The Christian discipline of simplicity is an inward reality that results in an outward life-style. Both the inward and outward aspects of simplicity are essential. We deceive ourselves if we believe we can possess the inward reality without its having a profound effect on how we live. To attempt to arrange an outward life-style of simplicity without the inward reality leads to deadly legalism.
Simplicity begins in inward focus and unity. It means to live out of what Thomas Kelly called ‘The Divine Center.’ Kierkegaard captured the nucleus of Christian simplicity in the profound title of his book, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
Experiencing the inward reality liberates us outwardly. Speech becomes truthful and honest. The lust for status and position is gone, because we no longer need status and position. We cease from showy extravagance, not on the grounds of being unable to afford it, but on the grounds of principle. Our goods become available to others. We join the experience that Richard E. Byrd recorded in his journal after months alone in the barren Arctic: ‘I am learning … that a man can live profoundly without masses of things.’
Contemporary culture lacks both the inward reality and the outward life-style of simplicity.
Inwardly modern man is fractured and fragmented. He is trapped in a maze of competing attachments. One moment he makes decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others will think of him. He has no unity or focus around which life is orientated.
Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We must clearly understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. ‘We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.’4 Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.
–Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, Chapter 6
Yes, but for one to have such a dedicated simplicity of living (a form of ascesis, really), one must first have a whole and functional account of life and its purpose. The materialist/secularist religion of Consumerism (to which many supposed christians really belong) seeks to provide just that, though it cannot of course achieve this. Sadly, much contemporary “spirituality” and “religion” simply does not provide a total vision for life, where each aspect is sacramentally linked to the whole. Classical Anglicanism did, I believe, but what has replaced it in our tradition does not. This is one of the reasons Orthodoxy is so appealing to many: it does. However, it is rigorous and demanding. There is no authentic Christianity without ascesis.