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| In Communiqué
Recently Alta Vista visited with Mike Schut, editor of Simpler Living Compassionate Life: A Christian perspective published in cooperation with Earth Ministry. Simpler Living Compassionate Life is a collection of voices that explore voluntary simplicity as a path to wholeness and abundance. Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Frederick Buechner, Calvin DeWitt, Cecil Andrews and others encourage us to listen to our lives and to respond in dialog about fundamental issues of life: time, money, food, spirituality, and community. Earth Ministry is a Christian, ecumenical, environmental, non-profit organization based in Seattle. Mike worked for four years with Earth Ministry in program planning and delivery. It was during this association that the book was birthed. AV Mike, how did you come to be interested in the relationship of the Christian faith and environmental issues?I grew up fairly rurally in Vermont and Minnesota. We always recycled, had big gardens and compost heaps. My parents worked professionally with mentally ill people. As I grew I became aware that their faith was the reason for what they did both in their professional life and the rest of their lives. The fact that their faith was not just a Sunday affair was a powerful role model for me. I attended Wheaton College where I studied biology and spent 4 years at the Church of the Savior in Washington D.C. During those 4 years, I spent one working and living with homeless men. These were very different places – a conservative evangelical institution and the Church of the Savior program. Yet in neither place did I hear about care for creation as a legitimate concern for Christians. I don’t recall hearing any sermons on the issue. I decided to do my masters work at the University of Oregon in environmental studies. It was here that I read the article by Lynn White – "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis" in a 1967 issue of the journal Science. In this article White blamed the Christian worldview for separating God and human beings from nature and suggested that Christianity was, therefore, responsible for paving the way for practices that have led to our current ecological crisis. This article galvanized the Christian community, making it stand up and respond. I felt White made valid points as far as how the West practiced Christianity but I did not believe that those practices were inherent to the faith. For example, Western Christianity has emphasized God’s transcendence (separation from nature) much more that God’s immanence (presence to us through each other and God’s creation). Both sides of this paradox need to be held in creative tension. As I studied environmental issues I wondered – shouldn’t Christians have something to say about these things? If we have something to say about justice in social issues shouldn’t we have something to say about environmental justice? After all the earth is God’s and we are part of this place. I felt like I wanted to do something concrete about this so I designed, for my master’s thesis, a course for churches about sustainability and environmental justice. AV How did you come to work on Simpler Living Compassionate Life?Someone had put me on the Earth Ministry mailing list. I was interested in the organization so I sent them a copy of my thesis. Soon thereafter, they funded a position and hired me to be the main program person. One of those programs was to develop an action – reflection resource around the connections between faith, over-consumption, lifestyle choices and environmental and social justice. After working for a year with the organization, I began to work on what became Simpler Living Compassionate life. AV Tell us about the book.We decided that we wanted the book to be a call to community and a call to compassion. We wanted to start where people were at, inviting their voices into the discussion. We wanted them to explore how their faith might interact with the issues they would be reading about in the book. So we structured the book so it could easily be used by individuals, but also as a course or in a small group discussion setting. It is divided into twelve parts including the introduction and the epilogue. A community building, twelve-week study guide is included in the back of the book. As the title connotes, it is about moving toward simpler living, making conscious choices about money, time and food. However, the second half of the title suggests that there is a larger purpose for simplified living - compassion. The call to compassion is not just a call to empathy. It is far more than that. It is a call to justice. The view of compassion behind the book is very much like that of Frederick Buechner when he said – " Compassion is that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin, knowing that there can never really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy finally for all." (A Room Called Remember) AV It seems to us that simplicity has become a popular topic.Yes, in some ways the idea of simple living has been co-opted by our culture. Advertisements even use the idea of simplifying to encourage us to consume more! Too much of the simplicity movement focuses on individuals only – getting my life under control. It reads more like an avenue for personal growth that a way of life. Without the justice component, simplicity becomes just one more option for the rich. The poor don’t have any excess to get rid of. Our hope is that the book will draw the well-off but discontent, those who are concerned that we in the US consume too much, those who are concerned about labor issues and other issues of social justice, and others, into a conversation in which they explore the connections among all these things. We want to help people realize that it is not just our lives that are out of control but there is something in our culture that needs to be addressed. AV Evangelicals have not led the way in care for the environment. Why is that do you think?One reason comes immediately to mind. When the topic of caring for the earth is brought up those on the conservative side get worried that we are talking about worshipping nature or replacing God with the earth or saying that saving the earth is more important than saving people. This heavy emphasis on personal salvation seems to be a big roadblock. And when care for the environment gets into specifics, those Christians that are more conservative politically are concerned about the economic implications. The emphasis on a health and wealth gospel where wealth is seen as a sign of God’s blessing becomes a barrier when we suggest that this attitude and the policies it generates are part of the problem with others not having enough. Dualism has become part of the Western Christian Worldview. In The Transforming Vision Walsh and Middleton do a good job of tracing and explaining this development. This dualism encourages us to see the world as split. The body (including the earth) was degraded, less valued. It became merely the backdrop upon which the human (spiritual) drama was played. It is here that White correctly criticized Christians for separating God and us from the earth.
AV In An Earth Careful Way of Life Lionel Basney says that once we backdrop creation the next step is to backdrop people. That is so true. We can see this backdropping when we stop to consider how the corporate world views us and everything else. In this corporate mentality, especially now with the increased ability to go anywhere to produce goods, to places with the lowest regulations and labor standards, communities are treated as a resource for production, then a market for consumption and finally a sink for externalities – a waste dump. What kind of view of humanity is that?
AV Where do you see hope and possibilities? I hope that we as Americans will come to realize that the American Dream doesn’t fulfill – even if I ‘get’ the dream. This is true of any idol. It promises something that it cannot finally deliver. It seems to me that the American Dream is perhaps our most significant cultural idol today – the god of economic growth. Its Achilles heel is that it doesn’t really make us satisfied and happy. The ‘good life’ of the American Dream mimics but can’t duplicate the ‘abundant life’ that Christ held out for us. However, to the extent that the ‘good life’ mimics the ‘abundant life’ it is going to be more difficult to call people to something more full and more joyful. For example: If I say the ‘good life’ promises you the ability to take care of your community, those you love, that is a good thing. That approaches the abundant life. However, the community around which we draw the circle of the good life is often very small. It could be as small as a tribe or a family. It doesn’t include what the biblical community and the abundant life stand for. In the biblical view the whole earth is our community – the animals, plants and people of a place. To the extent that the good life does not allow us to care for this broad community it is a powerful idol. AV For those who want to make a difference where do you suggest they begin?Wendell Berry gives good advice here. He says we need to consider the scale of our competence. We can’t save a planet but we can work in our yards or fields. We should begin, he says, with a place we know and love. Yet we need a global context and awareness of why and how our decisions on a small scale affect the whole but the scale of our competence is smaller. We, of course, need people who can enact policies and work for justice and equity on a larger scale, but for the purpose of allowing all of us to care well for specific places, specific species. Most concretely, perhaps, those who wish to make a difference can consider their food choices. The average morsel of food produced by agribusiness today travels 1,200 miles to reach our plate. Grown with pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, the food industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuel energy. The ecological and social "wake" of such a system is much greater than, say, buying locally grown, hopefully organic, produce.Michael Schut is available for sermons, workshops, and retreats. To contact him or to find out more about Earth Ministry call 206-632-2426, or visit www.earthministry.org. Simpler Living, Compassionate Life can be ordered from Alta Vista or by calling 800-824-1813.
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