SERMON: “Involuntary Simplicity”
Rev. Paul Beedle
September 17, 2006
MEDITATION: from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail. ... Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man must live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. ... Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? ... Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, ... through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; ... Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then. So may it be. Amen.
SERMON: “Involuntary Simplicity”
Three and a half years ago, I closed and locked the door of my apartment in Riverside, California, for the last time. It was a moment that briefly seized me, when for an instant there was a weight in my chest and a lump in my throat and a tear in each eye. And then I had to turn and get into the loaded U-Haul truck and drive it two hours to San Diego, unload its contents into a rented storage unit, return it to Riverside, and drive my car down to San Diego where I would live for the next four months. It was to be a full day, and I had no time in that moment that seized me as I locked the door, to reflect on what it meant.
I moved that first of March because the third month of my three months' severance pay was beginning, and I needed to save that month's expenses in order to make it financially through the next four months. That summer I would move somewhere else, and it might have been anywhere in the country. I was in search for an interim ministry position, and would be in conversation with search committees as far afield as Michigan. Mercifully, where I ended up was Pasadena, California. The move there would be similar to the move from Riverside, just a few hours' drive and a day's rental of a U-Haul truck. And I would remain in the same UUA District, in touch with friends and colleagues I had gotten to know over the preceding three years. But as I locked the door of that apartment for the last time, I might have been saying good-bye to all those friendships as well as all that I had building and working on those three years.
I lived rent-free during the next four months thanks to one of those good friends – Ned Wight, whom you met last February. When I came back for my car after unloading and returning the U-Haul, I would carry to San Diego the essentials I needed: clothes, toiletries, my computer, my pulpit robes, and a few books that either I was reading or I thought I might want to use to write a new sermon or prepare for a workshop – I made some extra money doing supply preaching and consulting around southern California during those four months. This was one of those occasions when circumstances intervened to simplify my life considerably.
Much has been written in recent years about voluntary simplicity – all of it anticipated, of course, by Henry David Thoreau's Walden a century and a half ago. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” “...to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see ... what it [has] to teach, and not, when [we] come to die, discover that [we have] not lived.” Three years before he went to live by Walden Pond, Thoreau had watched his brother die in his arms – the brother with whom he had enjoyed a memorable trip exploring the Concord and Merrimack rivers, which he wrote about in his first published book. Three years, on average, is how long it usually takes us to fully process radical change in our lives – grieving a loved one, moving to a new town, getting married, getting divorced, having a child, figuring out how to relate to a new minister, things like that. So at the time he was building his house by Walden Pond, Thoreau had probably more or less figured out what his brother's death meant to him, deep in his soul. “...and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived,” he wrote. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” “God himself culminates in the present moment,” he wrote, “and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.” “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” he wrote. “Love your life,” he wrote, “poor as it is. ... Things do not change, we change.” “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. ... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of acts.”
Thoreau chose simplicity in order to know truth, to find wisdom, to love life, and to affect the quality of the day. I believe his brother's death must have deepened his commitment to that choice, made it what he lived for. Still, he chose to simplify. He chose not to rush at his neighbors' pace. That's voluntary simplicity.
Involuntary simplicity is something else again. James Hollis, executive director of the Jung Educational Center here in Houston, talks about it in his latest book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. He says, “...the agenda of the first half of life is predominantly a social agenda framed as ... `What does the world ask of me, and what resources can I muster to meet its demands?' But in the second half of life, ... the agenda shifts to ... `What does the soul ask of me?' `What does it mean that I am here?' `Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?' ... The old sense of self wears thin, and the new is yet uncovered. Such moments of crisis are typically very painful, but they constitute an invitation ... to reorient its priorities ... that the ego will resist until it is forced to do otherwise. These continual `defeats' of the ego may finally, perhaps, bring it to the point where it begins to ask other kinds of questions. When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will begin to say: `What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?' ` Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?' ... the ego ... is usually led, through suffering, frustration, and defeat to demanding questions. If we stop running and turn to these questions, renewal, not defeat, emerges and we grow larger, often against our will. After all, who or what is asking these questions? If they are not asked by the ego, or presented by our culture, they must be asked by the soul.” [1]
I have to confess that I find his notion of the first half of life and the second half of life rather disagreeable. While many people in our culture might experience it this way, I don't think the sort of awakening he talks about has to happen in sequence, first to adjust to the world and afterward to adjust to our souls. Yes, in his thirties when he wrote Walden, Thoreau might have been said in his day to be entering the second half of life when he wrote: “By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.” That insight might be taken as a sign of his transition from the first to the second half of life. But when he wrote: “It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” he might as easily have said it is never too early to give up our prejudices. I do not believe we are fated to live the first half of life so terribly unconscious of our inner lives as Hollis seems to suggest. It is in our approach to life, and not in its length, that awareness of the soul grows. When we understand our ego – our conscious selves – to be poised at the boundary of our inner and outer lives, in position to survey the prospect of each, awareness and growth of the world and the soul can proceed simultaneously. One need not wait for the other. So an awareness of inner and outer life is a gift we can give our children; we can teach them some questions to ask themselves, to make the second half of life less of a crisis for them.
Nevertheless, they and we will from time to time catch ourselves coasting along on familiar patterns that we don't take time to examine or reflect upon. These can have to do with how we understand the world, or with how we understand ourselves, or a little of both. And sometimes life disrupts our patterns – making us put all our patterns in storage and live only with the essentials – so that we can't help but notice the ways we've been coasting along, because circumstances now require that we think about how we are living and what we are feeling and set ourselves new and simpler patterns. I think that must be what it's like being a new parent.
Voluntary simplicity is when you have time to think about setting new and simpler patterns. Involuntary simplicity is when you don't have that luxury. When I locked my apartment door for the last time in Riverside, I began a way of living that involved moving once a year. There was the four-month period living in Ned's spare room with almost all my material goods in storage, and then every summer I would move into a new apartment, figure out how my things would fit into each one, and try to live for a year without accumulating more stuff if I could help it, noticing what I unpacked each time and what could just as well have stayed packed.
My spare bedroom in Pasadena was not usable as a bedroom, it was filled with unopened boxes. In Santa Barbara the next year, I had a smaller apartment and so I rented a storage unit. I didn't miss seeing the stuff I stored. Thinking I might be in my current apartment longer than a year, I unpacked everything. At least when I move into my house next month, it's a short trip and I'll have a few days to move things myself instead of having to box it all up in a day and hand it over to strangers to cart across the country. I hope to take some time and think about what I've learned over the last few years about my patterns and needs.
When I moved from Riverside, I had left quite a few things off the truck. They either went to friends or into the dumpster. I left behind three tall bookshelves that I had had a long time, but that I was afraid of because one of them once fell on me – or rather, I caught it as it fell. It broke a lamp that I really liked. Even if you pushed the books to the very back of the shelves, they tended to lean forward. I decided that not only were they bulky and would be hard to fit into the truck, I didn't want to live with them any more. They went beside the dumpster. I had an inexpensive china cabinet that also was going to be hard to fit on the truck. I imagined I could use kitchen cabinets to store those dishes, or keep them in boxes until I had the space. The china cabinet went to friends. Since then, I've learned to look at all my stuff, sounding within to see if I'm ready to let it go, evaluating whether or not it plays a living part in my life. The energy that doesn't have to go toward the dying branches can be invested in deeper roots.
Involuntary simplicity has taught me to be aware of essentials in a way that I hope helps me meet life's crises more mindfully. It has given me practice in letting go. It has given me practice in experimenting with new patterns in my living, to see what serves my life and growth the best. And it has taught me in a profound way that I am not alone, as friends and family have helped me through the most overwhelming parts of these unwanted transitions. In that moment that seized me after I locked the door, I felt the touch of a friend's hand on my shoulder, and saw a friend's eye meet mine and briefly mirror that hint of a tear that welled up that I didn't have time to shed. And I took a deep breath and turned to walk toward the truck. The way out of this crisis was through it. And I was not alone.
May we all know deeply that, come what may in this life, we are not alone. May we find the courage to ask for the help we need, and may the love and grace that abounds in the world through nature and human community be found sufficient. So may it be. Amen.
[1] James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, pp. 86-88.