Living, Michael Schut brings together brilliant essays on the topic of modest lifestyles from twenty-three luminaries, including Terry Tempest Williams, Cecile Andrews, Wendell Berry, and Evy McDonald . Delving into topics such as time as a commodity, money in modern society, international economics, social and environmental responsibility, and the ever-widening global community, these compositions present a framework for examining and reforming how we view our place in a world obsessed with commerce and consumerism.
 
With a study guide and an appendix of further resources for those who want to take steps to change their lifestyle, Simpler Compassionate Living is a comprehensive look at how to step outside of the madness of materialism and rediscover the peace and fulfillment within—replacing the fleeting rush of acquisitiveness with a genuinely sustainable joy.
 
Also includes essays by: Shantilal Bhagat, Frederick Buechner, John B. Cobb, Jr., Michael Schut, Alan Durning, James T. Mulligan, William Gibson, Gerald May, Timothy Weiskel, Calvin DeWitt, Duane Elgin, Philip Sherrard, William Stringfellow, Jerome Segal, David Shi

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780819227232
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Publication date: 07/01/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 296
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Michael Schut is a popular teacher, speaker, and Morehouse author, focusing on the nexus between faith, sustainability, economics, and justice. He is currently the economic and environmental affairs officer of the Episcopal Church, following eleven years on the staff of Earth ministry. His latest book is titled Money & Faith: The Search for Enough (2008). Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective was originally published in 1999, and won the second best book of 2000 award by the Catholic Press Association. Schut also edited Food and Faith: Justice, Joy and Daily Bread. He lives in Seattle. Visit www.michaelschut.org for more details.

Read an Excerpt

Simpler Living Compassionate Life

A Christian Perspective


By Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Cecile Andrews, Michael Schut, Victoria Hummel

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 1999 Earth Ministry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2723-2


Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Sacred Journey: Seeking the Abundant Life


Simplicity of living, if deliberately chosen, implies a compassionate approach to life. It means that we are choosing to live our daily lives with some degree of conscious appreciation of the condition of the rest of the world.

—Duane Elgin

The call to simplicity and freedom for Christians is the call to move from achievement oriented spirituality to a life centered on a shared vision of relatedness to people and things, a relatedness of gentleness, of compassion, of belonging to one another.

—Richard Bower


Introduction to The Sacred Journey

by Frederick Buechner

Frederick Buechner is the highly celebrated author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including his autobiographical trilogy The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. His novel Godric was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (1981) and he has been honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Buechner was born on July 11, 1926. He attended Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, after which he was ordained in the United Presbyterian Church. Through his own story, including his father's suicide and, to hear him tell it, his unlikely conversion, he invites us to reflect on our own stories. Buechner and his wife Judith live in rural Vermont. They have three grown children.

Buechner's writing is profoundly honest and revealing. It is through listening for God's voice in his own life that Buechner gently invites you to listen to, and discover the sacredness of, your own story.


* * *

About ten years ago I gave a series of lectures at Harvard in which I made the observation that all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there. More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, I determined to try to describe my own life as evocatively and candidly as I could in the hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsed in it would shine through my description more or less on their own. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone we love dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all—just one day following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep and dream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed. And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks. But what do I mean by saying that God speaks?

I wrote these words at home on a hot, hazy summer day. On the wall behind me, an old banjo clock was tick-tocking the time away. Outside I could hear the twitter of swallows as they swooped in and out of the eaves of the barn. Every once in a while, in the distance, a rooster crowed, though it was well past sunup. Several rooms away, in another part of the house, two men were doing some carpentry. I could not make out what they were saying, but I was aware of the low rumble of their voices, the muffled sounds of their hammers, and the uneven lengths of silence in between. It was getting on toward noon, and from time to time my stomach growled as it went about its own obscure business which I neither understand nor want to. They were all of them random sounds without any apparent purpose or meaning, and yet as I paused to listen to them, I found myself hearing them with something more than just my ears to the point where they became in some way enormously meaningful. The swallows, the rooster, the workmen, my stomach, all with their elusive rhythms, their harmonies and disharmonies and counterpoint, became, as I listened, the sound of my own life speaking to me. Never had I heard just such a coming together of sounds before, and it is unlikely that I will ever hear them in just the same combination again. Their music was unique and unrepeatable and beyond describing in its freshness. I have no clear idea what the sounds meant or what my life was telling me. What does the song of a swallow mean? What is the muffled sound of a hammer trying to tell? And yet as I listened to those sounds, and listened with something more than just my hearing, I was moved by their inexpressible eloquence and suggestiveness, by the sense I had that they were a music rising up out of the mystery of not just my life, but of life itself. In much the same way, that is what I mean by saying that God speaks into or out of the thick of our days.

He speaks not just through the sounds we hear, of course, but through events in all their complexity and variety, through the harmonies and disharmonies and counterpoint of all that happens. As to the meaning of what he says, there are times that we are apt to think we know. Adolph Hitler dies a suicide in his bunker with the Third Reich going up in flames all around him, and what God is saying about the wages of sin seems clear enough. Or Albert Schweitzer renounces fame as a theologian and musician for a medical mission in Africa, where he ends up even more famous still as one of the great near saints of Protestantism; and again we are tempted to see God's meaning as clarity itself. But what is God saying through a good man's suicide? What about the danger of the proclaimed saint's becoming a kind of religious prima donna as proud of his own humility as a peacock of its tail? What about sin itself as a means of grace? What about grace, when misappropriated and misunderstood, becoming an occasion for sin? To try to express in even the most insightful and theologically sophisticated terms the meaning of what God speaks through the events of our lives is as precarious a business as to try to express the meaning of the sound of rain on the roof or the spectacle of the setting sun. But I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our own experience.

With all this in mind, I entitled those Harvard lectures The Alphabet of Grace in order to suggest that life itself can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves. Heilsgeschichte is a more theological way of saying the same thing. Deep within history, as it gets itself written down in history books and newspapers, in the letters we write and in the diaries we keep, is sacred history, is God's purpose working itself out in the apparent purposelessness of human history and of our separate histories, is the history, in short, of the saving and losing of souls, including our own. A child is born. A friend is lost or found. Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding. We are awakened by a dream. Out of the shadowy street comes a cry for help. We must learn to listen to the cock-crows and hammering and tick-tock of our lives for the holy and elusive word that is spoken to us out of their depths. It is the function of all great preaching, I think, and of all great art, to sharpen our hearing to precisely that end, and it was what I attempted in The Alphabet of Grace. I took a single, ordinary day of my life, and in describing the events of it—waking up, dressing, taking the children to school, working, and coming home again—I tried to suggest something of what I thought I had heard God saying.

That was ten years ago. By now my children have mostly grown up and mostly gone. I am not by a long shot entirely grown up myself, but I am ten years' worth of days older than I was then, and lots of things have happened to me, and I have had lots of time to listen to them happening. Also, since I passed the age of fifty, I have taken to looking back on my life as a whole more. I have looked through old letters and dug out old photographs. I have gone through twenty years' worth of old home movies. I have thought about the people I have known and the things that have happened that have, for better or worse, left the deepest mark on me. Like sitting there on the couch listening to the sounds of roosters, swallows, hammers, ticking clock, I have tried to make something out of the hidden alphabet of the years I have lived, to catch, beneath all the random sounds those years have made, a strain at least of their unique music. My interest in the past is not, I think, primarily nostalgic. Like everybody else, I rejoice in much of it and marvel at those moments when, less by effort than by grace, it comes to life again with extraordinary power and immediacy—vanished faces and voices, the feeling of what it was like to fall in love for the first time, of running as a child through the firefly dusk of summer, the fresh linen and cinnamon and servant-swept fragrance of my grandmother's house in Pennsylvania, the taste of snow, the stubbly touch of my father's good-night. But even if it were possible to return to those days, I would never choose to. What quickens my pulse now is the stretch ahead rather than the one behind, and it is mainly for some clue to where I am going that I search through where I have been, for some hint as to who I am becoming or failing to become that I delve into what used to be. I listen back to a time when nothing was much farther from my thoughts than God for an echo of the gutturals and sibilants and vowellessness by which I believe that even then God was addressing me out of my life as he addresses us all. And it is because I believe that, that I think of my life and of the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, as not just journeys through time but as sacred journeys.

Ten years ago in those Harvard lectures, I tried to listen to a single day of my life in such a way. What I propose to do now is to try listening to my life as a whole, or at least to certain key moments of the first half of my life thus far, for whatever of meaning, of holiness, of God, there may be in it to hear. My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

For the reader, I suppose, it is like looking through someone else's photograph album. What holds you, if nothing else, is the possibility that somewhere among all those shots of people you never knew and places you never saw, you may come across something or someone you recognize. In fact—for more curious things have happened—even in a stranger's album, there is always the possibility that as the pages flip by, on one of them you may even catch a glimpse of yourself. Even if both of those fail, there is still a third possibility which is perhaps the happiest of them all, and that is that once I have put away my album for good, you may in the privacy of the heart take out the album of your own life and search it for the people and places you have loved and learned from yourself, and for those moments in the past—many of them half forgotten—through which you glimpsed, however dimly and fleetingly, the sacredness of your own journey.

CHAPTER 2

The Good Life and The Abundant Life


by Michael Schut

In his former position as Associate Director for Earth Ministry, Michael Schut was responsible for program delivery, leading retreats and workshops, speaking, teaching, writing and more. Schut was the primary author of Simplicity as Compassion: Voluntary Simplicity from a Christian Perspective, Earth Ministry's eight-week curriculum which served as the core for the study guide for this book. He works closely with churches, small groups and individuals interested in deepening their awareness of the connections between caring for people and caring for the earth, between Christian faith and relationship with and care for creation, and how to express that in everyday life.

Schut holds degrees in Environmental Studies and Biology and has a professional history which includes a wide variety of experiences in the social service and environmental fields. After serving as a resident manager for homeless men, he worked for Environmental Safety and in the Agriculture and Natural Resources Division of the International Science and Technology Institute. He has also enjoyed a wide variety of outdoor education work experiences including teaching environmental education and leading wilderness backpacking and rockclimbing trips. Schut enjoys basketball, backpacking, playing guitar and singing. He is also very fond of ice cream.

Pursuit of "the good life" has become a powerful idol in our day. Movement toward simplicity challenges this pursuit at almost every turn. Simplicity just may be a component of, and a pathway to, what in Christian terms we call the abundant life. This essay introduces these topics—the restlessness many of us feel when pursuing the good life, the idolatries found within that pursuit—and closes by suggesting characteristics of the abundant life to which Jesus referred.


* * *

... I have walked at night and gone into your homes and found people dying unloved. Here [in the West] you have a different kind of poverty —a poverty of the spirit, of loneliness, of being unwanted. And that is the worst disease in the world today, not tuberculosis or leprosy.

—Mother Teresa


* * *

The Good Life

If asked, most of us could easily compose society's picture of the good life. Its images are constantly paraded before us on TV, billboards, newspapers, and magazines. While perhaps most prevalent in the U.S., the messages and products of that life are now exported throughout the world. Rural villages across the globe boast TV sets. Little wonder, especially for those whose basic needs go largely unmet, that the supposed "good life" as advertised is so attractive. But, unwittingly, our culture's highest ideal of the good life, the American Dream, has become a nightmare—for the earth (through ecological degradation), for those whose poverty is a necessary by-product of Western affluence, and for those who have attained the Dream and found it lacking.

One sign of this nightmare is the restlessness and dissatisfaction many of us feel in the pursuit of the good life:

I'm worn out. I just don't have time for what's important to me anymore, like time with my family, time to exercise, or time alone to think or read a good book.

I spend more time than I'd like, working to get stuff I don't really need. And in some ways my way of life prevents others from simply having enough.

I long for a way of living that reflects my true values, nurtures deeper relationships and builds community.


When we consider the following, it is little wonder that we experience life as out of balance:

• Americans spend 40 minutes a week playing with children—and six hours a week shopping.

• About one in every four vertebrate species is currently on the road to extinction unless we work to change their circumstances.

• The average amount of pocket money for American children—$230 a year—is more than the total annual income of the world's half-billion poorest people.

• During the 1990s, 57 million children will be born in the "North," 911 million children will be born in the "South." Those born in the North will consume and pollute more than those born in the South.

• American couples spend an average of 12 minutes a day talking to each other.

• Sixty percent of the total U.S. African-American and Hispanic populations live in communities with one or more uncontrollable toxic waste sites. These communities are disproportionately exposed to air, land, and water pollution.


These are serious signs of cultural and ecological imbalance—reflected in the restlessness so pervasive today. This is not to say that the good life is entirely negative. In some concrete ways it mimics the abundant life (which we will discuss shortly) and most of us have benefitted from its pursuit. But when it becomes our top priority, then the good life has drawn us into a life of idolatry.


The Good Life Gone Bad: The Inevitable Dilemma of Idolatry

The good life functions as a powerful idol of our time. The concept of idolatry often seems archaic, relevant only to biblical times when the Israelites' neighbors bowed down to graven images and Paul preached in Athens, a city full of silver and stone deities. But today's idols are just as real, though perhaps more subtle. An idol is anything we put before God, a partial truth mistaken for the whole "Truth," a lesser good elevated to the ultimate good. I have always found it particularly helpful to think of idols as promising something they cannot finally deliver.

In any discussion of idolatry, it is important to point out that no matter how genuine our desire to discern and offer our ultimate allegiance to "the Truth," idolatry is an inevitability of life. In Christian terms this inevitable fallibility is called sin, part of the human condition. We need to accept such an inevitability with humility but not disgrace. This discussion is included here to help unmask some of the idolatries associated with the good life in order to help move us toward the freedom and fullness of the abundant life to which Jesus referred.
(Continues...)


Excerpted from Simpler Living Compassionate Life by Henri Nouwen. Copyright © 1999 by Earth Ministry. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements          

Foreword, Bill McKibben          

Introduction          

The Sacred Journey: Seeking the Abundant Life          

Time as Commodity, Time as Sacred          

Your Money or Your Life: The Place of Money in Modern Life          

How Much Is Enough?: Lifestyles, Global Economics, and Justice          

Social and Environmental Impacts of Everyday Food Choices          

Social Structures and the Politics of Simplicity          

Simplicity Is Nothing New: A Brief Historical Overview          

Theology in Support of Simplicity and Eco-Justice          

Worldviews: The Lens through Which We See          

Widening Our Circle of Community: Journey to Abundant Life          

Epilogue          

Study Guide by Michael Schut          

How to Use This Material          

Course Overview          

If You Have Four-, Six- or Eight-Weeks          

Meeting:          

Appendix A: About Earth Ministry          

Appendix B: Resources for Further Study          

Bibliography          

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Nicely crafted and true to its subject of simplicity. Simpler Living, Compassionate Life is warmly recommended for personal or group use."
Earthlight


"Both a compilation and study guide, this graceful collection of the spiritual sides to consumption unfolds with every contribution."
—Center for a New American Dream Newsletter


"...an excellent resource for examining the connection between voluntary simplicity and wider issues of justice."
Buena Vista

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