Archive for the 'Psychology' Category

Are We Genetic Cogs in a Growing Malignancy?

admin July 20th, 2010

Yes it has been some time since I last posted to this blog. Still suffering from a bit of the “I’m not a good enough person to write this” miasma. But there are issues of simple living that deserve to be discussed and written about so I’m back in the game.

Several people have posted replies lately suggesting that what is most valuable to them is to hear how other people are struggling with living simply on a day-to-day basis, so I’ll share a dilemma I’ve just been through.

You might have guessed, if you read very many posts on this blog, that I’m a bit of a Luddite. Actually I do believe that part of our current environmental, economic, and spiritual crisis is that humanity has grown and behaved like a cancer over the past few centuries (some writers say far longer). It began as a virtually unnoticeable spot on the earth’s lungs, but over the years grew faster and faster until it has metastasized to every corner of the earth putting the earth and humanity in peril.

I believe that our cancerous behavior is driven both by of our inflated egos and our over-developed technology working in tandem. This dynamic has propelled us to exponentially use up much of the earth’s bounty and pollute what we haven’t already used up. This process has dramatically accelerated with the digital revolution, geometrically enlarging our blighting footprint.

Many, if not most, Americans would say that this process has been a very good thing because it has made us a great country, given us comfort, good health, longer lives, easier work, and much wealth. How could you argue with that?

Easy… when you look beyond these shallow benefits (shallow, compared to the health of the rest of the world) and look at all of the effects of this industrialzing-digitizing process.

BUT, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, even I, the great Luddite critic, love technological toys: computers, phones, cameras, etc. On the other hand, recognizing the ecological and human moral dilemma they create, I have tried to limit my use of these gadgets as much as I can and I encourage others to do likewise.

We were about the last people on the block to have a cell phone (got one because my wife’s old car was in constant danger of breaking down), then kept the first one so long that people were laughing at our big clunky fossil. I keep desktop computers for many years, patching and swapping out components. Don’t have a PDA, GPS, or book reader – which sometimes leaves my friends and family shaking their heads.

We do the same thing with old fashioned technologies like air conditioning which we run only in a couple of rooms when the temp is above 95 degrees, then shut them off.

These greenish practices certainly do not make us subsistence farmers with kerosene lanterns and a mule. We still have an urban/suburban lifestyle here in the close-in D.C. suburbs. But we try to slow down enough and live responsibly enough to make a difference and still be able to live in an urban setting.

So it’s a moral dilemma every time I have to decide whether or not to buy another gadget. I have avoided buying a laptop/notebook computer for years – really didn’t need one even if it would have been handy on occasion. But (there’s always a ‘but’) I decided that we needed one for our puppet theater business in order to run our audio and back stage cueing.

When I was close to making this decision several things began happening in rapid sequence.

    1. The adrenalin started pumping: “A new Toy! Oh boy! It’ll be sooo cool. We’ll be just like everyone else! Oh my God… we’ll be just like everyone else. Oh NO!”

    In fact there is recent research that shows this adrenalin rush is a real physiological change that occurs when we are making a buying decision. It is what energizes compulsive shopping, but it happens to all of us, even ME! Oh please God, don’t let it happen to me! But it does.

    2. And then the guilt and bargaining set in. “But we really need it. My memory is fading fast (aging) so I need the cue support during shows, and with worsening cataracts I need a big display so I can see where we are in the script; we need it to run a digital projector; Ok, OK, we’ll buy a cheap refurb; we have held off buying one for years, so it’s OK now; you can’t do business in today’s world without one; we’ll be able to work on scripts while on the road…”

Endless BS.

But could we really get along without one?

Yep – sure could! We could continue to be a traditional, old fashioned puppet show instead of one that’s more state-of-the-art, and I could suck it up and just deal with my infirmities – no one has thrown us out of their school or church yet because of them.

Of course I bought one!

The chemistry of seduction got me, and it probably will be useful from time to time.

Here’s my question: how can I continue wearing my Luddite T-shirt while warning about a technologically driven “end of the world” while ‘buying-in’ to the cancer I know is eating away at God’s world?

Sure, I don’t buy electronics very often, but every bit matters.

Almost everyone I’ve explained this to says “Oh it’s just fine – it’s for the business.” But is it really? Should ‘doing businesses justify everything we do whether it’s destructive or not? Business is part of the cancer along with our individual egocentric wants.

And is all this simply over-reasoning and creating a smoke screen to cover up the fact that my ego caved-in to the adrenaline rush? Am I just a genetic cog in the wheel of an ecological cancer? Is there no hope for us as a species?

Please let us all know how you handle these things by posting a reply.

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Simple Living Easter Resurrection

admin April 4th, 2010

Resurrection Sunday, 2010

Wonderful revelation this Easter morning in, of all places, The Washington Post business section!

Michelle Singletary, in The Color of Money column, reviewed a new book by Gail Blanke entitled Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life, (Springboard Press, $13.99) which of course I haven’t read yet, but will shortly.

The point of the book is that much of the stuff we have (junk and clutter, savings in the bank and mental junk as well), not only doesn’t make us more secure, as we have been taught, but rather when we lose these things as we inevitably will at some point, it causes us to feel very insecure, sometimes to the point of crumbling if what we lose is important enough.

All the while we are collecting and maintaining this stuff we are not free. We are prisoners to it because of the debt it creates in order to buy and maintain it, the pressure to make money to support it, striving to make more money to get out of our increasing debt or, worse, buying even more security blankies (my term) to bolster our sagging egos.  Then of course there is the need for either more space to keep it in, or suffer a loss of living space as we give it over to storage, not to mention having to live with our irritation, stress, and possible depression around having to live in the midst of it all. It gets in our way and slows us down.

On the flip side, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, when, as Gail tells us, we get rid of all those useless security blankies we miraculously find that we not only feel just as secure without them, we actually feel more secure because we are free of it and the burdens it creates for us. Getting rid of it frees us to begin finding out who we are or who we want to be, since we may not know who we or God wants us to be because we’ve been hiding behind our stuff, lo these many years.

Gail says we should throw away 50 things because throwing away our blankies is a cumulative experience in which success at throwing things away breeds still more success and leads to more and even joyful throwing away – our power over our stuff grows while our self-esteem and freedom grows along with it. We also begin to realize the real value of things, not the value we fantasize it will give us before buying it.

I won’t go into the details Michelle Singletary lays out in her review about how this all works because I want to get to the part about my Easter simple living revelation.

Simple Living Easter Resurrection

Easter is about resurrection and new life for all of us, and Lent is about sacrifice or “giving up.” Christian simple livers understand that living simply with less stuff opens a door to new life that is not contingent on physical stuff, and that new life becomes fuller as we deepen our commitment to living a life as much for others as ourselves.

Giving things up for Lent should not be an exercise in self-flagellation just for the sake of experiencing pain or loss. Instead it is intended to be a time of growth in which we re-discover ourselves by getting rid of the things in our lives that separate us from God and from others. For most of us that would mean our stuff and our irrational emotional attachment to it.

So, here’s my revelation, and I wish I had had it a couple months ago: The throwing out of 50 things would be an excellent Lenten discipline which would not only teach us something important about who we are, our relationship to God and to others, but would do something concrete and necessary for our neighbors everywhere by decreasing the size of our ecological footprints, and would allow us to give our stuff to those who need it much more than we do.

Then, Easter morning, we can wildly celebrate Jesus’ resurrection right along with our own. We will have completed our own Lenten hard work and will emerge from the tomb right along with Jesus.

There could hardly be a better Easter than that!

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I’m a Hypocrite

admin March 3rd, 2010

I just have to clear the air about something before I go on to write any more posts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul’s letter to the Romans. Our adult Sunday school class is doing a study of Romans at the moment, but what has been running through my mind has less to do with the class and more to do with my bumbling, stumbling, sometimes less than simple or faithful life.

I am particularly struck with Paul’s self-revelation that:

“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:18-20, NIV).

Oh, that’s me through and through! Often as I sit writing these posts I begin to feel hypocritical because they don’t often describe what goes on in my soul or my addled brain. And what goes on in there isn’t always so pure, giving, or simple as some of my posts might imply.

I have written a lot about the foundation of Christian simple living being love and compassion for God’s people and his creation. But I have not written enough about my own struggle trying to be loving and compassionate while at the same time, being far from the genuinely caring person I would like to be and should be.

I have always had a real problem with a low-grade selfishness and defensive anger. I’m pretty good at keeping them under wraps with other people (not to mention while writing blog posts), but they are always lurking around inside my head, twisting my feelings and perceptions. I tend to get frustrated and angry easily when things aren’t going my way, and all of these un-loving traits really put a damper on actually being the kind of person Jesus asks us to be. It is said that loving kindness is supposed to be our natural response to the love God shows for us. But for me it isn’t natural and too often isn’t there at all.

I feel like Paul even to his point of writing “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” Often my anger at myself and others occurs in an instant – so fast that it takes me by surprise, as if someone else were controlling me. Now, having some professional background in the mental health field, I know that isn’t the case, but it sure feels that way and I know exactly what Paul was writing about.

It can be very depressing because I work hard at trying to change these irrational feelings. I pray and meditate on it daily, and try to become more like what Christ asks of us. But it’s a long hard struggle and sometimes (OK, often) not successful. I feel like giving up.

There is now substantial brain research showing that far more of our behavior and feelings are genetic, chemical, and neurological than mental health professionals used to believe, so some of this comes with us into the world rather than it all being intra-psychic processes. Like substance abuse, these ‘innate’ emotions can make us feel like they’re totally out of our control.

Of course, both from a psychological and faith point of view, regardless of how in-born some of these traits might be, they still belong to us, and we have a responsibility to the rest of the world (as well as ourselves) to tame them and make the best of them. I believe that was inherent in Christ’s message.

So once in a while, I remember that I have made some changes over the years. I have become a little more compassionate and a little less reactive through meditation and prayer. It’s just that I’m not anywhere near where I should be, and I’m terrified that my blog posts make me out to be, what I might call, an intuitive lover: one who loves instinctively and well, and therefore lives a very joyful and naturally simple life.

After all, only someone who is really good at all this, and is well-practiced and disciplined in compassion and living simply would be in a position to write about it for the whole world, right?

Not in my case! I write, not because I’m so good at living this way, but because I think these things are desperately important, and that we should all be working on becoming compassionate Christian simple livers. I believe it’s what Christ expects of us, so we all have to do what we can – being on the journey together.

So I find some comfort in knowing that Paul had his moments too. I guess when you get right down to it though, I’m a neophyte at walking the compassionate talk, and at least a little bit hypocritical. I guess it’s another thing I’ll have to make the best of, because here it is, and it ain’t going away!

So I’ll press on, hoping that you will understand.

Thanks for reading.

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“The Perils of Prosperity” and Christian Anarchy

admin February 2nd, 2010

Once again I’ve found strong support for Christian Simple Living in the mainstream media! Not only that, but there’s some support there for believing that Christian Anarchy might help save us from ourselves. Of course the writer of this article probably didn’t recognize that rather obscure point.

Robert J. Samuelson, contributing editor of Newsweek and The Washington Post, wrote an article in the 2/8/10 edition of Newsweek entitled The Perils of Prosperity in which he argues that having our economy go bust every now and then is a very good thing. That’s because busts tend to make us aware of the riskiness of the financial world and its institutions which in turn makes us more cautious in our dreams for our financial future as well as in our actions.

But it is in his reasoning that simple living principles stand out.

I should say at the outset that some of my interpretations of his article are based on Christian Anarchy principles… and yes, I did promise in my last post that I would make having a discussion of Christian Anarchy my next project, so let this post be the opening salvo of that discussion!

Samuelson’s thesis is that all of us, not just the bankers, brokers, real estate agents, and the failure of government regulation, were responsible for this recession, and if we continue to delude ourselves with the thought that these “bad guys” really were the culprits, then we are simply setting the stage for the next big recession.

He says, very insightfully, that “Greed and shortsightedness didn’t suddenly burst forth; they are constants of human nature.” Ah yes, we are all fallen people! So if these nasty traits aren’t new, then what really did cause the recession?

Complacency! We were lulled into the ego-centric belief that the economy and financial system had become much safer than history actually demonstrated which encouraged all of us to take unreasonable risks while expecting much more personal wealth than was either sensible or supported by long term economic history. We only saw the short term economic story of the past 25 years during which the U.S. had the greatest run of prosperity in its history. With our myopic glasses on we imagined that our economic system was nearly perfect or invulnerable and that it would last virtually forever. This prosperity only led us to engage in more and more “self-defeating expectations and behaviors. The huge profits made in these decades by investors conditioned many to believe in the underlying benevolence of financial markets.”

Samuelson notes that modern democracies have made it their jobs to try to create as much prosperity as possible for everyone, i.e. they try to create “perpetual booms,” better known as perpetual motion machines or Ponzi schemes. How else is one to stay in office??

But the author concludes that “The cruel contradiction is that this promise itself may become a source of instability because the more it is attained, the more people begin acting in ways that ultimately invite its destruction…. The quest for ever-more and ever-better prosperity subverts itself.”

The connection to Christian simple living here is fairly obvious: More is not better, and the never-ending struggle for ‘more’ not only does not bring happiness, but rather too often brings disaster.

Here I would like to inject the notion of Christian Anarchy, and how Samuelson’s thesis supports it as part of our simple living practices.

First, does the term “Christian Anarchy” mean that Christian congregations should gather downtown and throw bombs?

Mmm… not quite.

The Greek term ‘anarchy’ has two parts: the prefix “an-” is the same as “un-” in English which means ‘not’ rather than ‘anti-‘ or ‘against’, and ‘archy’ means ‘ruler’ or ‘power’. It is generally applied to governments or other power-wielding organizations,  say like The Church. So broadly defined, anarchy would mean ‘un-power’ or “no power.”

The late Vernard Eller, a Church of the Brethren pastor and theologian who has written extensively on Christian Anarchy, used the term ‘Arky’ for short, and defines it as almost any government or other type of organization that “claims to be of primal value for society.” That would include governments of all types and most other organizations such as political parties, fraternal organizations, churches, schools, philosophies, and even the Woman’s Club! All of these make some claim to our allegiance and they all attempt to govern some part of our beliefs, values, or actions for the, ahem, “greater good.”

Here’s the hitch: for Christians the only real power is God, and all other powers are subservient to Him. So Christians owe their allegiance only to God and therefore cannot owe it to any other person or organization, especially if those organizations require you to believe or act in any way inconsistent with what God tells us to do or believe.

Why?

Because only God is entirely dependable and faithful to us. All other people and organizations are fallible (often very fallible) and frequently cannot be trusted, after all, as I mentioned above, we are all fallen people. Even the very best of us. Even those we have trusted for years and years. Sooner or later they all let us down in some way, and not infrequently, catastrophically. Even “The Church.” Think of all the ills perpetrated by various factions of “The Church” over the centuries – the torturing and killing; the collaborations with illegal and/or immoral people, clergy immorality, illegal or immoral financial dealings, etc.!

Thus, according to Eller, for followers of Christ “Anarchy (unarkyness)… is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of; nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys. And “Christian Anarchy”… is a Christianly motivated “unarkyness.” Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of All Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies…” (sic.)*

This is at once both a theological issue and a practical issue. Here, today, I’m focusing on the practical part because the Samuelson article is such a good example of what happens when we have faith in the world’s arkys – they mess with us!

This is pretty much what Samuelson tells us. We gave our allegiance to the brokers, real estate agents, bankers, and economists, naively believing that whatever they told us was right. We literally invested everything we had with these folks. We trusted a human ‘arky’ to do what human arkys can’t do, and which Jesus told us specifically not to do.

Truth-be-told, we did it because the promises they, and all the rest of consumer society told us, sounded soooo good, we just wanted to believe it – we just wanted to have it… all!

So we gave up any pretense of believing and acting on what Jesus taught us about what’s important in life –particularly that we should never put our trust in money or goods because they never serve us well. Rather we were taught to live simply and honestly and not to love money.

We gave our faith and allegiance to “the masters of the universe” and consumer society in general. We allowed them to lead us into this pit, then suffered as we crashed and burned together with The Masters of the Universe (although they are rich and don’t care).

A little Christian anarchy a few years back would have served us well.

More on Christian anarchy in the next post.

*Taken from Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers, Vernard Eller. Online book at http://www.hccentral.com/eller12/index.html

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“Just War Theory” And Simple Living

admin January 15th, 2010

Obama, Niebuhr, “Just War Theory,” and simple living are all of a piece.

It’s time for me to comment a bit on political and world affairs.

I hesitate to go there because this arena has become so filled with hate and vitriol. I also believe that we can live as Christians regardless of what any government or political party does or doesn’t do. However our congregation’s adult Sunday school has been discussing President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and his use of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Just War Theory in it. This got me thinking about the theory, foreign policy, Christian morality, and its relationship to Christian simple living.

Niebuhr, of course, was one of America’s preeminent protestant theologians in the 20th Century who taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary. He is known for his mentoring relationship with German minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, his writings on Just War Theory, and a number of critical books on other theological topics.

Niebuhr and others, most recently Barak Obama in his Nobel speech, claim that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi-style nonviolence never successfully stops wars or conflicts. They suggest that Gandhi or King could never have succeeded in stopping or preventing the Second World War by talking with Adolf Hitler, for instance.

The theory holds that war and conflict are permanent parts of human life because of original sin, i.e., we are ‘fallen’ imperfect people, and we will always be falling into conflict. Because we live in this sinful world, therefore, we will be forced to exercise power in order to prevent the world from collapsing into chaos, which would not be the Christian thing to do. Rather than merely trying to prevent war through ineffective nonviolent strategies, we should strive to make war as moral as possible by preventing more suffering than is necessary.

The fundamental principles for doing this are that:

  • War must always be a last resort;
  • Force must always be proportional to the threat (never more than an eye for an eye…);
  • Civilians must be spared whenever possible.

So what in the world does this have to do with Christian simple living?

Christian simple living as I’ve defined it, is based on Jesus’ teaching that we should above all else, love and care for others and not engage in war or other acts that are destructive to people. This is what I call “Kingdom thinking.” It is a kingdom where we put our egos in our back pockets and consider the welfare of our neighbors first, no matter how far away or how much we might disagree or argue with them.

Part of doing that is to live simply so that we don’t use up more than our share of things, or use our ‘wealth’ or its accumulation, to abuse, oppress, or injure others, or injure creation as a whole which would be destructive to everyone. Rather we are to use our resources and our energy to build-up others, i.e., the community and the nations, as a whole.

This is a holistic, far-sighted, and patient approach to life which I think is at considerable odds with Just War Theory.

I believe that the notion of the just war is based on the brain wiring we are all, unfortunately, born with. That is, we are biologically and emotionally pre-programmed to use fight-or-flight responses. If a threat of any kind arises, we automatically want to either fight back (go for the jugular) or flee from the threat. Neither of these, of course, leads to peace.

The fight-flight response pretty much prevents us from engaging in long-term, proactive prevention and peacemaking efforts – the kind of thing Jesus has been asking us to do. In fact, much of the peacemaking that does go on today is focused on stopping existing conflicts, and even though that is a step in the right direction, it is not based on long-range or holistic thinking. Reducing current conflicts means that we are still focused on the conflict rather than on preventing future conflicts in the first place.

Even phrasing this as prevention is off-target because the term ‘prevention’ by definition assumes there are anticipated conflicts that we want to avoid. This is still reactive rather than proactive. Being proactive, in this case, means creating the fundamental conditions that ensure peace, period. This would mean, among other things, creating healthy interpersonal, social, economic, and international conditions which optimize the quality of life for everyone. Prevention efforts usually focus on altering only those conditions which affect the current conflict. Although the ‘healthy conditions’ might be preventative, the thinking and psychology behind them and the strategies and tactics used to create them are just not the same thing as prevention.

Under such optimized living conditions, people would tend to feel more fairly treated, would have most basic needs met, and would have better tools and resources for dealing fairly with disagreements long before they became conflicts or wars. I say this having spent a great deal of my career in the health promotion and disease prevention business, particularly substance abuse prevention. So I’ve had some time to think about it.

Our knee-jerk fight-flight response usually kicks-in so quickly that we don’t often give ourselves the time to learn or practice being proactive. We don’t have the time to practice peace! We only have time for fighting the next war or, at best, intervening once a war is about to start. Long term Kingdom Thinking requires patience and understanding so it’s usually at best an afterthought for us – after we’ve counted all the bodies.

Here, then, is my biggest objection to Just War Theory: it enables us, or traps us in the fight-flight vicious circle, because it always leaves open a large opportunity to give up on learning, understanding, patience, and peace, and instead to reach for a gun – fast, because it has been humanity’s accepted way of dealing with things. It’s a huge loophole, which we most often make use of, that actually prevents us from ever learning to do it right.

So day-by-day we get further and further from the Kingdom, and more and more entrenched in the darkening vicious circle of fight-flight and war as our preferred way of life.

So what are Christian Simple Livers to do? Do we have a role to play here?

One of the just war issues is that nations and their governments are constitutionally incapable of keeping the peace through peaceful means. That was Niebuhr’s whole point. Fallen people and their governments can’t seem to do without war. And Obama was in total agreement.

Truth be told, if I were president, I would adopt the same Just War stance even in spite of my Christian beliefs and rantings about Kingdom Thinking.

The secular world of nations and governments is mired deeply in its conflictual DNA as a way of governing and surviving. Obama and Niebuhr might be right that even a Gandhi couldn’t have succeeded against a Hitler.

But I think that is exactly the point that Jesus was trying to make about the Church and the Kingdom. It isn’t for everyone! Perhaps it can never be for everyone. But it can happen – in the Church, if we take it seriously – we just never have. A community of believers can function in this way through care and concern for each other, even those with whom we have very strong disagreements. With faith we can learn to do it. It has been done before.

I do believe that people who are intent on it, and have faith in it, and have faith in God, can create a better community and a better society at least within the bounds of the church community. And it may well spill beyond the church community as it often has in the past. We just need a lot more genuine Christian community based on living simply, and still more spillage into the secular world. Let’s think in terms of millennia here, not just a few years. But even in a few millennia I don’t believe it will be for everyone, as Jesus said.

This is my vision for the foundations of Christian simple living: We are called apart to behave differently – to take a radically different path. We don’t need to avoid the world as the Amish do so as not to be dirtied by it, but to work with Jesus in creating the Kingdom, while being “in the world” but not a part of it. This is a mark of The Church. If we can learn to live simply, spare the earth, and act in just and compassionate ways with each other, we will have taken a few more steps toward Kingdom Thinking and keeping the peace. And we can continue taking more and more steps toward creating equitable and just foundations for a more peaceful world as we mature in Christian simple living.

Within The Church – within this (potentially) blossoming Kingdom, we don’t need Just War Theory – it would destroy us.

This approach is very much in line with what has become known as “Christian Anarchy” which I am a great fan of. I keep threatening to write a few posts on this and have yet to do it, so maybe that will be my next project.

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Simple Living Issues on the Front Page

admin January 4th, 2010

Well here it is: three different articles related directly to simple living and the environment – all in the same edition of The Sunday Washington Post (1/3/10). The stars must be aligning just right!

When our simple living concerns serendipitously show up all at once in the headlines of one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, then maybe our time has come… or not. I always get overly excited when things like this happen, as though our world is really, finally about to change for the better. I can’t help but think that it has to be more than just a coincidence. Maybe our collective consumer desperation over our deteriorating financial and economic situation has finally culminated in a rush to sanity!

Then my memory kicks in and I recall that in the past such rushes to sanity have quickly pooped-out when the heat of the crisis abates and most of us revert to type.

But there is always a glimmer of hope that even if the sanity doesn’t last long, that at least a few people will have learned a little about a better way of living and a few more people may actually have tried living a little better – a baby step toward lasting sanity. And I really do think that happens often enough that it’s worth writing and talking about.

At any rate, I commend these articles to you along with a brief summary of each.

Sink Your Teeth into a Fast, Michelle Singletary

Michelle, who writes the Color of Money column in The Post, recommends a 21 day financial fast in which we buy only necessities by curbing our need to consume. Several families took her up on the fast and the article reports on their experiences.

She advocates the fast for people for whom the stress of money causes pain with a spouse, friends or family, or for people who are worried about their retirement or college savings, or if they just don’t have enough to get to the end of the month, i.e., it’s for most of us.

The fast instructs us not to ‘shop’ (or window shop, which she says, is merely shopping for entertainment – a definite no-no) not to use credit cards (cash only), and not to buy anything that is not an absolute necessity like food. No going out to restaurants or fast food emporiums, not even a coffee on the way to work, and no buying gifts or gift cards.

On the gift-giving issue, Michelle tells us that, like most simple livers already know, we can give ourselves or hand made things instead.

And on using plastic: it makes buying too thoughtless and easy. Even if we pay off the card every month, the ease of it causes all of us to buy more than we need.

Michelle also advises folks to make a budget and stick to it, explaining that budgeting is not about you, it is about good stewardship, using well what God has given you.

There are many more very thoughtful items in the financial fast guidelines, so click on the link above and take a look at the entire article.

Happy Talk, Carol Graham

Carol Graham is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. Her book, Happiness around the World: the Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires, will be on book shelves this month, and her article in The Post hits a few of her book’s key points, including:

There is a pattern for those who are happy:

    A stable marriage, good health, and enough (but not too much) income.
    Not surprisingly, events such as divorce, unemployment, or economic instability are terrible for it.

But strangely, we tend to adapt to both prosperity and adversity, i.e. we can have virtually everything and be miserable as well as being cheerful during tremendous adversity. Where our adaptive ability often fails us is around uncertainty. This is difficult for most of us to adapt to and it is under these conditions that many of us feel the least happy.

Carol’s team’s studies in Russia and Peru showed that those who made the greatest income gains were, ironically, the most critical of their economic situation while those with the least income gains were, on average, more satisfied. Of course, she explains, the frustrated achievers may have made gains precisely because they were discontent in the first place.

But the bottom line here is that, as a number of recent studies have shown, our western, First World assumptions about wealth and possessions making us happy are simply bogus.

Beyond recycling and light bulbs, Juliet Eilperin

Finally, a story that once again not only demonstrates how far behind the rest of the industrialized world the U.S. is with regard to the environment and climate change, but also shows how those who are way ahead of us are becoming missionaries to us, the former (how embarrassing) leaders of the technological world.

A Swedish experiment aimed at helping U.S. citizens understand that a lifestyle that curbs greenhouse-gas emissions is not necessarily oppressive, just different, has selected a number of American families to be “Climate Pilots”.

Under the coaching of Swedish volunteers, several Virginia families are installing high-tech greenhouse gas saving devices and changing their daily routines to greatly reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. In addition to installing such technologies as geothermal heat pumps, these families are also using a number of low-tech strategies such as eating much less meat to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by farm animals.

The author reports that Americans each emit 23.5 metric tons (that’s nearly 26 tons U.S.) of greenhouse gases per year, 4 times the world average! The average for the European Union countries is 10.3 tons per capita while Sweden is now at about 7.4 tons. Sweden has made climate change a central pillar of their domestic and foreign policy for over 10 years. The city of Kalmar for instance will be fossil fuel-free by 2030. Several Kalmar families visited VA to coach the climate pilots there how to do it themselves.

Sweden has accomplished this by making climate change a national priority such that every community has a climate and energy adviser, and the government has launched “study circles” on climate across the nation during the ‘90’s. The article also makes the point that Sweden, along with other European countries, has not succumbed to the American pathology of believing that individual’s rights and freedoms must always trump the common good, no matter how many people may be hurt by that kind of ego-centric living.

Post Script

Perhaps Christians who live simply may be able to reach other Americans with the message that it is our community, whether it is our local neighborhoods, or the nation as a whole, that is at stake here. It is no longer about ‘me’, but care for all of us and all of God’s creation that is paramount, not my right to have a Hummer!

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