NEWS FEATURE: Simple living has its roots in spiritual living

c. 1998 Religion News Service LOS ANGELES _ America’s simple living movement, embraced as an alternative to environmental catastrophe and rampant secular materialism, can find its ground in the religion of Jesus, Buddha and other world faiths. That, at least, was one of the low-key _ indeed, simple _ messages at the Sept. 19 Seeds […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ America’s simple living movement, embraced as an alternative to environmental catastrophe and rampant secular materialism, can find its ground in the religion of Jesus, Buddha and other world faiths.

That, at least, was one of the low-key _ indeed, simple _ messages at the Sept. 19 Seeds of Simplicity national conference sponsored by Cornell University’s Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy and held on the campus of the University of Southern California.


“There has always been a faith-simplicity connection, from the Buddha to Jesus to the desert people of the Exodus to the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. _ always setting examples both for the religious world and secular world,” said the Rev. Peter Moore-Kochlacs, a United Methodist who is director of the San Diego-based ecumenical group Environmental Ministries of Southern California. “The old religious practice of frugality can be a just and sustainable alternative, within our culture, to mass consumption.”

Moore-Kochlacs was one of 22 speakers at the simple living conference. The conference attracted about 500 people, some just interested in de-cluttering their lives, others wanting to change the world.

And while religion was as low-key as most of the speakers, religious themes weaved their way almost unobtrusively through many of the speakers’ presentations.

One speaker, for example, cited the Rev. Martin Luther King’s call for America to go from a thing-oriented to a people-oriented society while another told the story of a Buddhist monk whose simple life became really complicated after someone gave his monastery a minivan and the monks found urgent reasons to use it constantly.

“Focus on your own passion, what gives your life meaning,” said Julie Ozanne, an associate professor of marketing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Simplified living, she said, allows people to reclaim “as much time from your job or the marketplace, whether it’s to be with your kids, helping in the community with people who are impoverished, working on clean water. Whatever it is that gives you meaning, that you are living the life that you want to live.”

When an audience member asked why no one on the panel, “really gives too much credit to the Lord,” conference organizer and Seattle writer Cecile Andrews responded, “Voluntary simplicity is consistent with a sacred view of life, no matter what particular religion is being discussed.”

Several speakers did make more direct connections between deep spirituality, mental health and getting rid of “stuff” in one’s life.


“If stuff made you happy there’d be nothing but happy people living in Beverly Hills and unhappy people living in the bush,” said actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr., the daylong conference’s keynote speaker.

Ellen Furnari, a Vermont-based simple living consultant who used to do non-profit work for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, conceded the simplicity movement is a Western phenomena, not for the world’s impoverished “who do not have access to food, shelter, clothing education, safety _ the kinds of things we think of as being basic human rights.”

In major consumer countries like Canada, the United States and across Western Europe, Furnari said, the media message often is that “the sense of emptiness can be fulfilled by buying something. It becomes a vicious circle. We keep being convinced that we just need to have the right stuff and if we just acquire that better vacation, that bigger home, the latest in technology, whatever it might be, that would settle that longing.”

Susan Salterberg, program manager at the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa in Waterloo, Iowa, told the audience about growing up on a farm without indoor plumbing in 1960. Her family, she said, “didn’t buy our entertainment,” but visited neighbors with homemade ice cream.

At the same time, she said the simple living movement’s goals are often not realistic in America’s poor counties and communities where people need trucks and sport utility vehicles more than tiny electric cars.

“I work with the audience I’m with; in my county, people are very poor, and telling them to not buy a SUV might be totally inappropriate because they’re not able to afford a much smaller car,” she said.


Begley said the global rise of corporate over religious influence is a reason why corporate pollution increases.

“You need only look at the size of the buildings over history to see who was in charge,” he said. “It used to be Notre Dame, the big cathedrals _ religion certainly called a lot of the shots in the Middle Ages. And then it was government buildings _ the Washington Monument and other big government buildings were the biggest buildings around. Now, for years, it’s been the Sears Tower and the corporations have the biggest buildings and clearly have the most power, and that’s the way it’s been for awhile.”

That will only change, he said, “when people are fed up.”

But Begley, like Salterberg, also warned against going too far in rejecting modern technology.

“If you worship too long at the altar of electric cars and solar panels, you’re gonna run into the same thing. It’s easy to be serene up at Big Sur.”

Speakers also pointed out what voluntary simplicity is not.

“It’s not forced asceticism,” said Moore-Kochlacs.

But voluntary simplicity, he added, “is at its best within the religious community. You’re called to protect and to serve the Lord in the garden of his creation, and one way you can do that is to move into a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity.

“Call the religious community to a lifestyle of frugality, and that means to make one’s footprint smaller upon the earth.”

DEA END FINNIGAN

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