I grew up with Mennonites in a little town in Ohio. One of them, a kid named Elmer, was in my class. He wore overalls and boots to school. In the spring, he reeked of the onions he had to thin from the fields of his family’s farm, first thing in the morning. The Mennonite girls wore gingham dresses and very cute little white lace caps on their heads.
We called them black-bumper Mennonites because unlike their Amish cousins, also followers of Menno Simons, the 16th century Dutch founder of their wider religious movement, they would buy brand-new vehicles, mostly vans to haul around their big families, and paint the bumpers black to avoid appearing ostentatious.
Years ago, Roberta and I were wandering the back roads of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to admire the world of the Amish. We went down a gravel road in our quest to get as close to authentic Amish life as we could. We spied a tall old guy with a long grey beard wearing overalls and the typical straw hat standing by a stall where he sold shoo-fly pie. Which consists basically of flour, shortening, and brown sugar. Which attracts flies. Hence the name. Well, it attracted Roberta very powerfully, so we kicked up a rooster-tail of dust as we stopped. Next thing you know, we took up the old man’s offer for us to stay overnight in the “bed and breakfast” he and his wife maintained in their barn. Price: $20 a night. Roberta was entranced. I laughed when we went into the upstairs of the barn and discovered a fly-infested space with a sway-bottomed spring bed and a toilet that consisted of a plastic bucket with a seat on it, and a shower that drained directly into the corral outside. At breakfast next morning, sitting under the gas lamp above the kitchen table as we ate a hearty meal, Roberta announced that she wanted to be Amish. Our hostess immediately answered: “Oh no you don’t!” and proceeded to describe how much hassle and work it is to be Amish. You have no privacy, your house gets inspected to make sure you’re not living like the “English” – their term for everybody who isn’t Amish. Her main objection to her Amish way of life was that it was more about the appearance of simplicity than simple living itself.
Gandhi made a big deal about living simply. He spun cotton to make the fabric for his simple dhoti clothing. He went about in flip-flops and tried to do life the way poor Indians did. But to maintain this lifestyle while he was leading the nonviolent revolution against the British raj in India, it cost a lot of money and hassle to schlepp his spinning wheel and to deal with all the special accommodations he required. It was anything but simple for his retinue to deal with his proclivity for simplicity.
Simplicity sounds really nice for a lot of us who suffer from the complexities that life hurls our way every day. But it isn’t always simple to live simply, is it? All too often, you end up trading one kind of complexity for another.
When traveling in developing countries, you might be entranced by the joy in the faces of poor people who appear to be enjoying the simple life. And yes, there’s joy in those communities to which we can aspire. But a closer look reveals how much difficulty is involved in the simple life that they appear to be living. Roberta and I visited her son when he was in the Peace Corps in a very remote Quechua village in the Andes of Peru. We loved the place! It was bliss to wander through fields where women were singing beautifully as they picked and shelled peas. But we also were sobered by the tough choices facing the villagers every day. These were proud people whom the Spanish had never bothered to conquer. They did not think of themselves as being poor, which was a spiritual blessing for them. But the deprivations they had to deal with were difficult. They didn’t have to deal with the time-consuming, maddening arcana of the Internal Revenue Service, but they had plenty of other stuff that weighed on their souls and consumed their time and energy.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a call to simplicity. When you think about the Sermon on the Mount, it helps to be aware that these few chapters in the New Testament were the only words that Jesus’ audience would ever hear from him. There were no newspapers, no televisions, no internet to record and disseminate his words. So we must assume that everything Jesus wanted those folks to hear was in his sermon. And what is very striking about it is what’s not in it. There’s no dogma. No doctrine. No catechism. No statement of faith. It’s not about what to believe, but rather about what to do and how to be. There are admonitions to love and care for others, to give up oppressing others. Don’t worry about your clothes, don’t worry about food. If you don’t worry about stuff, you won’t be obsessed with consumption. You’ll be much more likely to more fully enjoy whatever you already have. It’s simple religion - much, much simpler than the dominant paradigm of Christianity in America today. Apparently, that was all the religion that Jesus thought folks needed. Of course, we’re all going to have to deal with complicated stuff, no matter how hard we try to live simply. But we can approach that complexity with simplicity of spirit.
We can be clear-eyed about what ultimately matters and what ultimately does not. We can cultivate satisfaction with the life we are living today, as it is today, as best we can. We can savor what is good around us and within us. We can value our relationships more than our stuff or our ambitions. We can avoid entanglements that get in the way of our precious relationships. We can cultivate a life of contemplation that makes the mundane sacred.
Simplicity is a way of seeing and being, an ideal to which we can aspire, even as we negotiate and engage with the tangle of tasks and choices that beset us every day. Simplicity of spirit will naturally guide us toward greater simplicity in our way of living. Who knows? If enough of us engage in spiritual simplicity, maybe systematic simplicity will follow!