Waking Up to the Gifts of Simplicity
The First Sunday of Advent
Reflection By Cynthia Kittredge
Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep!
- Romans 13:11
Advent startles us with this rousing charge from St. Paul, “Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep ... !” When we “wake up,” we experience a conversion, a shift from a state of oblivion to alertness, and from unconsciousness to awareness.
If waking up speaks of conversion, what is it we are turning away from when we don’t respond to the invitation to practice simplicity? In non-church language simplicity is sometimes called “minimalism.” In the Christian tradition simplicity is translated as poverty, purity, or singleness. Simplicity’s opposites include wealth, luxury, excess, complexity, distraction, multiplicity, dissolution. So to wake up to practice simplicity might mean to focus, to reduce, to concentrate, to make single.
I live a rich, wonderful life that I keep track of by lists, lists organized with subheadings and subordinate categories, lists that are stored in paper notebooks and Dropbox and Google Docs. I’ve bought task management software to search and file and keep it all under control lest I forget a good idea, or let an obligation slip away.
My lists are filled with mostly good things, like friends to stay in touch with, cool projects to tackle, books to read, and ways to improve. But, there are a lot of them, and with every new list, the process gets a bit more complicated. Surfing and scrolling have multiplied the tags and subfolders needed to corral everything. Vague unease becomes obsession, followed by exhaustion, and ending in self-judgment. And then I fantasize that maybe I’ll get a word processing program that eliminates distraction, get rid of all my random clothes and replace them with a capsule wardrobe, outfit a van, or hit the Appalachian Trail.
Or in Advent, I could choose to wake up and ask God to remind me to practice what I know about simplicity. I know that when I go on retreat with the Brothers at the monastery, I am able to eliminate so many activities: phoning, shopping, cooking, working, and especially talking. While there, when I commit to just one or two practices, like praying and sleeping, I can forget the whole list I left behind and not worry a bit about what I might be missing. The truth is there is nothing missing, no lack or want, no FOMO (fear of missing out). All will be well, and it already is. I will go home refreshed and renewed and make wiser choices among the many, many good and right things to do.
I’ve learned a lot about simplicity from the activities in life that I love. From making art, I’ve learned about the fine distinctions of focus and attention. “In this painting, what do you want the viewer to pay attention to?” asks my teacher. “In the puddles of color and the busy marks, where is the focus?” And from preaching, I’ve learned to let go of all the extra words and go with one vivid image, like the one from St. Paul. And from traveling, I’ve learned that less is more. What a relief when I don’t have to sit on the roller bag to zip it up!
This Advent, I’m going to pray for the discipline and courage to more fully embrace a practice of simplicity, trusting that this will offer much fruit, including improving my ability to concentrate, more fully capturing and expressing the heart of the matter, and in letting go in order to wake up and embrace the beauty of the moment I’m in.