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Soul Work & Simplicity
by Wanda Urbanska and Frank Levering
First of a two-part excerpt from Nothing's Too Small to Make a Difference
(John F. Blair, Publisher)
"Let your soul turn always, not to desire the more, but the less." -- Saint
John of the Cross
" As we live and as we are, Simplicity -- with a capital S -- is difficult
to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple
terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple,
a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend
what simplicity means." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
According to most men I know, our mothers are or were saints, women who set the standard
for perfection -- and all the rest of the world pales by comparison! Even Richard
Nixon, never noted for keeping company with saints, allowed that his mother might
have been one. With some trepidation, then, I offer you a quote from my sainted mother,
Miriam Lindsey Levering -- a Quaker, like Nixon's mother. Ironically, it's a quote
about perfection.
"Moses," my mother once remarked, "had his body in the water before
the Red Sea parted. You take the self that you have, and you put it in the water"
That "self that you have," my mother was saying, is anything but perfect.
And if you wait for self-perfection before you "advance on faith" -- a
favorite expression of Miriam Levering's -- you'll never accomplish a thing. Faith,
my mother believed, could move mountains -- or part the Red Sea. But what you have
faith in is not the hope of an ideal self, but the ability of flawed mortals to achieve
wondrous things.
Catholic theologian Henry Nouwen makes much the same point: "You don't think
your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking."
In other words, you act, you try something, you're not on the sidelines armchair-quarterbacking,
a pot-shotting critic-at-large. You're in the game.
The wisdom of Miriam Levering -- a peace and international-law advocate who played
a vital non-governmental role in the development of the United Nations-sponsored
Law of the Sea Treaty -- is worth remembering when we face our own implacable Red
Sea. As is Nouwen's insight that courageous living can lead to inspired thinking.
When it comes to what I call soul work -- the effort to align ourselves with something
larger than ourselves, the effort to mature spiritually -- it's important to recognize
that it's never too soon to start. No matter how unworthy you may feel, no matter
how unsure of your ability you are, that "self that you have" is good to
go.
Still, we hesitate. Surely, others -- people who seem to walk the talk of spiritual
alignment -- are better at this than we are. Yearning to evolve spiritually, we're
tempted to attach ourselves to gurus. And gurus abound in the soulwork business.
The American spiritual guru menu offers quite a gustatory selection, from sun-dried
New Agers on one end of the spectrum to deep-fried fundamentalists in virtually all
religions on the other. And if one guru is not enough, we can always order à
la carte -- a guru here, a guru there, adding up, we hope, to a satisfying spiritual
feast.
Forgotten in our follow-the-guru culture -- a curious phenomenon, given our lip service
to the virtues of doing our own thinking --is the stark fact that, spiritually, in
the end, we must look deeply into ourselves, facing our inner Red Sea with whatever
strength may come to us from God or whatever forces we invoke to help us. All but
forgotten, too, is the organic connection between spirituality and simplicity. Too
many of our contemporary gurus want it all. They offer us the heady fragrance of
transcendence, yes -- but on closer inspection, they offer it with all the trappings
of material "success."
Thoreau, at his famous pond, knew better. The quintessential transcendentalist, a
man who in his meticulous scrutiny of nature inferred transcendental divinity in
our mundane world, Thoreau understood that soul work eschews what money can buy.
"Superfluous wealth," he insisted, "can buy superfluities only. Money
is not required to buy one necessary of the soul."
Simplicity and Spirituality
A few miles down the modern highway from Walden Pond, I used up much of my quota
of salad days at Harvard Divinity School, where Thoreau's compatriot Ralph Waldo
Emerson delivered his fatuous "transcendental eyeball" lecture, startling
the proper Boston intelligentsia with an image of the divine never dreamt of -- as
Hamlet would say -- in their philosophy.
Controversy has not been a stranger at Harvard Divinity. In my era, as now, the school
has rocked the boat of conventional Christianity by emphasizing the spiritual legitimacy
of other religions, particularly at the school's Center for the Study of World Religions,
a physically unimposing, yet intellectually formidable, enclave of scholars from
many faith traditions. Across many cultures, It is, to be sure, world-class scholars
who rock that Christian boat. Their recognition that religious diversity is a fact
of life on a multicultural, ever-evolving planet has made more than a few old-line
passengers a tad green at the gills.
Religious diversity is not an offshore phenomenon alone. The United States has become
-- since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act -- the most religiously diverse
nation on earth. In the best of all worlds, religious diversity, which implies the
existence of many faiths but not necessarily engagement and understanding among them,
leads to pluralism. Religious pluralism, writes Harvard professor Diana L. Eck in
her book Encountering God, means that truth "is not the exclusive or inclusive
possession of any one tradition or community. Therefore the diversity of communities,
traditions, understandings of the truth, and visions of God is not an obstacle for
us to overcome, but an opportunity for our energetic engagement and dialogue with
one another. It does not mean giving up our commitments; rather, it means opening
up those commitments to the give-and-take of mutual discovery, understanding, and,
indeed, transformation."
My own exposure at Harvard Divinity to the richness of world religions led me to
one overriding conclusion: Simplicity lies at the core of spirituality. Certainly,
most of the faith traditions have embraced simplicity in one form or another, acknowledging
the lapidary wisdom of Jesus when he says that if your eye is sound, your whole body
will he full of light. Simplicity, in this spiritual sense, is a way of cleaning
the lens of sight, of clearing away all that obscures the larger truths beyond ourselves.
Inner simplicity, we might name this response to the challenge of the infinite --
a simplicity that cherishes, above all things, the inner life of the spirit.
One of the primary truths of the life of the spirit is the idea of divine "enoughness."
"The rich man," the Talmud reminds us, "is the man who is satisfied
with what he has." "He who knows he has enough is rich" is the wisdom
of the Tao Te Ching. True wealth, says Jesus memorably in Luke, is being "rich
toward God." Time and again, with a dazzling array of metaphors, Jesus teaches
us that our real treasures are God's spiritual gifts, eternal and nonmaterial, available
to anyone willing to receive them.
In his book The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace, the Dalai Lama affirms what is
essentially the same revelation from his embattled Tibetan Buddhist tradition. "In
life," he writes, "you face hardship to amass food and wealth, but at death
you have to leave it. Who knows how your wealth will be used by those who inherit
it? For a few days they may grieve for you, but soon they will be squabbling over
their share. This is how your life is spent."
Jesus might have put the matter more metaphorically, but here lies the fundamental
insight of simplicity, cutting across disparate spiritual traditions. Use your time
here wisely, the Dalai Lama is telling us. Life is short and of infinite value, and
there is much to distract and tempt us away from what is eternal in our nature. Determine
what you really need. Finding your real treasures and understanding their full value
-- that's where simplicity and spirituality converge. The rest is transitory. The
rest, ultimately, will have no meaning.
* * *
Simple Living on PBS
Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, a public television series, will begin airing
on Twin Cities Public Television beginning in October 2005. TPT will run 18 half-hour
programs.
Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska offers thoughtful ideas to inspire each of us to
make adjustments to possession-cluttered, time-starved lives. Whether it's suggesting
that you commit to writing one letter every week, replacing disposable coffee cups
with a travel mug, buying a seasonal share of a local farmer's crop or volunteering
for a worthwhile cause, this series will provide you with small steps that, taken
together by all of us, can make a large impact on an your own life and on society
as a whole.
Simple Living examines what people can do to make their lives easier and more stress-free,
from buying products that will last a long time to managing budgets more responsibly.
The show focuses on four themes: environmental stewardship, thoughtful consumption,
community involvement and financial responsibility. In each of the shows, when you
make those lifestyle changes there are multiple and overlapping benefits. All of
these benefits and changes are little changes, but they add up to a lot when taken
together. They are ways for people to become more thoughtful about the way that we
live, and to lessen our environmental footprint.
Wanda Urbanska is a nationally known author and expert on simplicity. She is a graduate
of Harvard University and author or co-author of five books including Simple Living,
Moving to a Small Town, and Christmas on Jane Street. She is coauthor with Frank
Levering of the book, Nothing's Too Small To Make A Difference. She has hosted the
PBS primetime special "Escape from Affluenza: Living Better on Less." Her
series, "Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska," is currently airing on PBS
stations nationwide.
Frank Levering is a farmer, author, playwright, poet, producer and scriptwriter,
with a wide range of credits. He is the co-author with Wanda Urbanska of five books,
and he has published a collection of poetry, Blue Light (Orchard Gap Press). In 1999,
Frank founded and remains producer for the innovative environmental Cherry Orchard
Theatre in Virginia. In 1986, he and Wanda Urbanska moved from Los Angeles to the
orchard, which is known throughout the Southeast for its pick-your-own cherries.
Levering Orchard, which was founded by Frank's grandparents in 1908, is now the largest
cherry orchard in the South. Visit www.simplelivingtv.net
Copyright © Wanda Urbanska and Frank Levering. All rights reserved. Printed
with permission. |
| June 2005 |
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