Warning: simplicity may complicate your life.

In the wake of the conspicuous consumption of the '80s come the simplicity gurus telling us to get rid of all our stuff. But for Christians, the simple life doesn't come so easily.

I'm getting married this summer, and one of the things Guay and I have discovered is that we have way too much stuff for one household. Unless we want our closets and cupboards bursting at the seams, or plan on adding another two doors to the garage, we are going to have to lose or throw out about half of our books, clothes, gear, and appliances--not to mention all the unspecified junk to which we have grown mysteriously attached over the years.

So, while working on invitations the other night, my lovely fiancee suggested that instead of asking friends and relatives to donate toasters, linens, or microwaves, we could have a garage sale at the reception. Well, it would certainly cut down on the clutter.

Imagine our surprise, then, when on a trip to the local bookstore (a place where it looks like I'm not going to be able to shop for a while) we discovered that the folks writing all those self-help books have come up with a solution to the clutter problem. It's called voluntary simplicity, and--according to the book jackets--in the past five years it's become one of the fastest-growing cottage industries in the U.S., replete with self-help gurus, trendsetting pundits, and enthusiastic talk-show hosts--all extolling the incredible benefits of the simple life.

Along with national best-seller like Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992) and Elaine St. James' three little volumes, Inner Simplicity (Hyperion, 1994), Simplify Your Life (1995), and Living the Simple Life (1996), the voluntary simplicity movement has spawned dozens of new books, articles, newsletters, study groups, and seminars as well as an occasional home page (no doubt embroidered in a folksy cross-stitch pattern), each giving us lots of not-so-free advice on how to cut the stress, clutter, and complexity out of our lives. Simplicity, it seems, is now the rage. No longer just for the Amish and Quakers among us, simplicity can now be purchased at the local bookstore.

The funny thing is, however, that the voluntary simplicity movement may not be as simple as it looks. It may not be a single movement at all, but rather a patchwork quilt of some very different trends, each one appealing to distinct audiences and promoting its own unique solutions to life's problems. Looking through various "simplicity" books scattered throughout the business, self-help, and inspirational sections of the store, it seems to me that the gospel of simplicity breaks down into three fundamentally different messages: simplicity is about frugality, simplicity is about stress management, and (most rarely) simplicity is about social and ecological justice.

Although she's not the only one promoting the gospel of cheap, Amy Dacyczyn is certainly one of its leading (and most successful) evangelists. The author of the Tightwad Gazette (a highly popular newsletter and the title of three books published by Random House) has earned more than $1 million helping others to stretch their nickels thinner than Saran Wrap. By shopping at outlets, growing some of their own food, and using lots of leftover clothing, toys, and food, Amy and her husband, Jim, have cut annual expenses for their family of six to an incredible $17,580, all while saving enough money to purchase and furnish a $125,000 Victorian home!

Even with all the newfound wealth from Dacyczyn's writing and public appearances, the family continues to live within this strict budget, arguing that it teaches their children about the importance of keeping their wants and needs in balance. You can bet they're not sitting around watching the shopping channel in this household.

While their approach isn't so narrowly focused on frugality, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin are also concerned with helping people get control of their finances, cut their rate of consumption, and get out of debt. As an example, they have managed to cut their own expenses to $600 a month, and they argue that they are getting a lot more happiness for the buck than most Americans trapped in the twin cycles of consumption and debt. The message here, at least in part, is that you can find happiness by becoming aware and getting control of your relationship to money by becoming financially independent. In an era when credit card debt and personal bankruptcies are spiraling out of control, it hardly seems like a bad idea to resuscitate the traditional Yankee virtues of thrift and frugality. American homes have doubled in size over the last five decades, and not because families are getting bigger, but because we have (and think we need) more and more stuff. We now have more cars than drivers, more TVs than living rooms, and a lot more toys than time to play with them. And, as Dominguez and Robin point out several times in Your Money or Your Life, owning more has not made us happier.

There is a limit, even in the land of malls and shopping channels, to what consumption can do for us, not to mention the strain it's putting on global resources and the environment. Cutting back seems like a wonderful idea.

Still, it's important not to canonize frugality too quickly. Saving money and cutting out debt are certainly good ideas, but thrift is hardly much of a virtue if our ultimate goal is just to take care of number one. After all, Ebenezer Scrooge could make a schilling scream, and one of the billionaire Hunt brothers used to brag about saving money by bringing a bag lunch to work.

Being frugal doesn't make us better persons if the point is just to get or stay rich, and while reading through some of the articles in Money, Kiplinger's, and Time, it is often hard to distinguish the benefits of voluntary simplicity from the financial security and independence promised us on all those TV infomercials that tout the advantages of the real estate or direct mail business. If the voluntary simplicity movement is just another get-rich-and-drop-out-of-the-rat-race scheme, perhaps it's not worth the effort.

The point in Elaine St. James' three books (all best-sellers in the self-help and inspiration sections) isn't that the simple life will make you financially independent. Rather, the point is that simplicity will eliminate the clutter and complexity of your over stressed life and help you to reestablish some of your basic priorities--family, friends, and perhaps even a rich interior life.

This is also more or less the message found in Cecile Andrews' The Circle of Simplicity (HarperCollins, 1996), Rich Heffern's Adventures in Simple Living: A Creation-Centered Spirituality (Crossroad, 1994), and born-again Quaker Scott Savage's newsletter, "Plain."

The argument is that the rush to consumption is driving our personal and financial lives out of control, and that if we want to lead more peaceful and holistic lives, in balance with ourselves, our families, and the world around us, we ought to simplify things. So we're advised to turn down the promotion or overtime that will give us more money but leave us with less time and energy for the things that are important. Downsize our careers, our daily commute, and our compulsive shopping. Take time for our friends and family, for a quiet moment of reflection and prayer, perhaps even for some volunteer work in the local community.

It's certainly hard to criticize any trend that calls us to take a critical look at our patterns of consumption, or that warns us about the dangers of an unbalanced attachment to wealth. After all, Christian writersfrom Saint Matthew to Pope John Paul II have consistently reminded us that wanting and owning too many things can start to get in the way of our relationships to God and neighbor.

To paraphrase Jesus in Matthew 19:24, if you want to know how tough it is for a rich person to get into heaven, try negotiating a revolving door at Nordstrom's with two overloaded shopping carts. Christians have long maintained that material goods are a gift of God's creation and essential for our livelihood and good health, but nearly every spiritual author has warned that accumulating things in great numbers can distract us from what is really important and divide us from those with less. So if voluntary simplicity helps us recover a sense of balance, reestablish our priorities, and develop an authentic spirituality, all the better.

As more than one critic has pointed out, however, some of this advice to downsize and simplify our lives might sound pretty hollow to a growing number of blue- and white-collar Americans who have been involuntarily downsized in the recent rash of corporate mergers and layoffs, or to the millions of Americans who are working harder and longer just to keep up.

It's pretty clear that the author St. James' target audience is not all those folks holding down two or more jobs in the swelling ranks of America's service industry. Nobody flipping burgers at McDonald's or changing linens at the local budget motel has to be told to get rid of their boat. It's important not to spiritualize the growing gap between the rich and poor in this country by telling those without high-power jobs to take some time to smell the roses.

But whatever spirituality we discover or develop around money, we will ultimately have to come to grips with the larger economic and ecological injustices in our changing world. Otherwise voluntary simplicity amounts to little more than whistling in the dark.

At the same time it's helpful to remember that finding time for an authentic spirituality won't necessarily simplify our lives, or lower our stress levels. As Don Mosely notes in a 1996 Sojourners piece, Christ's call to discipleship challenges us not just to leave some of our distractions behind and come away with him to a quiet place but primarily to live compassionately and in solidarity with the suffering of the earth. And that can often complicate our lives a great deal, and raise our stress levels to new heights. Just look at what happened to Saint Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, or Cesar Chavez, just to name a few conscientious disciples. Jesus is not a soothing cup of international coffee in front of Jesus is not a soothing cup of international coffee in front of a seaside sunset, and spirituality is not always a calm oasis far from the madding crowd.

If you leave out the Bible, Thoreau's Walden, or the writings of Dorothy Day and Gandhi, the original "voluntary simplicity book is probably Duane Elgin's Voluntary Simplicity (Quill, 1993). Unlike some of the texts, newsletters, and seminars that have mushroomed in the intervening years, Elgin's primary focus is on a call to live more simply so that others might simply live.

Like Jesus, Gandhi, Day, and Pope Paul VI, Elgin argues that by embracing a voluntary simplicity we don't just discover a new path to financial independence or inner peace but seek to live more lightly and respectfully on the earth and to overcome the gross inequalities that divide the haves from the have-nots.

We find much of the same argument in Downwardly Mobile for Conscience Sake (Paine Institute, 1993), edited by Anne Near, which traces the story of ten individuals who seek to live in ways that are respectful of the earth and the poor. In both of these books, as in much of Christian spirituality and Catholic social thought, voluntary simplicity is not a form of self-improvement or -purification; it is an integral part of a personal and communal response to the social and ecological injustices that confront us at the end of the second millennium. It is an act of holiness and justice.

In the end, the current voluntary simplicity movements offer us a number of advantages, encouraging us to wean ourselves off the twin cycles of consumption and debt while reminding us of the importance of taking stock of our personal lives and priorities.

Books like Your Money or Your Life can help us recall the real but limited importance of our possessions, while St. James and others warn us of the dangers of attachment. Still, it's important to keep in mind that at the heart of the Christian tradition, the practice of voluntary simplicity or poverty has been encouraged primarily as a way of expressing compassion for and solidarity with our suffering neighbors.

As Saint Paul noted about another wedding banquet,the reign of God is not just a matter of eating and drinking, but of peace and justice among all God's people. So, too, voluntary simplicity is not just a matter of having more free time or less clutter, but of being in authentic communion with others.