Archives: Articles

"The Jones are surrendering!" a TV news reporter proclaims. "The family with whom we've tried to keep up is throwing in the towel!" The camera pans to four desperate looking people standing in front of a large house. 'We've had it," the wife says. 'We're exhausted. We never see each other. And we have so much debt that we can't keep up anymore. It's just not worth it."

So begins Beyond Affluenza, a recent public television special made in Seattle. The one-hour program and its prequel, Affluenza, document the current expression of an ideal that recurs throughout American history -- simplicity. The Puritans and Quakers emigrated here to live out an austere and simple ethic. The founding fathers believed that civic virtue is accompanied by material restraint. In the 1840s, Henry Thoreau sought to live deliberately at Walden Pond, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott experimented in simple rural living. That experiment was repeated in the back- in to-nature communes of the 1960s and '70s, which were inspired in part by people like Scott and Helen Nearing who had pioneered the simple life of rural homesteading decades earlier.

Many people today are again willing to trade relentless consumption for a more intellectually and spiritually rich life. For most of these people, the pursuit of simplicity means gaining control of their money and their time so that both can be used more intentionally. By downsizing their expectations of material affluence, people are able to discover and invest in what really matters to them, whether that is family, relationships, community involvement, environmental responsibility or a new, more satisfying kind of work.

Who is pursuing the simple life? Among those trying to live more deliberately is a young man who leaves a lucrative position at Microsoft in order to do what he has always wanted -- be an actor and help others by volunteering, especially as a Big Brother. A family opts to live on less money after the husband refuses to accept a job transfer that would have him designing weapons and the wife decides she wants to stay at home with their children; to act on these values, the family renovates an old house, relies on bicycles instead of a car, and grows some of its own food. A 50-year-old corporate attorney retires from his practice in order to run an environmental organization; he and his wife recycle and compost so effectively that they fill only one garbage can a month. And a couple who keeps a large home in the suburbs decides to rent out part of it to graduate students from other countries. The rental income frees them to devote fewer hours to paid employment, and they are enriched by their friendship with their tenants.

The idea of living more simply has spawned hundreds of books, videos and seminars. While some of the recent books can be classified with pseudo-therapeutic self-help literature, many are both useful and philosophically serious.

What is making this ideal so appealing to people in a time of such conspicuous affluence? The search for a simpler life is usually a response to a crisis like war or economic depression, according to historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life. But Shi thinks there is a "psychological malaise" at work in our culture. "We've never before had such high levels of anxiety and depression among affluent people. Though people are materially well off, they're discovering that their lives seem hollow and meaningless. They're searching for meaning and, in many cases, they're also looking for alternatives to the frenetic pace of their lives."

Shi, president of Furman University, points out that during the '90s the work week actually increased for the first time in more than a century. "Even our leisure time as become scheduled, has lost its spontaneity. And among all the hoopla about our prosperity is the disturbing fact that the three most commonly prescribed drugs are an ulcer medication, an antidepressant and a pain reliever. Underneath the surface of success and material splendor, many Americans are struggling to cope."

If the voluntary simplicity movement has a geographical enter, it is the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle. That's is home of three of the most dedicated practitioners and eloquent advocates of the simple life -- Vicki Robin, Cecile Andrews and Janet Luhrs. Seattle is also the home of Earth Ministry "a Christian, ecumenical, environmental, nonprofit organization" which has just published Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective, an anthology of essays and a curriculum intended to be used by churches. The people in Seattle are, Shi says, developing an infrastructure that the simplicity movement has seldom had. On the day I visited Robin at her home near the university, the scene was bustling with people who were carrying around furniture and setting up a picnic table in the garden. "A team is here working on something called the 'ecological footprint," Robin explained. The ecological footprint is a concept developed by Mathis Wackernagel of the University of British Columbia to measure humans' impact on the environment. "He worked out a way to translate objects into the number of acres it would take to produce the material for them," Robin said. "This morning the team weighed the futon on which you're sitting to see how many pounds of cotton it contains. They're now working on a bedroom, and they'll do the kitchen next."

By translating everything into acres, Wackernagel (who, with William Rees, published Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth in 1995) has measured the ecological footprints of people in different countries. The average American has a more than ten-square-acre footprint, while the global average is under three. "If you divide all the arable land on the planet by the world's population, you find that we're already overpopulated and overconsuming. We're going into debt globally," Robin says.

The ecological footprint project meshes nicely with Robin's own work -- to provide a method for mastering personal finances, as the first step in finding new road maps for living. With the late Joe Dominguez, she coauthored Your Money or Your Life, one of the bibles of the voluntary simplicity movement. Still selling briskly, the book (first published in 1992) spent more than a year on Business Week's best-seller list. It details nine rigorous steps for gaining financial independence.

Robin, a thoughtful, reserved woman in her 50s, lives frugally, co-owning her house with three other women, driving a well-maintained old car, and buying many of her clothes in thrift stores. She plows the income from her book into the charitable foundation she established with Dominguez. The New Road Map Foundation, staffed by volunteers, provides grants to other nonprofit organizations.

"One of my favorites is the Northwest Earth Institute," Robin says. "It was created by a man who had been a partner in a major law firm in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife were concerned about environmental degradation and set out to teach people the basic principles of living in a way that cares for the earth. They and their small staff developed four courses that people take at their workplace during their lunch hours. More than 250 businesses have offered these study groups in ecology and voluntary simplicity"

When I asked her if environmental concerns were the main impetus for her work, she said, "That's a very strong motive for me--that we're taking God's creation and treating it as though it were ours to use up. But I've always had many layers of passion motivating my decision to live more simply. To me, this movement is spiritual, ecological, social and cultural. Though many of the people I know are deeply engaged in a spiritual quest of one kind or another, it's getting less and less fashionable for Americans to frame their lives around their values and beliefs.

"We need to be more deeply rooted in our values, and more devoted to loving and caring for one another. We need to live in a way that fosters community and that doesn't destroy other cultures. We're losing cultures -- that whole web of intelligence that tells us how to survive and live well in a particular environment. It's not just the environmental wall that we'll soon hit; there are many walls. We're relinquishing species after species, habitat after habitat, social structure after social structure. We have no idea how essential the things we're destroying may be to our own well-being."

These crises give the present interest in simplicity a new urgency, Robin believes. She cites studies that indicate a large cohort of Americans hold values inconsistent with those of the dominant culture, even though many of them are still living as part of that culture. She wonders if the voluntary simplicity movement is like "a change in the geography of the ocean floor that's creating a swell on the surface but won't impact the shore. Or are we seeing such an intense and rapid shift in people's thinking that, like a huge wave hitting the shore, it will really bring about changes?"

Robin wonders if there might be some way to speed up the process, to increase people's awareness of their feelings of discomfort and dissonance so that they become willing to endorse social policies -- consumption and energy taxes, for instance -- that will change the direction of our culture. Given what we're up against, she asks, "Can we afford to be evolutionary, or do we need to be revolutionary? What form would such a revolution take? And how big is the constituency that would back major changes in our public policies? How much of their lives are people willing to put on the line for their ideals?" She has no answers for these questions, but, she says, "I keep my nose pressed against them."

Cecile Andrews, author of the widely used book The Circle of Simplicity, radiates energy and enthusiasm for her ideas and her region. "People really care about the environment here. The Pacific Northwest is a kind of frontier. Lots of people move here seeking a better life"

As the home of Microsoft, Seattle is also full of people familiar with high-tech industry and the hi-tech lifestyle. But, says Andrews, "People still remember when their lives were more relaxed. Simplicity is kind of a double response--both to the environmental crisis and to the feeling that life has become chaotic and out of control. We're all working so hard that we've almost lost the ability to enjoy ourselves. The high point of people's lives seems to be crossing something off of their to-do list. That's as good as it gets!"

For Andrews, the simple life is the examined life. In its present manifestation, voluntary simplicity is a middle-class movement of well-educated people "who like to think and read, who look thoughtfully at every aspect of their lives and consider the consequences of their decisions." It doesn't necessarily entail a log cabin or pinched frugality. "I hate people to think of simplicity as only frugality," Andrews said. "Rather than frugality, I prefer the term 'morally responsible consumerism.' Paring back is part of simplicity', but an even bigger part is dealing with the inner emptiness that makes people so obsessed with consumerism -- the lack of spiritual concerns, of community, of a sense of meaning. Simplicity means being inwardly rich, being joyful, and feeling a sense of connectedness."

Like Robin, Andrews believes that our economy has become so e₉vironmentally destructive that we will eventually be forced to change our way of life. But she doesn't see that change coming soon. Though voluntary simplicity is growing, so is consumerism. At this point, the movement is still about individual, not social, change. But eventually the individual movement will affect corporate structures and public policy. Simplicity, she says, is a Trojan horse. "We look so benign that nobody's afraid of us. Then we pop out and change society."

Andrews's favored tool for helping people to examine their lives and to resist consumer culture is the study circle. A former community college administrator, she wants 'to find a noncompetitive way to bring people together and help them think for themselves. "Simplicity circles are built around people's personal stories," she explained. These small groups usually meet in people's homes once a week for a ten-week period, discussing such topics as how to change consumption habits, build community and transform work.

"During the session on community, we begin by talking about times during our lives when each of us has experienced community. There's no leader -- we just go around the circle, and people tell wonderful stones. After we've examined what's happened in our own lives, we go on to critique society. The third step is to brainstorm ways in which we can take action. We plan small, specific things each of us will do that week. If people focus only on what they can do to change the larger society, they begin to feel helpless. But each of us can do something in our own neighborhood, our own community. The following week we report back and compare our experiences. I wanted these study circles to be something people could do without needing training, without relying on experts, without paying any dues. It's something a group can do on its own." Simplicity circles are now meeting throughout the English-speaking world, she said.

Janet Luhrs is a single mother raising an 11-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter. She said her parents taught her to live below her means and to choose her work according to what she loved to do. Luhrs spent her 20s living frugally so that she could devote herself to writing.

"Then, when I was 30, I thought I was missing out on something, and I went to law school. That's when my life became complicated. I graduated, got my first credit cards and bought expensive, corporate kinds of clothes. We had our first child and decided we would hire a nanny to raise her, while I went out to work as a lawyer. But that lasted only a few weeks, before I asked myself, Why am I doing this?' I fired the nanny, stayed home and had another child."

Luhrs's concerns became focused when she took a class on simplicity taught by Andrews. "It was like finding home," she says. Seven years ago she began publishing a quarterly newsletter, Simple Living: The Journal of Voluntary Simplicity. "I really started it to teach myself," she explains. "I had known how to live simply as a single woman in my 20s. But I didn't know how to do it, with kids and a mortgage and credit cards."

Four years later, Bantam Doubleday Dell asked her to do a book on simplicity. The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living (1997) is an encyclopedia of information about everything from the pleasures of simple dating and romance to creative real-estate financing.

Luhrs sees herself as the practical generalist of the simplicity movement, the person who tells people how to do it. All three women think of their work as interrelated and complementary. "Vicki began by focusing more on people's concerns about money, while I was interested in time," Andrews noted. "Janet attracted a lot of people who were fascinated with the ingenuity part -- 50 ways to have a good time without spending money, or isn't it fun to plant your own garden and cook your own food. My group is probably more the cafe society, who like to talk about the philosophical aspects and the policy implications."

All three bear out Shi's assertion that "the people who have succeeded in maintaining a commitment to simplicity over time are disproportionately people with a powerful spiritual foundation -- that is, some sort of transcendent element in their outlook that gives them the fortitude and the tenacity to maintain this mode of living in the face of all of the conflicting tendencies and temptations around us." Robin talks a great deal about God and about the relationship between simpler living and spiritual development. Evy McDonald, who runs the New Road Map Foundation with Robin, has written a "Group Study Guide for Contemporary Christians" to be used with Your Money or Your Life. The curriculum has been tested by church groups in a variety of denominations. McDonald is now studying to become a United Methodist pastor. Indeed, Robin and McDonald's work reminds one of the dictum that summarizes John Wesley's economic advice: "Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can."

Andrews has a Quaker and is now a Unitarian. She was raised as a Methodist. "My church taught me both to think things through and to be concerned with social justice," she said. "I see simplicity as a core social-justice issue. People worry about how our way of life, our consumption patterns, are affecting people around the world. They're taking seriously that quote from Gandhi, 'Live simply so that others may simply live."

"For years now I've gone back and forth between the Quakers and the Unitarians," Andrews said. "I love the Quaker philosophy, and the silence. But Quakers are quiet people, and I'm not. Unitarians are loud and talkative, like I am. My church voted that morally responsible consumerism should be the main issue Unitarians study and discuss this year. Because they provide both spiritual nurture and community, churches are going to have a central role in the simplicity movement -- and the movement may help to revitalize the church."

Luhrs was raised as a Catholic but doesn't belong to a church. "I'm still probably a Catholic at heart," she said. "But I've opened up to a much more eclectic spirituality. I've done a lot of meditation and exploring of different kinds of spiritual traditions. I consider simplicity as a spiritual way of life -- if you stop working around the clock or worrying about being in debt or shopping compulsively, then you have time to try to be a better person rather than just an accumulator. Spending time cultivating your virtues rather than your closet is a wonderful way to live."

Robin, Andrews and Luhrs each have projects under way that build on their previous work. Robin is gathering material for a book about how people define and use the freedom that Your Money or Your Life is designed to help them find. "Though the book is extremely effective, taking all nine of the steps it advocates is quite challenging because we tend to be uneasy with that degree of freedom. People wonder, 'What will I do with myself if my teacher, my boss, my society aren't telling me what to do? How do I give of myself? What is myself?' We've handed people a solution, but we're also handing them another problem. I've been interviewing people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures. The variability in the way people define freedom is fascinating. God gave us free will. It's what distinguishes us from other creatures. So not to know how to use our freedom well is misusing our greatest gift."

Andrews is addressing the social-justice implications of simplicity. "I'm trying to figure out how we can talk about this with poor people," she said. "I would never use the word 'simplicity' with people who are struggling to meet their basic needs. Our emphasis on consumption, and the growing gap between the rich and poor, presents a self-esteem issue for poor people and a threat to our democracy. The expense of political campaigns gives the poor less and less of a voice in government and society. A lot of us grew up in families that wouldn't seem at all affluent now. But people felt OK about themselves. Now poor people are learning to judge themselves as losers. They see luxuries on TV and think, 'I should have that. I'd be happy if I had that.' But very few will ever have those luxuries.

"I'm trying out a new idea for how I can talk about values with poor people without coming across as Lady Bountiful. I'm working with a newspaper for the homeless on movie reviews from a poor person's perspective. It's also a way of educating the middle class about the viewpoints of the poor, since middle-class folks buy these newspapers and like to read reviews. And I'm facilitating a writing project for poor people."

Luhrs is working on a book on the effect of simple living on intimate relationships. "I find that the people interested in simplicity live together more consciously, with more awareness," she said. "They really put a lot of time, effort and thought into their relationships. Simple living means a lot of different things for them. Some think of it as a sort of inner simplicity that consists of being more honest about who they are. For some, it's simplifying their outer lives so they're not spending their time Fighting about money or worrying about debt. Working together on these lifestyle issues makes people feel closer to each other."

It is significant that these three leaders of the simplicity movement are women, and that women are disproportionately represented throughout the current movement. In holding full time jobs and fighting their way up the corporate ladder while raising children and trying to maintain homes and families, women have perhaps been more conscious of the frenetic demands of life and more inclined to change priorities. (In the past, men like Alcott and Emerson were the public spokesmen for the simplicity ideal, but of course women did much of the work that made simple living possible.)

Though Shi contends that simplicity movements go through cycles and rarely manage to build a long lasting structure, Robin, Andrews and Luhrs think that the movement has become so mainstream that it won't go away. Their own opportunities to speak are increasing, and they see their audiences growing. The call for a simpler and more intentional, sustainable and meaningful way of life continues to find a deep resonance.

Books by Trudy Bush:

Practicing Our Faith: Away of Life for a Searching People. Edited by Dorothy C. Bass. Jossey-Bass, 256 pp.

Practicing Theology. Edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C Bass. Eerdmans, 265 pp.,

Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens. Edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Don C. Richter. Upper Room, 304 pp.

Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time. By Dorothy C. Bass. Jossey-Bass, 160 pp.

Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice. By Stephanie Paulsell. Jossey-Bass, 224 pp.

Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. By Christine D. Pohl. Eerdrnans,218 pp.

(Study guides for these books, as well as information about upcoming books and grants, can be found at the Valparaiso Project’s Web site: www.practicingourfaith.org.)

The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, based at Valparaiso University in Indiana, has been encouraging people to think about and live the communal practices that form Christian existence. The project, directed by Dorothy Bass, has produced a number of widely read books. including Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. In addition, it proved grants to support projects engaging people in Christian practices in congregations, theological school., and other institutions. I spoke with Bass about the project’s focus on practices, and how they can orient us in Christian formation and education.

What does the term "practices" mean? Why has it been so prominent in your work?

Practices are the things people do together over time that shape a way of life. One of the short definitions of practices is "embodied wisdom": a certain knowledge of the world is embodied and engendered by the way we go through our daily lives. The Valparaiso Project is trying to develop an understanding of Christian practices that helps people reflect on the shape of Christian life today.

In Practicing Our Faith we talk about practices that address fundamental human needs: honoring the body, hospitality, household economics, saying yes and saying no, keeping Sabbath, testimony, discernment, shaping communities, forgiveness, healing, dying well and singing our lives. Because these practices grow out of our basic needs, all human communities must engage in them in one way or another. The practices become Christian when they’re lived in light of and in response to God’s active presence for the world in Christ. Deep convictions about who we are in relation to God and others are woven into their texture.

There is an integral relationship between how we live and what we can know of God, other people and the world. What we believe is entangled with what we do. We can believe more fully as we act more boldly. And we can act more boldly as we believe more fully.

How do these practices relate to what might be termed more fundamental practices such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, worship and meditating on scripture?

We say in Practicing Our Faith that worship is the most formative practice, the activity in which all Christian practices are distilled. None of the practices we discuss can be done faithfully without constant prayer and Bible study and we weave biblical material and links to prayer and worship into our treatment of every practice. But we wanted to show how worship and Bible study are not set apart from life. For example, passing the peace is a distillation of a Christian practice that also takes place in the world as we forgive and welcome one another.

I wish that Practicing Our Faith had included chapters on Bible study and prayer, and we did include these in Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens. Wonderful chapters by Susan Briehl on the Bible and Mark Yaconelli on prayer, written with their teenage coauthors, begin and conclude that book. At the same time, there are hundreds of retreat centers, shady groups and books encouraging people to pray and teaching them to read the Bible in fresh ways. I think North American Christians are a little less comfortable with examining the actual material quality of our daily lives -- how our time, possessions and talents are used.

The concept of practices we’re developing in the project focuses on embodied life in the world. The spiritual practices are an important part of this in that they help us to notice God’s presence in the activities of daily life. But our approach is to call attention to the concrete shape of our communal life and to encourage critical reflection on it. Each of the Christian practices we explore depends on and fosters our spirituality -- for example, keeping Sabbath forms us in rest and gratitude but also draws us into thinking about social justice, family patterns and so on.

How did your own interest in the practices emerge?

I was a historian of Christianity when I came to this work, and I have always have been intrigued by the dynamics of continuity and change in the Christian church and in how we live as Christian people. So I had thought about the practices that have been passed down and also about how they’ve changed in new historical situations. We bear a living tradition -- there is both continuity and change in the practices.

Can you give an example of how a particular practice has changed?

Consider the practice of hospitality, a topic that has been studied by Christine Pohl. In the early church, when people lived in households with many members, and in which the houses had courtyards, domestic space was more visible and less private, and there was a built-in capacity to welcome strangers. Later, monasteries took on the task of hospitality, and the monks were very reflective about it. They asked questions like "What are the limits of our hospitality?" and "How could we do damage to guests by offering our hospitality in the wrong way, and how might they damage us?" And they based their hospitality on the biblical stories that underlie this practice.

In the modern era Christian hospitality is more institutionalized -- it takes the form of hospitals, charities, hostels, which means that people lose the face-to-face quality of hospitality. When people like Dorothy Day started to reclaim the tradition of hospitality in the 20th century, they had to create institutions that would be able to do the job. The small, isolated private household in many ways is not up to the hard work of hospitality to the poor and those in need, especially now when most homes are empty all day.

Nevertheless, despite changing historical structures, ministering to strangers and welcoming those who are in need remains an irreducible aspect of the faith, embedded in scripture. The question is how to do that today. Pohl says that the congregation provides a nice mix of the intimacy and publicness needed for the doing of hospitality. But, as she emphasizes, this is hard work. Her book Making Room is an example of embracing a Christian practice while also thinking critically about it. That is what the Valparaiso Project has tried to do, and encourage theologians and other Christians to do.

You say in Practicing Our Faith that the practices are "in trouble." Is there something about our situation that calls for a renewed focus on practices?

We have been living in a time of very rapid social change. People are very mobile, and there are forces that fragment communities -- communities that used to be responsible for passing on wisdom. There’s a lot of very fine freedom and opportunity that comes with this, but it’s also easy to just kind of go with the flow of the culture in the absence of deliberate and sustained attention to developing Christian habits of life.

Though it is increasingly difficult to form and sustain communities, I don’t think that any one of us, or any one family or household, can or should do these practices alone. We need to discern the shape of the practices in conversation with others and through constant reencounters with the word of God, with worship and with opportunities for carefully studying and reflecting on what’s going on in our society. We need this if we are to be thoughtful and deliberate about our lives.

For example, it’s very hard to keep Sabbath without a community that supports that practice. Even churches may expect people to be busy all the time, so that Sunday can become the busiest day of the week. Communities, not just individuals, need to support each other in Christian practices. People in the community need to keep reminding each other that God intends us to rest one day a week. We need to encourage our pastors to take a day off, and to be a supportive network that makes it possible for them to do so.

We’re not going to get far in living a life that’s shaped by Christian practices without addressing the hold of consumerism on our lives and spirits. One of my favorite practices is what Don Saliers calls "singing our lives to God." There’s an enormous difference between music as a consumer item and as something into which we enter deeply -- something about which we’re knowledgeable, which engages us deeply in the world and draws out our gifts. Singing along in a congregation engages us in this way. We stop being consumers when we’re attentive to this kind of practice and dig into what it means.

Are we less adept at the Christian practices than our parents or grandparents were?

Every generation is a mixed bag. The young people who helped us write Way to Live were very hungry for the practices and, on their own, had found some wonderful ways of living them out. They showed hospitality in their openness to people from different groups, for example, and were aware of the emptiness of some of the promises of mass culture.

I had a noteworthy encounter with a grandmotherly woman who told me that she and her friends had read Practicing Our Faith and had said to one another, ‘Well, I already do these things. I keep the Sabbath and visit the sick and sing hymns." I said, "OK, but what about your children and your grandchildren?" She paused and said, "Oh, you’re right!"

Still, I don’t want to be urging us to go back to our grandparents’ time, since there was a closed-off quality to many of the churches of that time and people’s lives were narrow in ways ours aren’t.

Two generations ago, people probably were in closer touch with some specific practices than we are now, given the forces of consumer society. Making and sharing meals used to be a basic part of Christian life. It’s much less so in our fast-food culture. We can get our nutrition by simply popping commercially prepared food into the microwave. But by doing so we miss opportunities for engagement with one another and with creation through what we put on our table and the words we say around that table. At the same time, I encounter a lot of young people who are interested in where their food comes from and what’s happening to the animals and the workers who produce the food. We need to think about new ways to reclaim this time of nourishment as a time of blessing.

To follow up on the example of the grandmother: it seems that previously people lived out the practices unconsciously, and that now we need to be more conscious about them.

That’s correct. I’ve heard Jewish friends talk about how there used to be many more women in the community who just knew how to keep a kosher home and didn’t have to go to a book to figure it out. The knowledge was just passed down. Now it needs to be more deliberate. That’s true in Christian settings too. Even the most basic practices, like sharing a meal and saying grace, take some deliberation for people now.

Modern culture is perhaps more hostile to a Christian way of life?

1 wouldn’t want to say that. The issue is not whether the culture is hostile but whether Christians can see what is going on around them and respond in appropriate ways. If we remain open, we might find examples of excellent practices among people and in places where we would never have expected to find them.

I prefer to talk about resisting certain aspects of the dominant culture rather than about opting out of it. We need to build patterns of resistance into our Christian communities, but also to stay part of the larger community. We share the world and time with all our neighbors. God loves us all. God loves the world. Christians shouldn’t try to step away into utopian, separate groups, but rather find communal patterns of resistance that stretch us all toward the future.

Given that the practices are so important to the church and the living out of the faith, does your work lead to any specific proposal a about the shape of theological education? Do we need to rethink how ministers are trained and how theology is taught in light of the practices of faith?

I think that the question we are raising -- how do Christian practices add up to a way of life? -- is being raised in theological schools. The schools are asking, "How do we help students to integrate what happens in one class with what happens in another class?" "How does what happens in field education relate to what happens in people’s homes, in classrooms and in the library?" Reflection on practices can be one way of drawing the pieces of theological education into larger and more coherent wholes.

People are hungry for a more thoughtful. deliberate way of life, a way of life that’s engaged in community and care for creation, and responsive to God’s presence in the world. Theological schools can be places where this hunger becomes manifest, and where we explore what the tradition offers us as we try to live out such a life.

For our recent book Practicing Theology we gathered a group of theologians to reflect on what difference attention to practices would make to the study of theology. We’re very interested in how the doctrines and beliefs of the church grow out of communities of practice and also have implications for those communities. Theological schools themselves can experiment and exemplify a way of life shaped by Christian practices.

Practical theology -- theology that is addressed to the lives of communities and grows out of the lives of communities, theology that is done for the sake of a way of life -- is a growing, exciting dimension of theological studies. We’re realizing that it’s impossible to separate the life of real communities from the theology that matters to those communities. The Valparaiso Project is now in the process of becoming much more explicit about how our work is situated within practical theology and what its implications are for ministry.

Let’s take a specific kind of seminary course -- on preaching. What does reflection on practices tell us about the task of preaching?

Well, one of the practices we have highlighted is testimony -- truthful speech. We need to hear and speak the truth in our everyday lives. Preaching is one way in which the church tries to foster that practice. It’s important to realize that the preaching happening this week belongs to a long practice of faithful speech that has taken somewhat different forms in different times and cultures. Today’s preaching is part of an ongoing history and also contains the possibility of discovering new dimensions.

Like any practice, preaching is not the work of a single practitioner but is a shared task of the whole community. Though the preacher is the one in the pulpit. the purpose of the preacher’s activity is to help the whole community to engage and proclaim the word. It’s an opportunity for all the people to become more articulate about their lives and to be able to speak the truth to one another.

The question takes me back; in a way, to the opening question about defining a practice and why the practices are so important. Christian practices as I understand them are multifaceted. In each there’s a spiritual, liturgical, biblical doctrinal, historical and public policy dimension. Each has implications for personal, domestic, congregational and public life.

Does a focus on the practices suggest anything to help churches that are wrestling with a difficult issue such -- homosexuality?

I hope this approach will help churches build up a more positive culture rather than being so intent on tearing each other down. One of the things we made explicit in Way to Live is that we as authors weren’t primarily interested in giving readers a list of dos and don’ts. We wanted instead to help them see the positive life that is open to them -- to see how satisfying a life lived with integrity, honesty and mutual care can be.

Practicing Our Faith took a similar approach. The authors wanted to encourage reflection on how Christians can help each other embrace a life-giving way of life. When we were deciding what practices to include, we suddenly realized that we were probably the first recent group of church types who had met for several days without discussing sex. We knew this was a significant gap, but we had to wrestle with how to identify the relevant Christian practice. We came up with "honoring the body"

It seems to me that the challenge for the church is to capture a larger vision of the goodness of human embodiment and of the brokenness and sin in which we all participate. In her lovely chapter on "honoring the body" in Practicing Our Faith, Stephanie Paulsell writes about the deepest Christian beliefs concerning the human body. She encourages us to practice these every day in caring for our own bodies and the bodies of one another with tenderness and respect. In her book of the same name she offers some powerful examples of how same-sex partners do this. This more positive approach may not settle the questions in many people’s minds these days. But I do think that more attention to how we as church can better honor the body would provide a helpful context for present debates.

You’ve written a book on keeping the Sabbath. What has been your own experience with that practice?

I turned to it almost in desperation when I was a seminary professor and a new mother of twins. I was frantically busy and not very happy. It was a relief to realize that there is a commandment devoted to resting, to not working all the time. Attempting this unusual practice not only by worshiping but also by disengaging from the market economy one day a week gave me a respite and a weekly reminder of a more intentional way of living. But there are different stages of family life, stages in which keeping Sabbath has been more or less possible for us. It’s an ongoing negotiation.

As my children have become teenagers I’ve realized that this practice is especially hard for young people. Schools are not very sensitive to their need for rest. Many teenagers work too hard, whether it’s because they’re taking demanding courses or are working at fast-food places. It’s very difficult for them to have any control over their time. We can encourage them to reflect on this and support them as they try to find a way to have some Sabbath time.

How does the focus on practice change the way we think about youth ministry?

What we model in Way to Live is very different from the entertainment model of youth ministry that’s so widespread today -- where the basic idea is to get a young, charismatic person to keep the kids busy and make sure they have a good time. That model doesn’t invite young people into the shared life of Christian practices. We want to invite youth and adults to share life in Christ together. Since growing in the practices is a lifelong process, it makes sense to craft formation intergenerationally. Our approach also is different from the catechetical. We see catechesis as one of the ongoing practices of the church, and thus a part of youth formation, but only a part.

I remember myself as an insomniac nine-year-old, lying sleepless in bed after my parents had turned out the lights. In those self-centered, introspective days of childhood I hardly believed in the realty of the present. How could anything really happen? I wondered. Reality didn't seem real until it was past, when I could turn it over in my memory and find the meaning of it. A trip to the circus, being punished by my father, the appearance of light on water -- nothing became fully real for me until I could remember it and think about it.

So if I couldn't remember it, how was it possible that my parents could actually have been married and had a life together two whole years before I wen came into existence? For that matter, how was it possible that my mother could remember my own past when I couldn't?

Like most children, I was convinced that reality existed only insofar as I could remember, assimilate and think about it. Children can't help being narcissists, and they are always trying to make sense out of and control an adult reality far more complex than they can imagine. What is shocking to discover, however, is how much truth there is in the childhood understanding of the self as constituted by memory, and how destructive it can be to forget the implications of this.

A case in point: With the support of my mother and my aunts, I spent nine years weaving together into one story key family events of the past 120 years. My mother, aunts and surviving uncle supplied me with details I hadn't known, as well as new stories. The hard part was sifting and sorting the jumble of plots, metaphors, images, phrases, aphorisms, jokes, recipes, smells and sights to forge a single story. And it was impossible to write about any of it without living through it again, mind and body, in vivid, excruciating detail.

I was pleased with the results. Whatever the flaws in the project, I was sure I had transmitted faithfully and lovingly, and to the best of my ability, the collective family memory of joys, grief, successes and heartaches. I expected everyone to be pleased. Instead, family members were shocked and horrified. "How can you have said those things about your grandmother?" says one. "There is no reason to put that disgusting detail in this story," says another. "Nothing was the way you describe it," says a third. I've been shaken to the core by this reaction. Their attack on my memories feels like a denial of my very being.

What went wrong? First of all, I forgot the obvious. Though my memories do constitute my bones and flesh, other memories constitute the bodies and souls of other family members. I should have been prepared for this.

As a historian, I knew that every family member experiences the same event differently. Birth order, disposition, previous experiences, age, gender and the larger family dynamic all shape the lens through which each one sees the world. What I did not realize was how little we human beings really believe this when it comes close to home. I worked from the unconscious assumption that the family would share not only my memories but my interpretation of them.

I realize now that because I am a human in a fallen world, my being and my memory are flawed. Though reality is infinitely complex, each of us wants to believe that our memory alone defines reality. Thus we feud in our families, anathematize fellow Christians and demonize the stranger. No wonder Athanasius and his fourth-century friends insisted that for this lack of vision we need not just forgiveness, but the possibility that God will radically re-create our very being, including our self-centered vision.

In the incarnation, God offers this new creation. I cling to this promise as I pray for my family and for all of us who are flawed and yet desire God.

I find the return to school every fall very exciting. I like the start-up rituals. I still have to have new stuff -- pens, notebooks, calendars, and of course new shoes. I am glad to see the faces of my friends and colleagues again and to hear what they have been doing since I saw them last. I love to see former students again and meet new students. I’m eager for classes to start. I haven’t yet gotten behind on my paperwork and phone calls.

At the same time, there is always a certain amount of anxiety at this time of year. I worry about how I am going to allocate my time so that I can get everything done without killing myself. And I worry about whether, in the crush of the year’s activities, I can preserve my soul. I know I am not the only one who feels such ambivalence about the start of a new year, or who wonders how to get through the year without losing one’s soul, or one’s faith, or one’s intellectual integrity.

I have spent many months recently with Julian of Norwich, so let me relate what advice I think she would give us. She would tell us first of all that what we need is God.

God? That may seem a vague and simple-minded answer. But even if we accept it, we still have to know what actual resources we need, and what to do with those resources in order to seek and find God.

Julian would assure us that these resources are ones we do not have to go out of our way to acquire. In fact, we have had them all along. They are the capacities which belong to the image of God in us. She calls these capacities truth, wisdom and delight, and each corresponds to one of the persons of the Trinity. The capacity for truth "sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and of these two comes the third, and that is a marvelous delight in God, which is love. . ."

According to Julian, then, as beloved human beings created in the image of the Trinity, we already, right now, at this moment, have our resources for the year ahead: the capacities truly to see God who is the truth, to contemplate God who is wisdom, and to delight in God who is love.

As for how we arc to use these resources for seeking and finding God, I imagine Julian saying something like this: Get firmly in your mind that each of these three really does correspond to one of the three persons of the Trinity -- truth, to God the Father; wisdom, the ancient Sophia, to the second person, who is God our Mother; and love to the Holy Spirit. This means that none of these three human capacities can operate independently from the others and remain what it is meant to be. None can ultimately be opposed to the other two, or be separated from them, or he subordinate or superior to them any more than we could ever encounter one member of the Trinity without the other two.

Having insisted on the unity of our capacities, Julian would, I imagine, go on to talk about how we can exercise them specifically for seeking, finding and loving God: Your first capacity, for seeing the truth, gives you the ability to encounter God directly, to come face to face with God, she might say. And I would add, you need to exercise it continually so that you (lout forget that when you talk about God, you are talking about the one who is most fundamentally and deeply real. God is not a construct of the human mind any more than we are, and so cannot be reduced to anything we say about God.

Furthermore, unless you put yourself in the way of being encountered by the living God, rather than just thinking about God, or talking about God, or stating God’s position with respect to various moral issues, your work will be in vain.

I think Julian would go on to admonish us in something like these terms: If you intend to encounter God who is the truth, you cannot do so without the daily practice of prayer, no matter how truncated or inadequate it may seem to you to be. If you don’t already have such a practice, and you need help getting started, find help. If you do have one, let it evolve as it needs to evolve, but don’t give it up. Don’t forget, either, that Jesus said, "Where two or three are gathered, there I will be in the midst of them." Go to chapel regularly; participate in the sacraments. In regular worship you can certainly expect to encounter God who is truth.

But don’t practice your prayer and worship as though they are somehow more sacred than or set apart from "ordinary life." God who is truth is the Creator who is truly present in all that is created, and in all people as their truest selves. Be quite certain, therefore, that when you truly encounter another human being and look with the eyes of wisdom and love you are not only seeing them in truth, you are truly seeing and meeting God in them. So pay attention, and never scorn or dismiss anybody as unimportant or unworthy of you.

Be attentive to the students, teachers, staff and class-mates who may be very different from you; listen for God in all of them, even if you don’t think you’re going to find God there. Attend to your mail person, to sales folk in stores, to the old people who walk their dogs in front of your house. Especially be attentive to the situation of those in need whom you encounter face to face, or see from your car window, or read about in newspapers, magazines and books. Don’t be quick to deny their need, or explain it away or, worse, judge it. Never forget that you can’t talk profitably about God unless you are constantly trying to see God, for God is not the same as what we say about God.

This means that whatever we can learn that is real knowledge about anything is also knowledge of God who is holy wisdom. Don’t worry if the so-called relevancy of the sociology of religion, or medieval theology, or feminist or black theology, or the structure of the Bible, or the thought of Paul Tillich, or Hindu religion is not immediately apparent to you. If it describes God’s world and the people in it in all their aspects, it is describing something of God who is wisdom.

Pray, Julian would add, but also think through what comes to you in your prayer. Sing, listen to scripture, receive communion, but realize that using your imagination, mulling over what and whom you are met by in prayer, and bringing that together with what you are learning is the very stuff of the work you do in response to the grace of the Trinity.

As for your third capacity, to delight in God, Julian would say this: Delight is not something you do. It is your own response to God who is the Trinity, and yet it is given you.

It is given by God, but you must also understand that it is you who must exercise delight, as you exercise your senses through which you take in the world, though it is more fundamental than a sense. Indeed, delight in God is as necessary to your well-being as looking upon truth and contemplating wisdom. Delight is the means by which you see and understand the origin, meaning and goal of your life, the lives of those around you, and the world in which you dwell, all of which are "rooted and founded in God’s love"

The fact is, we are made for love, to bring joy to God because God loves us, to be loved by the God who delights in us, and to love God and God’s world and God’s creatures and take a deep delight in them in return. Indeed, love is the courteous, familiar ground of our own care of them, for God’s love is the ground of everything.

Love, for Julian, was indeed everything. As Julian was told in a final vision more than 15 years after her first revelation:

In this tough time, to our fears that we will lose our soul, our integrity, our very selves, Julian repeats the words of Jesus, "Don’t be afraid." It is, indeed, God we need, but the God who is truth, wisdom and love we already have. And if we remain in God, if we "remain in love," and are faithful to the best of our ability, God will, to use Julian’s words, "keep us safe" in the work we do.