Last summer I was walking with a friend in Woodhill Forest on the South Head peninsula. As we approached the wild west coastline, we came upon some alien creatures. There were probably about a dozen of them, each weighing up to about two tonnes, with the most humungous wheels I’d ever seen. They were speeding up the sandhills toward the beach, sometimes swerving and throwing up sand. My friend, who is good at identifying unusual creatures, said that these are known as off-road vehicles, or SUVs meaning Sports Utility Vehicles. Evidently, they consume great quantities of fuel, and belch out large quantities of air pollutants. They tend to have glaring front lights, in spite of the fact the sun was shining brightly. They were mostly driven by young human males, and they had small groups of devoted human females watching on.
If I don’t laugh about it, I would cry. As we walked past the girls, I looked at some of their young faces. I really wanted to talk to them. However, either because ‘discretion is the better part of valour,’ or because I didn’t have the courage, I just said, “hello.” There were two things I was aching to say. The first was to ask, “Do you know we are living in a climate crisis?” Second, I had just finished reading an article in the latest Forest and Bird magazine about the damage that some off-roaders were doing to endangered species in wild habitats. I also wanted to say to the girls, “Please, tell the boys to be careful of the wildlife, including the sand grasses.” It was once thought that the earth had unlimited resources. The difficult thing we must now face – and we are the first generation to have to do so – is that we now know, the earth does not have unlimited resources. Richard Foster writes, “The earth cannot afford our lifestyle” (Freedom of Simplicity, 151).
In this article, I want to reflect on what has become known as the climate crisis. In some ways, I think this is a misnomer. It is in fact a life crisis; a planet crisis; a human crisis; a creation crisis. I think at least one clue to an answer lies in the words of Jesus in Luke 12. There, Jesus asked his followers to contemplate a flower, say, the lily, and notice that it had a glory greater than all that they had heard of King Solomon in his luxurious royal garments. This is simplicity in all its glory. I suggest that a biblical response to our environmental crisis could be summed up in the traditional Christian virtue of Simplicity. T. S. Eliot spoke of Christianity as, “A condition of complete simplicity” (The Four Quartets, p.39).
What might this virtue of Simplicity be? It doesn’t mean being simple in the sense of naïve. It doesn’t mean being simplistic in the sense of laying down pat answers to imply that solutions to this problem are easy. Living simply, in a complicated world, is complex. Neither does Simplicity mean poverty in the sense of “not enough.” As the writer of Proverbs prayed so wisely, “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonour the name of my God” (Prov 30:8–9).
One might be tempted to think, however, that the answer to nature’s crisis does lie in poverty since there is evidence for a direct correlation between one’s wealth and the size of one’s carbon footprint. There are variations and mitigations, but statistically a general pattern exists that indicates that affluence is the greatest determinant of a person’s contribution to environmental destruction. I doubt that the owners of the SUVs in the Woodhill Forest, spewing out unnecessary carbon monoxide, were on a meagre income. While the statistics show that China, the USA and India are the three highest emitters of CO2, it is also true that someone like, say, Jeff Bezos in the USA would have a higher personal carbon footprint than, say, the communities of the Dalit people or other untouchables in India. When the statistics are taken per capita, the countries in the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula come out as the highest offenders – Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Per capita, the African nations are among the lowest offenders. Thus, say, a Saudi Arabian sheik would have a far greater carbon footprint than, say, a whole village or town in the Sudan. As someone once famously said, “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.”
Over the centuries many Christians have felt a call to radical poverty. We are familiar with Francis of Assisi in the 13th century who shed all his possessions and his family’s substantial inheritance. In our own living memory was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Less well known, Toyohiko Kagawa gave up his possessions and lived with the poor in Japan. Richard Foster, however, advises us that formal and radical poverty is not for everyone. He writes, “If we want to live like [Saint] Francis [of Assisi] we had better not be married. If we want to be married we had better not try to live like Francis. The failure to understand this simple fact has caused a great deal of misery in human society” (p. 72).
So, what is Simplicity? Before he died at the hand of the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who took a stand against Hitler, wrote, , “To be simple is to fix one’s eye solely on the simple truth of God at a time when all concepts are being confused, distorted and turned upside down” (Ethics, 68). So, whatever it is, to live in Simplicity consists of both the way we live on the inside of us, our thinking, our desires, our commitments, and also the way we live in the material world around us.
While we often think of Jesus as relatively poor, there are reasons to suggest that he was, in fact, quite middle class. He was from an average family in Nazareth, a trained manual worker who went wandering as a popular de facto Rabbi at about age 30. Some of his disciples were fishermen who owned boats and nets in a family business. One was a tax collector. None were destitute. Jesus and his disciples did not go begging in the way Francis of Assisi did. Yet Jesus was the model of Simplicity. The apostle Paul too, had been a tentmaker, but says in his letter to the Philippians, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well-fed or hungry whether living in plenty or in want” (Phil 4:11–13). Contentment is one of the hallmarks of Simplicity. G. K. Chesterton said, “There are two ways to get enough: one is to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
As well as nurturing contentment, Simplicity is also generous. When Jesus and his disciples gave up their day jobs, they needed still to support themselves. John’s Gospel tells us they shared a common purse (John 12:6; 13:29), probably for earnings from any day-labour they might get on their travels, or for donations. Luke’s Gospel tells us that much of their support came through the generosity of women whom Jesus had helped. It records, “The twelve were with him, and several women who had been healed from bad spirits and diseases, Mary called the Magdalene, from whom seven demons came out, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, who was a manager of Herod’s household, Suzanna and many others who served them out of their own resources” (Luke 8:1–3). The generous sharing of material goods by these women who travelled in simplicity with the group, enabled Jesus’ ministry.
Generosity comes from all sorts of places even in our modern world. A news item on TV1 in November 2022, also reported more recently on RNZ, described a very simple and generous innovation by Dunedin fireplace company Escea. The founder of the company, Nigel Bamford, was aware of the problem faced in refugee camps and in poor countries where open fire cooking is unsafe, unhealthy, fuel-hungry and labour intensive. He therefore allocated some of the profit from ordinary fireplace sales in NZ to design and manufacture a very simple, portable, lightweight cooking stove. These have been flat-packed and shipped to refugee camps in places like Syria and Afghanistan. Escea works with a charity called Relief Aid who then employ locals in need of work to reassemble the stoves at their destination. The feedback of gratitude for the simplicity and effectiveness of the stoves has evidently been overwhelming. The stoves are simple to light and keep burning, using less fuel and are therefore cleaner. Aptly, the project is called “Fire for life.” I can only say, Alleluia.
As well as being content and generous, Simplicity is grateful. This story is told of Saint Francis: “On one occasion, Francis and brother Masseo went begging bread in a small village. Returning with a few dried crusts, they searched until they found a spring for drinking and a flat rock for a table. As they ate their meagre lunch Francis exclaimed several times, “Oh, Brother Masseo, we do not deserve such a great treasure as this!” Finally, Brother Masseo protested that such poverty could hardly be called a treasure. They had no cloth, no knife, no dish, no bowl, no house, no table. Elated, Francis replied, “This is what I consider a great treasure – where nothing has been prepared by human labour. But everything has been supplied by Divine Providence, as is evidenced in the baked bread, the fine stone table and the clear spring.” Joyfully they finished their meal then journeyed on towards France, rejoicing and praising the Lord in song” (Freedom of Simplicity, 70–71). Personally, I think I would have been more grateful if there had been some dessert. However, so be it.
Perhaps hardest of all for us is that Simplicity is in no hurry. It takes its time. Environmentalist David Suzuki says, “We have become the impatient species, too busy to let nature replenish itself and too puffed up with our own sense of importance to acknowledge our utter dependence on its generosity.” Leviticus 25:1–24 gives a glimpse of how God wanted the Israelites to treat the land. First, they must understand, as Moses tells them, that God says, “The land is mine.” The earth belongs to God, not us. Some of us may be able to cast our minds back to the movie Crocodile Dundee, starring Paul Newman and set in the Australian outback. In one memorable line, Newman says, “Arguing about who owns the land is like two fleas on the back of a dog arguing about who owns the dog.” In ancient Israel, there was no room for the pattern we see in the modern attitude to real estate. Foster says, “The idea that one could cut off a piece of the consumer pie and go off and enjoy it in isolation was unthinkable” (Freedom of Simplicity, 23).
Even so, God’s commands in Leviticus regarding the use of land sound particularly difficult. Moses told the Israelites to let their fields lie fallow every seventh year. This rings true in the echo of Suzuki’s cry for more patience in our species to let the earth replenish itself. Let the land have a Sabbath rest. Remember the joy many of us felt in the first COVID lockdown, when we could give nature some time and some space? Yet, how difficult that would have been to do voluntarily! And as if this would not be difficult enough to do, the Israelites were also told that every seventh of those seventh years was to be a Jubilee year. In that year, not only must the land be given its freedom to rest, but those who had lost land through misfortune could return to their family land as their inheritance, and those who had become slaves could go back home to their tribal land. Hard to do, but what a happy thought: to proclaim the year of Jubilee!
It is difficult enough for us to refrain from shopping or working on our day of rest, let alone to let our world rest for a whole year. It is easy for us (whether on the Saturday/Shabbat or on Sunday/the Lord’s Day) to grab something in the mall, whether we need it or not. It always seems difficult to say “no” to any opportunity for material gain. We may suffer from a fear of missing out. We have been taught to “get ahead.” A sabbatical principle, however, has a lot going for it. Evidently, for example, in the 1970s, Country Calendar once featured a farmer who belonged to a Sabbatical Fallowers Fellowship which sought to apply this principle. He had land on the Te Akau Peninsula on the north banks of the Raglan Harbour and used to shut up a seventh of his land every year. It did require a reduction in stock numbers, but his stock health and yield naturally improved.
There’s a sense of having to “let go” in Simplicity. There is a certain loss of being in control when we let things be themselves without owning or using them. We know that all we have will be taken from us when we die but letting go of stuff now is much harder. In the Gospels Jesus seems to encourage us to let go of our tight grip; he invites us to loosen our grasp and place our treasure, along with our hearts, in God. Simplicity is a way of seeing things, a perspective that falls gently on us if we are patient. It allows us to enjoy simple things and be grateful for this fleeting and temporary generosity that has come our way for our brief lifetime.
Finally, Simplicity is a gift, a grace. Perhaps those most gifted with this grace are children, so Jesus often used them in his teaching as models for the Kingdom of God. They are so vulnerable, yet they thrive on joy. In one of my few overseas trips, a group of us visited World Vision Projects in Bangladesh, and there would be gift-giving at departure from each project. We had learnt that the boys in the projects used to collect rags and roll them together into a ball. When they had collected enough rags, they would tie them all together with an outside rag, and the combined result would become their football. They could play for hours kicking to each other and stealing the ball off each other and laughing. Because rags could be hard to find, our WV staff member would present the children with a real soccer ball from NZ each time we left a project. Their joy and excitement was overwhelming. Yet it was such a fragment of the world’s resources that made them so happy. Surely such joy is another of the many graces of Simplicity.
