Summer Simplicity
Rev. Lissa Anne Gundlach
Unitarian Church of All Souls, NYC
July 28, 2013
Do you ever read the Onion? It’s a satirical newspaper featuring real and ColbertReport style parodied stories, formerly ubiquitous on street corners and now purely
digital. I’m not a steady follower, but a few weeks ago, one of their fake stories from a
friend’s posting on Facebook caught my attention:
Plan to Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results
Returning to work after seven days off, Derek Olson, 31, confessed Monday that
his plan to use his weeklong vacation to straighten out his life yielded mixed
results.
"This was the week all the stuff I'd been putting off for years–big and small–was
going to get done," said Olson, a data-entry operator at A.G. Edwards & Sons.
"From getting Steve and Kim a gift for their wedding two months ago to going
through all those boxes I'd left unpacked since moving here in '98 to finally
deciding what my future is with [girlfriend] Melanie, it was all going to get taken
care of."
You might guess from the direction the piece is headed that Derek didn’t finish what he
set out to accomplish during his summer vacation. From the Onion:
"I decided the first thing I was going to do was unpack all the stuff in the
basement," Olson said. "When I opened the first box marked 'Magazines,' it had
nothing but a bunch of socks and my electric pencil sharpener. I got so disgusted
with my lack of organization, I went back upstairs and started watching TV."
Each day of the week, he tries to dig in on another project, hits a wall pretty quickly,
becoming profoundly distracted. He paid a gas bill, but then lost the envelope on the
way to the mailbox. He watched some movies, ate fast food, and hit the bars. He loses
faith that he can make even the smallest changes to his life. Can you relate? I certainly
can. I know it’s jokey and extreme, but it certainly resonates. Summer, for me and I can
guess for many of you too, is a time that I make a lot of promises to myself to get my life
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straightened out, organized, and simplified in a short amount of time. I’m not as
extreme as our pretend friend Derek, but I can get pretty ambitious. Getting rid of those
boxes of books sitting in mom’s attic for over fifteen years, not a problem, I have time
for that. Reorganizing my closet and giving away those clothes I haven’t worn in years
taking up space, sure. Declutter every single cupboard, yes!! I’m sure you each have
your own stories.
So what’s this summer urge to purge all about? My hunch is it has something to
do with a drive for simplicity. For many of us, summer gives us the promise of expanded
time, real or perceived, to consider how we want and need to live. The longer days and
slower pace of the city life beckons us inward to reflect on the quality of our lives,
what’s working for us and what’s desperately in need of change. Summer’s sense of
expanded time also beckons us outward into nature, whether it’s our urban oasis of
Central Park here in Manhattan or to travel near or far in search of beaches, lakes and
mountains, maybe hiking or camping. Many of our children, youth, families and adults
alike seek refuge and retreat at Unitarian Universalist camp and conference centers like
Ferry Beach, Star Island and Unirondack.
We have an ongoing desire for more simplicity in our lives, not unique to
summer. Somehow, however, it feels as if the need is brought into more acute focus
during this time. In our time away, we might experience a paring down of our lives,
living with less distraction and stimulation. We might turn off the TV and tune into the
night sky for our entertainment, or spend a whole day just reading a good book. We
might eat simple meals, with a few, fresh ingredients, cooked without fanfare on the
grill. We might tackle some of those pesky life projects we often put off throughout the
year and try out some more sustainable personal habits, even if we cram them all into a
week.
As I reflected on simplicity for the sermon today, I kept coming back to the work
of the American Transcendentalists- you might be familiar with them from your
Unitarian Universalism or spiritual seeking. The Transcendentalists were a group of
liberal intellectuals, activists, and educators working and living around the hub of
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Concord Massachusetts during the mid-19th century. Many, including perhaps the most
famous Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, emerged from the Unitarian tradition
to create a new way of understanding spiritual life, rooted in individual experience
rather than in the liberal Christian biblical tradition. Nature played a key role in this new
spirituality. In their understanding, nature reveals to humans our most essential selves,
usually masked by the complexity and chaos of “society.” Our own drive for simplicity
originates from this revelation, a desire to reflect the elegance of nature through the
landscape of our lives.
Transcendentalists sought to live out this philosophical principle, some more
successfully than others. Emerson granted one of his most famous students Henry David
Thoreau the use of his land on Walden Pond for a two-year experiment intentional
simplicity which began in the summer of 1845. There, Thoreau built himself a tiny
house, complete with a bed, desk, cooking stove, and three chairs—“one for solitude,
two for friendship, and three for society.” He meticulously kept journals of the rhythms
of nature, as well as his comments on social and political thought. You may recall his
most famous words in Walden, from our responsive reading this morning:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Now, we know that Thoreau was not without flaws and imperfections in how he carried
out his experiment in intentional simplicity. I’ve heard stories about how he brought his
laundry home to mom’s house and how he was in town as much as out of town,
frequenting wealthy Concordian’s homes for hot meals and hospitality.
Thoreau, as all of the Transcendentalists, may have been class-bound and limited
in his worldview, but what’s really important about his Walden Pond experiment is that
he spoke directly to his elite community at a time when wealth and power were being
amassed with astonishing speed. Thoreau made it a viable choice for others to critique a
society generating tremendous economic disparity in tandem with terrifying
environmental destruction. He offered another way to live, grounded in learning,
friendship, stewardship of the earth and self-reflection. Through this intentional living,
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he brought forth the value inherent in simplicity as a meaningful life principle and biting
social critique, deeper than any material wealth. From a December, 1856 journal:
What you call bareness and poverty is to me simplicity…. I find it invariably true,
the poorer I am, the richer I am. What you consider my disadvantage, I consider
my advantage. While you are pleased to get knowledge and culture in many
ways, I am delighted to think that I am getting rid of them.
Since Thoreau’s time, our world is in many ways more in need of his message, and in
many ways, so many people are already living it. The wealth gap continues to widen,
and environmental destruction to our rainforests, mountaintops and water continues in
our endless search for fossil fuels. And yet, the movement to live more simply and
sustainable is more active than ever, seen everywhere in our culture in Community
Supported Agriculture, urban farming and homesteading, with new technology to
support alternative energy sources.
In our contemporary context, no figure better interprets Thoreau’s message for
our time than Wendell Berry, the “mad” farmer-poet from Louisville, Kentucky. He uses
the word “mad” to describe the absurd odds against a small farmer in America. He’s
well characterized by a recent article in the food and culture journal Edible Louisville:
Wendell Berry believes the good life includes sustainable agriculture, healthy
rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry,
good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, and the
interconnectedness of life.
Besides being a run-on sentence, I couldn’t have better described this incredibly humble
yet fierce activist who spoke this year at our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly,
convened in his hometown.
For Berry, the pain wrought by human destruction is to be owned and felt
deeply, held simultaneously with the generosity and beauty of the earth. We cannot
escape or retreat without understanding how we are implicated in the earth’s
destruction, just as we are blessed by its creation.
From one of his poems, the Want of Peace,
All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
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by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.
I lack the peace of simple things
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.
In his General Assembly talk to Unitarian Universalists in June, Berry warned us:
If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must
be prepared to become poorer… But we must do this fully realizing that our
success, if it happened, would change our world and our lives more radically
than we can now imagine. And we must begin now to make that change in
ourselves. For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to
changed people.
For Berry, simplicity isn’t a superficial balm, temporarily easing the destructive impact of
humans on our world. At its best it is a life principle and social critique that motivates us
to make sustained commitments and changes us.
We are not Henry David Thoreau or even Wendell Berry. We don’t live off the
grid, though we might choose to at some point in our lives. We might in fact be more
like our pretend friend Derek from the Onion, finding ourselves distracted and
overwhelmed by the daunting task of simplifying our lives, even a little bit. We don’t set
ourselves apart from the complexities of urban life but rather dwell in them each day,
still desiring to simplify our lives and to be a part of sustainable change.
No matter how cluttered our lives may feel, each of us has the capacity within
us to touch the profound sense of peace of a simple life lived well. We have the power
to make positive choices that in the words of Wendell Berry “Make the human race a
better head,” and “Make the world a better piece of ground.” As we are drawn into the
beauty of summer, may find our selves refreshed and renewed, with the courage and
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commitment to make even the smallest changes. May the expansiveness of time this
summer inspire us to align our daily lives with our highest aspirations.
Amen
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