Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona --

In Living More with Less, Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji.

Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.”

Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room.

She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.”

Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him.

“Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.”

“Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage.

This forever changed Marie’s relationship to paper.

Doris Janzen Longacre writes: “A typical North American reaction to that story is likely to be one of these two statements: ‘Okay, how? How does throwing out blank on one side paper affect people on the other side of the globe?’ OR ‘What you say just makes me feel guilty. It’s not good to raise all this guilt. We don’t know what to do with it.’”

My reaction to this story was otherwise: I feel vindicated! Although I have never met wise teacher Panditji, I have long respected the spirit of his lesson. Over the years, there has been hundreds or thousands of envelopes that I have carefully slit along all the edges with my letter opener, trimmed off ragged or written on portions, and stacked the bits for use as scrap paper.

My ever-growing pile of scrap paper has not been for nothing!

Let me introduce myself.

I've always attributed my more-with-less formation with an MCC service term in Bolivia early in my parents’ marriage. This was fertile ground to grow their own ethic of humility and simplicity from the lessons received from their families, so they raised my siblings and me to be a little bit different than society around us.

One way that the more with less of my upbringing nurtured me was in transportation:

The neighbours had a car for every family member older than 16 but our family waited around school foyers and church libraries until the one with the vehicle was ready to go home to the farm.

Moving to the city in my adulthood, naturally, I bussed, walked and biked.

It slowly became who I am in part because I like who it makes me.

A bit of a crazy person, yes, but more than that.

Biking as transportation takes more in time and effort but there’s also a lot more joy both in relationships and in the natural world, and also in bodily health from this “less” way of getting around.

Biking builds connection. By not entombing myself in 2000lbs of glass an steel, I move through the world very much in touch with it. There’s lots of more: water from the sky above and the road below, more temperatures scorchingly hot or biting cold, and because there is less speed there is more possibility one to notice fine architectural detail...and discarded aluminium cans to add to my next scrap metal run.

One’s route is not merely travelled but experienced when getting around by bike. There’s a lot more – including more connections with others moving through the world on bicycle and on foot.

As you may have realized from my rambling stories I’m not an expert. Instead I come as one shaped in community and faith into a lifestyle ethic of more with less.

Biking builds connection. By not entombing myself in 2000lbs of glass an steel, I move through the world very much in touch with it. There’s lots of more: water from the sky above and the road below, more temperatures scorchingly hot or biting cold, and because there is less speed there is more possibility one to notice fine architectural detail... and discarded aluminium cans to add to my next scrap metal run.

One’s route is not merely travelled but experienced when getting around by bike. There’s a lot more – including more connections with others moving through the world on bicycle and on foot.

As you may have realized from my rambling stories I’m not an expert. Instead I come as one shaped in community and faith into a lifestyle ethic of more with less.

I use the More with Less cookbook and its friends Simply in Season and Extending the Table, of course, but I had not dug deeper into Doris until Melanie Neufeld of MC Manitoba convened a discussion group for a More with Less revival.

There I was introduced to 5 life standards that Doris suggests. Not a lifestyle list, she asserts, and not a rigid set of rules, these standards are general principles for a “perpetual response to the living God,” for she says, “Following and obeying Jesus is never a list of responsibilities.”

• Do Justice.
• Learn from the World Community
• Nurture People
• Cherish the Natural Order
• Nonconform Freely. (I love this wording!)

Doris’s rambling volume is filled with anecdotes and tips, but I have one caution against the glory of simplicity that can emerge from more with less thinking. There is sometimes a Puritanical glee in self sacrificing – in having more of less. In doing more to do without. It is easy with our frugal Mennonite formation to see virtue in lack, but I think that draws us away from the postures of abundance these principles want to lead us toward.

I often react against how we talk about balance: as a sort of static goal to be achieved and maintained in the sense of frozen in place.

Have you stood on one foot? Balance is dynamic. It is is an active process that will quickly topple if its achievement is halted in the sweet spot. The weight shifts ever so slightly and pulls you over to this side so muscles contract and pull to even it out and then tremble to hold until the next shift draws over to another side entirely and you keep adjusting and adjusting, with ever so small movements.

Seeking balance in our practice of doing justice and nonconforming means constant negotiation.

There is negotiation in these principles as well. Negotiation and interconnection. Each one influences how we do another.

Doing justice means asking hard questions. Exhausting questions. About everything. What world of grief results from my throwing out those envelopes... and do I throw the small section with the clear plastic window in the recycle, as MMSM assures me I can, or into the garbage to prevent that nasty polystyrene from ending up in the recycled paper stream?

Do I head to Superstore and increase the riches of Galen Weston? Or pay slightly more at a grocery store where they employees fairer wages, offer good benefits and employ folks with disabilities? Or buy imported food at the tiny neighbourhood grocery store operated by a lovely Palestinian man and his cohort of newcomer boys who struggle to understand which feta I’m requesting at the deli counter and haven’t figured out how to tare my jar?

And speaking of my jar, do buy a conventional shampoo that does just the right things to my hair or gallivant across town to that one independent store with its limited hours to “refill” my bottle with pricey shampoo promising all the eco friendly benefits?

One can quickly run into decision fatigue and that’s even before sourcing further up the chain and asking “who might be harmed in the process?” Which people are nurtured or not by our spending choices? What about the exploited workers in Bangladeshi sewing factories? the migrant farm workers toiling in both living and working conditions no North American would stand for?

Doing justice is a big job and one we’re probably as likely to fail at as succeed. The zero waste movement has a saying that is key to remember “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.”

Perhaps some of how we negotiate balance is acknowledging the different imperfections. Each one of us consider human effects, world impact, and the natural world in our choices – and may weight them a little differently.

One eats vegan to reject intensive factory agriculture that uses more to make more while another vows to buy only local, pasture-raised meat, that uses less resources to more ways, maximizing interconnected systems. Both seek more care for the earth in food systems.

One only buys used clothes at thrift stores to spend less money while another buys an eye-poppingly expensive wool garment from a local farmer and weaver. Both seek less resource draw for clothing themselves.

One takes a do it yourself approach to repair – more work, less cost; while another finds craftsman fixit people and for less work and more cost. Both have less need to buy new and get more use out of what they already have.

One retreats to a simple but physically demanding rural life which implicates less do-justice quandaries. Another remains in the mainstream – but just outside of it – resisting consumerism and calling for more imagination and change in local and national policies, procedures and systems. Both honour more with less in different ways.

As we seek to learn from the world community, we are challenged to balance nurturing people and doing justice. Words on a page and faces on a video screen are tools to open the lesson book of the world – learning more about others with less carbon impact.

On the other hand, cross-cultural experiences help us gain valuable perspectives. Travel allow us to experience more: more dust, sweat, wind, rain, sugary tea and spicy soup. More time and proximity to foster friendships, like Panditji the Hindi teacher, who can teach us to see our habits and practices that need transformation through life standards lenses.

Grievously, such experiences also demand a lot more carbon expenditure. The very friends who call for our solidarity over tea also suffer the effects of our excessive carbon spending. :(

And the push and pull of balancing more and less confronts us as we cherish the natural order and nonconform.

I think as often as not society’s ways are out of step with nature. Thus the glorious freedom to nonconform is actually found not hindered by learning from the natural order.

As I harvested native plant seeds for a guerilla gardening project this summer, I marvelled at Creator’s abundance. It’s easy to think the natural world models only grim subsistence and survival of the fittest. But that one little plant had the exuberance to produce dozens of deep brown seeds, attached to cottony white fluff ready to prodigally distribute itself through the neighbourhood – some to land on sidewalks and be trampled underfoot, some to be taken up by birds or squirrels to build a pillowy nest and some – probably few, maybe only one – to fall on good soil, take root, and begin it all again.

Nature is not worried about running out. Even as it undergoes stress – so often caused by us humans taking more – nature adjusts. The natural order balances its mores and its lesses, shifts and adjusts and continues in new and different ways.

God has written our lessons in nature: the lilies of the field are arrayed in splendour to bloom for a time and then pass away?

May we tune the eyes of our hearts and minds to use less but seek more beauty, delight and joy!

There is less speed (and more effort) in most of my daily commutes, but there is ever so much more joy as I smile and wave to my dance friend who walks the loop each morning as I’m going to work.

There is more work but less waste in the weekly turning of my no-rules compost bin – and more community for the 4 households who put foodscraps in and take rich humus out.

There is less waste and more delight when I burn scrap paper, junk pallets, and discarded furniture to heat the house, then use the ashes to loosen label glue on the glass jars I pulled from the recycling bin. (There’s also more storage space needed so if anyone needs some spare jars or bottles, talk to me afterward.)

There is less beauty but more uses from used cooking oil and spoiled yogurt when I add hydroxide and elbow grease to make soap.

My Mennonite upbringing and continued formation show me the things I can do as an individual. But I’m also increasingly leaning into the things we must do as a collective. Individual change is slow but group change can really gather momentum. There’s lots more to say about that but my time is up so I’ll leave lobbying and community organizing for another day.

In closing, I hope you have found the life standards inspiring for the ways you can also practice humility and find hope in our call to practice balance as we follow the loving creator who made it all and allows us to mess it up. And remember but we’re all interconnected – as are all the impacts of what we do, as Pandjiti understood so well with those envelopes. Our efforts – however small they seem – are bigger than our own lives. We can nurture people, act in tune with nature, respect lessons from around the world and do justice as we demonstrating – and sometimes demand – more with less ways of living and exercise our balancing muscles.

Bio: Karla Braun lives in the intersection of passion for sustainability and practical concessions to realities of urban Canadian living. She joyfully bikes to work as a writer and editor for Mennonite World Conference. Outside of sharing stories from the global Anabaptist family, she grudgingly scrapes pop cans out of gutters, coaxes her compost, deftly delabels a copious collection of reused glass jars and bottles and has recently taken up crocheting hideous creations out of breadbags. She is proud to have been blocked by Recycle Everywhere on social media for asking too many uncomfortable questions.