Simple Spirituality by Christopher L. Heuertz

Author:Christopher L. Heuertz [Heuertz, Christopher L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2009-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.[14]

All of these are good questions, and Shi’s conclusions are pacifying observations, but most of the questions, and most of the typical answers, are about what we have, want, or need. I wonder if the questions shouldn’t be more about what others don’t have, still want and desperately need.

But these sorts of questions often make us feel bad. Then we’re at risk of being motivated to figure out a simplicity that is actually narcissistic. I’ve always appreciated Richard Foster’s staple read on the topic, Freedom of Simplicity, especially the warning about our tendency to turn simplicity against itself. He writes, “Most dangerous of all is our tendency to turn any expressions of simplicity into a new legalism.”[15] Well, now I’m in big trouble. Simplicity for simplicity’s sake is really only legalism—that tyrannical feast of appearances where we put on airs to impress one another. David Chronic writes, “Attaching to Jesus leads to detaching from the world and to simplicity of lifestyle. This is not simplicity for the sake of simplicity, but simplicity for the sake of relationship—relationship with God and relationship with each other.”[16]

When we embrace simplicity for simplicity’s sake, we wind up smelling foul, inauthentic. The spirit of true simplicity, however, is redemptive. We see Jesus laying down his life. We see Jesus celebrating the One who gives everything. We see Jesus forgoing nonvalues as he embraces the true values of the kingdom of God.

This is what the prophet Isaiah was pointing to in his writings on the aspects of true fasting (Isaiah 58). Isaiah suggests that fasting isn’t simply to go without food, but to take that food and feed the hungry with it. True fasting is meant to create an openness and emptiness in us to allow those on the margins to have their needs met and fulfilled, to clothe the naked and offer a place for the wanderer to stay.

Growing up, I really messed up fasting. I used to think of it as a way to manipulate God, sort of like putting God in a wrestling submission hold (not unlike a spiritual half-nelson-chicken-wing or a figure-four-leg-lock). I wanted fasting to make God do something for me—I wanted it to force God to answer my prayers. If I don’t eat, then “God, you better hear my prayers, and you better answer them! Just look at me, so pathetic and miserable in my hunger.” Fasting became the puppet strings fastened to God’s arms and legs, and my going without food was supposed to give me the power to pull on those strings.

Isaiah deconstructs that paradigm and reconstructs one built around justice. The prophet shows us

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