Material Simplicity, Part One May 13, 2009

Note: I’m not addressing money in the following post because I feel it deserves a more detailed examination on its own, which will be “Material Simplicity, Part Two.“

The question of whether or not it is necessary for a Pagan monastic to live a life of scarcity is an interesting one. Most monastic traditions, founded within faiths where spiritual transcendence is often emphasized over physical indulgence, stress an ascetic approach to the material world: simple clothing, a very basic diet, few if any luxuries and a marked lack of personal possessions beyond whatever one needs to perform day to day duties. (As for celibacy, I’ve discussed that elsewhere.) While clothing, food and luxuries are often as dependent on one’s environment and physical health as on one’s financial means, not owning a lot of stuff has seems to be a more unsettling idea to many Pagans than, say, wearing only simple, comfortable garments or abstaining from sugary foods or alcohol. At least, that’s my impression from talking to others and hearing their reactions to the news that I am attempting to live a monastic life.

After all, we live in a dominant culture which tells us every day and in a hundred insidious ways that we are our stuff — and it’s hard to undo that conditioning. And let’s be honest, at first glance being a Pagan seems to be all about the paraphernalia — statues, jewelry, altar items, books, magical tools, herbs, incense, oils, T-shirts with a wind-blown goddess posing under the full moon with a pair of wolves…you get the idea. (I still don’t understand the ginormous pentacles I’ve seen cropping up in occult stores within the last few years, though. Wearing a religious symbol larger than your foot seems a bit much.) Also, as there are gods of wealth in our various pantheons and a high emphasis on property and inheritance in some traditions, some might believe that it would be ungrateful to turn our backs on Their blessings and selfish to deny those things to our heirs, as well as silly to downplay all the hard work which earned that new car and five-bedroom house. And because it is so strongly linked with notions of extreme self-denial, accurately or otherwise, monasticism in general has even been called “un-Pagan” by those who feel that it has no place in a religious milieu where the physical world is viewed as every bit as sacred as the intangible one.

However, I would argue that for a Pagan monastic, simplicity of possessions is an idea which should be considered. Even the poorest of us often have many possessions which aren’t really necessary for a life of devotion and contemplation. Living with few material goods can be satisfying and spiritual without being painfully life-denying or self-abasing. (It also makes moving house a lot less hassle.) While it is always possible to take this too much to heart and become a scowling Greyface type who has forgotten how to honor the joys of living on this world, most of us aren’t going to go that far. But how does one know how much is too much, or conversely, how little is too little?

That, actually, is largely dependent on your circumstances. If you have the good fortune to live in a monastic community that has property in common (such as automobiles, appliances, tools and learning materials relevant to your tradition) then you probably don’t need a whole lot of personal belongings. But if you live in an isolated area and are the only monastic within several hundred miles, you may require more in the way of material goods simply to conduct your day to day affairs. Most of us fall somewhere in between these two examples; living a monastic life, or trying to, while juggling work, family, running a household and other “real world” responsibilities. Deciding how much you really need means, therefore, that you have to look objectively at your life in every aspect and determine whether or not the things you own are useful to the way you aspire to live, as well as whether they enhance or detract from your goals as a monk or nun. Perhaps it’s not really necessary to give up your comic book habit since it is something you enjoy without being very attached to it. Then again, maybe having your own computer is too much of a temptation for slacking and you’d be better off using the library computers for email and business instead of spending hours playing World of Warcraft at home.

There are a lot of resources available for those who feel they might benefit from reducing the amount of things they own. Many books and websites have useful information on de-cluttering your house, organizing what’s left, and determining things like whether or not you really need five winter coats or just one. The phone book has listings for charities which will accept all manner of goods, and eBay, Craigslist and your local classified ads are possible places to exchange unwanted items for cash. Even if you aren’t a monastic, doing this might well be a good idea — striving for material simplicity can show us what is really important, whether it be family, work, community service, activism, living more lightly on the earth or really enjoying one’s embodied existence instead of spending most of your time worrying about how you’re going to pay for it all.

The other side to paring down is not replacing all the stuff you got rid of with more stuff. (George Carlin had a funny routine about this.) Lots of us use acquisition as therapy or shopping as recreation — this is of course not immoral or unethical in and of itself, but does it really solve anything? And there’s a big, glaringly obvious issue about which many of us seem curiously blind despite all our talk of being in a nature-based religion: whether or not acquiring and owning an item justifies the environmental impact, use of resources and amount of human toil necessary to manufacture and transport it to wherever you are. Did those shiny crystals come from a strip mine in South America where they were clawed out of a mountainside and subjected to a chemical bath before being thrown in boxes and shipped all the way to the psychic fair? Maybe you’re better off using rocks you pick up from around where you live or special places you’ve visited. On the other hand, perhaps you do need that 4 wheel drive SUV because you live in the mountains and during the winter, it’s the only way to get to town to obtain supplies for your household. Careful consideration of all your material goods in this light might lead you to some startling conclusions, but at least you won’t be in denial anymore about what an earth-loving Pagan you are. (Or maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised — not all of us follow the dominant culture’s emphasis on thoughtless materialism to begin with.)

Granted, some monastics may not wish to instill this kind of constraint on their accumulation of possessions at all. Remember, I said that considering material simplicity is a good idea — but it isn’t necessarily useful for everyone. If you serve a deity of abundance, then having a certain amount of material luxury is probably the thing to shoot for. If you support yourself with craft work or some other activity that requires a lot of supplies, then getting rid of all your yarn and raw flax and wool is folly. If your tradition teaches that the gods favor the faithful with material prosperity, then it may be important for you to openly celebrate the blessings They bestow rather than shunning them. But there is a world of difference between enjoying your stuff in a spirit of honest delight and gratitude, and becoming avaricious and greedy — an attitude that is seldom tolerated for long by either other people or the gods, if myths and fairy tales are anything to go by. If a monk or nun chooses not to live a life of material simplicity, it is important that he or she pay close attention to how much time, money and energy are spent dealing with or acquiring possessions, and thus take care to check excesses whenever they seem in danger of coming up. (Moderation is a monastic value I hope to address in a future post.)

Generosity is a much-admired trait in almost every religious tradition, and if there is one thing to be said for having material abundance, it does afford one to be generous. Some cultures see the most important people as being the ones who regularly share all they have with their fellows, while in some religious traditions, gift-giving is seen as something that creates an obligation between people and forms bonds between people of various social ranks or family relationships. For a Pagan monastic, none of this might matter — or it may matter a great deal. This is another reason why one may wish to retain his or her material goods, in order to develop a stronger sense of community and stronger ties of friendship and alliance. These things can be done without handing out stuff, of course, but there is a special kind of bond created by the gifting of a precious or personally important item to someone who is aware of its significance, and these bonds might be more important to cultivate with one’s co-religionists and neighbors than giving everything you have away to strangers.

Whether one is restrained about material ownership or not, there is one thing to keep in mind: it’s only stuff. Its presence or absence does not have to interfere with your spiritual life unless you allow it to, nor does having more or less necessarily make you more enlightened or blessed than others (and the gods sometimes exhibit peculiar standards for showing favor anyway, in my experience.) Exerting self-discipline and remembering to take pleasure in whatever you do have, however much or little, is more important than worrying about whether you are sufficiently ascetic or are not exhibiting enough proof that the gods have blessed your family. And as always, being mindful of your relationship to your possessions is the best way to avoid letting them (or a lack thereof) own you.