With Lehman’s catalogs on the center of the table (“simple products for a simpler life”), we embarked on this week’s core values conversation around “abundant simplicity.” Our first exercise was to picture and do a bit of writing about someone we know whom we admire as living “the good life.” After sharing about some of the people we chose and why, we entered the next level of questioning: how does that vision of life compare with the vision we were raised with? All of this was to help us remember that our vision of the good life — what kind of home, shared with whom, what kind of food, how we spend our time and money, and so on — comes from somewhere. It’s culturally formed (see the Ched Meyers’ article we read in preparation). And a desire for “simplicity” can easily become as materialistic and stressful as a life of unfettered consumerism (see one of the articles we read for today, “Beware of toilet envy”). Simplicity is about stuff in some ways, but it’s more about the purity of our hearts and the values that anchor all of our choices. Meister Eckhart provided a good reminder of this, as we read the following quote that appeared in a back issue of Geez Magazine:
Asceticism is of no great importance. There is a better way to treat one‘s passions than pile on oneself ascetic practices which so often reveal a great ego and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness. If you wish to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more subject, then place on it the bridle of love.
*cino’s core values expression of abundant simplicity is this: “The good life is characterized by sharing, resourcefulness and eating together often.” Basically: we need each other, we are better together and we reject the myth of scarcity that is so often used to manipulate us into acting out of fear for the sake of our own self-preservation. There is much abundance in living simply in order to live generously, in finding creative ways to connect and thrive that don’t involve excessive amounts of money.
But the good life, we we’ve come to experience it, is about more than just abundant simplicity; it’s about all of the core values we’ve been studying together — experiential learning, compassionate listening, radical hospitality — and about being part of a community of people who wrestle with these ideas and practices together, in the midst of brokenness, around a kitchen table.
Last modified: March 4, 2020
