Simplicity.
That’s a cut-against-the-grain word in this season of so much everything — so many parties and too many cookies, herds of lit-up reindeer marching across the lawns, lines of frantic shoppers hunting Xbox game systems or one more package of anything to put on the mound.
We do it, but in many hearts there’s also a whisper — maybe even a shout — of “too much,” a longing for a sacred silent night.
And so some people are deliberately, consciously, intentionally choosing less. Less Christmas shopping. Fewer decorations to put up and then haul back down, fewer plastic bins into which to cram it all.
Those who cultivate simplicity say they want more time, more peace, more care for the world — not just at Christmas, but for the rest of the year as well, as a deliberate statement of their faith in God. Some are asking hard questions. How do the choices we make — what we buy, what we eat, what we drive, what we invest in — affect the world? What impact do our choices have on the earth and those who produce the goods we buy?
The simple-living movement is about more than saying “too much” to a consumer-driven Christmas, however. It ties together elements of environmental stewardship, of global economics, of socially-responsible investing, of caring for the least in a world in which many Americans have so much while the vast majority of the world’s people live in poverty.
“The whole movement comes out of a faith perspective, that we need to understand what lies beneath the surface of our actions,” said Gary Cook, associate for global service and witness for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). And, perhaps especially at Christmas, some people long for a world that seems whole and compassionate, somehow in balance.
“The world is so fragile, it’s so dangerous, it’s so fragmented, it’s so precarious. And the future is so uncertain,” said Tom Nolen, associate for congregational nurture at First Church in Portland, Ore. “I think for those of us who aren’t in control of the big picture, there’s a big yearning” at Christmas.
It’s not sentimentality or nostalgia for the past, he said, or even a longing for a picture-perfect holiday. But it’s more “a yearning for peace.”
So some people make a special effort at Christmas to make the holidays about more than door-buster sales — to try to live in a way that matches what they say they believe.
Each December, Westminster Church in Greensboro, N.C. holds an alternative giving sale after Sunday morning services, giving parishioners the chance to support local, national and international ministries by purchasing cards that support the work of those groups. And Ten Thousand Villages, www.tenthousandvillages.com/ , a business that supports fair trade initiatives, sets up a market where people can buy craft items made by artisans from developing countries.
Westminster raised $11,000 through those sales in 2004, and hopes to do at least as well this year.
In some families people give their relatives cards saying that a chicken or a cow has been purchased in their honor and sent, through the Heifer Project, https://www.heifer.org/ , to a family in Afghanistan or Tanzania.
They give fair-trade coffee purchased through the Presbyterian Coffee Project https://www.pcusa.org/coffee/ .
And Presbyterian Disaster Assistance ( https://www.pcusa.org/pda/tools/alternativegiving-hurricanetrailers.htm ) is asking this year that people remember the hurricane reconstruction efforts in Florida and the Gulf Coast, to consider giving money to buy tools and supplies for volunteers working in the reconstruction and to consider giving a gift of their own time and labor for the rebuilding.
In Spokane, Wash., First Church has since 1988 hosted a Jubilee International Marketplace, open to the public, selling pottery, toys, woven goods and more, bringing in more than several thousand people and this year producing more than $51,000 in sales.
“We call it a fair trade festival,” said Mary Frankhauser, one of the organizers. She said the “fair trade” language has become familiar and the Spokane shoppers “want to support fair trade. They’re sick of buying stuff where they know people are being taken advantage of. We just say, ‘Hooray for you.'”
And Frankhauser said the commitment she and her husband made when they married 35 years ago to live simply grew directly from their faith. “When I read what Jesus says about caring for our neighbor, I don’t see him saying do that at Christmas,” Frankhauser said. “It does affect every day of our lives … It builds our awareness of God’s love for the world.”
Harriet Prichard, a lifelong Presbyterian, is founder and president of the board of Alternative Gifts International https://www.altgifts.org/bin/site/templates/splash.asp . About 20 years ago, Prichard, then the director of children’s ministries for Pasadena Church, developed the idea of “alternative gifts” to support mission. The children of the church sent school kits to Bangladesh, women’s groups sent rice to Vietnam, and the youth sent animals to families through the Heifer Project.
From that start grew Alternative Gifts International, a nonprofit, interfaith group that encourages people to set up alternative gift fairs in their congregations and communities and to support “life-sustaining” projects around the world. Last year, people — many of them working through congregations — organized about 450 alternative giving markets in 44 states, and the movement is starting to spread overseas, Prichard said in an interview.
How much are these gifts worth?
The cost of a necktie will provide medicine and therapy to a child suffering from cystic fibrosis in the Republic of Georgia, the group’s website states. The cost of a video game would give medicine to 100 impoverished people in Central America. Dinner and a movie would pay for eye surgery and glasses for women and children facing blindness in Nepal or Bangladesh.
People set up alternate gift fairs “because they want to do something real, something authentic,”
Prichard said. “The gifts are gifts of power, gifts of food security, gifts of empowerment, gifts of justice. They’re always needed,” are never returned. Prichard said her work with alternate giving “has been a learning experience from Day One. It has enriched my life over and over. I found myself to be a learner who has gained a great deal of understanding of global issues like poverty and hunger … We live in a global village, don’t we? And every global issue is involved in our stewardship and our giving.”
Prichard sees congregations as playing an important role in helping people understand the idea of global connectedness — the catch-phrase the non-profit group Alternatives for Simple Living https://www.simpleliving.org/ uses is, “Live simply so that others can live.”
But “it’s really quite a challenge to reveal to Americans the realities about the gap between the rich and the poor,” Prichard said. “It is time for Americans to be fair and just about that and to share their surplus with the world. That’s a hard message to share . . . People shut off.”
But events of the last year have helped prick people’s ears. Gas prices topped $3 a gallon. Home heating costs are expected to soar this winter.
Deborah Brincivalli is pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Burlington, a mostly blue-collar congregation in New Jersey where some already feel economic pain. “People who worked 25 years — all of a sudden their business shut down,” she said. “Many people are just one paycheck or two away from being homeless.”
Yet she’s seen that congregation of about 115 provide turkeys for families at Thanksgiving this year and provide generously to help the victims of the hurricanes and the earthquake in Pakistan and the great tsunami. Sometimes they pay in weekly increments, but they give.
Americans saw the images of people stranded on their roofs in New Orleans, desperate on the streets, pleading for help — many of them poor and black — and they understood what Prichard meant about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
The Burlington congregation gives at the holidays, but not only then. February is blanket month. In March, they give cleaning supplies. They pay for haircuts for residents of nursing homes. They walk out of the sanctuary under a banner that says, “You are about to enter God’s mission field.”
Cook said the simple-living movement is “small but growing,” and the themes of sustainability and environmental protection and peaceful living cut across generational lines. Parents want to know how to raise their children with values in a world in which grade-school children have Christmas lists asking for I-Pods and cell phones, Brincivalli said.
“We’ve got to talk about what is sustainable as we move into the future,” Cook said. “The whole world could not live as we live,” or the resources would disappear.
For the church, “our biggest mistake is that we confuse stewardship with fundraising,” Cook said. “The church’s role is to do the year-round emphasis that first of all the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” that all we possess is a blessing from God. “We don’t include that enough in stewardship,” Cook said.
“We don’t include the idea of how much is enough? If I take more than I need, will there be enough for others?”
Last year during Advent, Keenan Kelsey of Noe Valley Church in San Francisco preached about the idea of “holy simplicity,” referring in part to the example of simple living set by St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of San Francisco.
The Noe Valley congregation had collected Christmas gifts for the children of recent immigrants, and Kelsey asked them to think about why — saying that “living love is the best way to welcome the Christ child into your life.” He said Francis of Assisi was born wealthy, as a young man loved extravagant living, but eventually rejected his inheritance to serve the poor and outcast.
Simple living isn’t easy, Kelsey preached, because “a driving force of modern society is consumerism, the drive to possess things to such a degree that we become possessed ourselves … Considerable thought is required to sort out what is necessary, what is luxury and what is just plain silly.”
But simplicity can bring vulnerability, an awareness of being broken, of having nothing left to lose — and knowing that God is there, Kelsey said.
“Life is complicated, and following Jesus is not a simple matter,” he preached. Following Jesus “is a matter of returning again and again to what is truly important in living. It is a matter of a spiritual journey inward and a lifestyle journey outward. It is a matter of trust in the all-sufficient grace and mercy of God. It is basically a matter of loving God completely and loving our neighbor as much as we do ourselves.”
He encouraged Presbyterians to give themselves their own gifts for Christmas: love, generosity, calmness, forgiveness, kindness, patience, humor, passion, devotion, commitment.
Simplicity.
