Simple Living

A reader writes:

I have been following your blog regularly for about two years now, and your work has sparked many a rousing discussion at our dinner table. In recent months, my wife and I have undergone a lot of personal suffering–three months of family deaths, financial difficulties, etc. It felt at times like we were being squeezed from all sides. This time seems to have passed, and it led us to reflect more deeply in prayer on suffering, poverty, etc. We have both felt called to live lives that are a bit more simple so that we might free up resources to help those who are truly in need. We’re discerning how we can tread more lightly on the earth too, growing some of our food, etc. And last, we are looking forward to having children in the next year or two and are wondering how to raise a family on one teacher’s income.

From your posts, it’s pretty clear that your family lives a rather simple material life. I’m wondering if you can point me to any resources on how to do this more fully, or the spiritual benefits of it. We’re reading “Happy Are You Poor” by Thomas DuBay and are writing to various bloggers, priests, etc. who seem to be living out this life in various ways.

I’ll look forward to hearing from you, and if this serves as fodder for any blog posts, I think your thoughts on any of these matters would be immensely helpful to a large number of people. (Here in the Twin Cities, we have a very large group of Catholic friends, many of whom are discerning similar situations.)

Hmmm… I’m not much of an authority on this sort of thing. I don’t have any game plan for Simple Living. We live frugally because we have to: that is, we’ve made certain choices–me to try to live out the vocation of a writer/lay teacher, our family to homeschool, my wife to devote herself to the domestic church and not to Gradgrind’s Factory–that mean a) a lot of work and b) a lower middle class income.

So we make do. But I’ve never read any of those books that talk about *how* to make do. Finance books make my eyes cross. I could probably profit from a serious think about the theological implications of Simplicity (by reading such books as, well, Simplicity by John Michael Talbot and Dan O’Neill, or Small is Beautiful, or the title you mention–but I haven’t.

The reason I haven’t is because I’m so pressed for time trying to make ends meet that leisure reading is at a premium. That’s one of the paradoxes of “simple living”. It’s hard work when you *have* to do it. 🙂

Not that I’m unhappy, mind you. God is good and this “non-traditional lifestyle” as they call it has taken some very strange and interesting (albeit not highly lucrative) turns over the years, for which I am deeply grateful. I’m just saying that I don’t have much in the way to offer about how to *plan* for simplicity. I’m one of those people who was asked, when I left high school, to fill out a form about my “career goals” and where I saw myself in ten years. I *still* have no idea how to fill out that form. Planning–especially financial planning and lifestyle planning–is not my strong suit. However, that doesn’t mean the questions you raise are unimportant ones. It just means I’m not going to be much help in answering them.

If readers want to give it a crack in the comboxes, knock yourselves out!

Oh! One book you might like is Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, since he seems to me to be asking similar questions to yours. Also, as I mentioned above, one of the ur-texts for this conversation is E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

You also might want to poke around and find out more about Distributism, which Chesterton always quixotically advanced as an alternative to capitalism and socialism. His What’s Wrong with the World is a fun and typically insightful look at his thoughts on economics and so forth.

Essentially, Chesterton had the notion (fully consonant with Catholic teaching and roundly condemned by the rich and powerful people who control the state, captain industry, and manufacture our culture and ideas for us in the media) that concentrating massive wealth and power in the hands of, oh say, the rich and powerful people who control the state, captain industry, and manufacture our culture and ideas for us in the media is a bad thing since it basically leads to tyranny and slavery. (Of course, as we see today, that could never happen and the lower classes could never be forced–at gunpoint–to pay trillions of dollars to rich people who are incompetent to run their businesses well, but who have so much power that they are “too big to fail” without taking millions of people down with them. So Chesterton is totally out of date today.)

Still and all, Chesterton–for all his complete and utter lack of prescience about the world a century after he wrote–has some things to say to us which might be of interest. For instance (again like Catholic teaching) he puts the human person, not the state or the corporation, at the center of his economics. His interest in not in massive accumulation of wealth and power, but in making sure that the family and the good of the family is what an economic system exists to ensure. Neither socialism nor capitalism is ordered toward that, which is why they tend to turn deadly. It is one of the many ways in which conservative Catholics have sold their birthright for a pot of message that, in their flight from the deadly thing called socialism they have elevated the mere human tradition of “capitalism is a more workable system than socialism” into an entirely false Sacred Tradition of capitalism as “God’s chosen economic system”. The results of this false exaltation of human wisdom to Revealed Truth can be seen everywhere. I give one example here.

Anyway, just some stuff to play around with as you think this through. Thanks for raising an interesting topic!