Psalm 131
August 7, 2011
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time on and for evermore.
My guess is that you've never heard of Neel Kashkari, but I am willing to bet that at some point you've criticized him. You just didn't realize you were doing so. Well, you didn't criticize him, per se, but you may have criticized what he was in charge of.
Today, if you were to look for Neel, you wouldn't find him in his haunts from three years ago. You'd have to go to Truckee, California, above Lake Tahoe, to find him. He lives a simple life there. As he says, he chops wood, builds a shed, and gets in shape. Back in 2009, he and his wife moved there to escape their lives in Washington, D.C.
Neel first came to Washington in 2006 along with the George Bush's new Treasury Department Secretary, Hank Paulson. He had been working for Goldman Sachs as a tech banker in San Francisco when Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, was tapped to become the secretary. He called Paulson out of the blue and asked if he could join him. Neel had wanted to be part of government ever since he saw the Iran Contra hearings as a twelve year-old. He was captivated by how democracy worked, and he wanted to be part of it.
Things went okay at first, and then Neel was asked by Paulson to head up something big. He was asked to head the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October of 2008. It was a big task, and as soon as he was chosen the critics gathered. Congressmen and women criticized him for being too young, at age 36. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he was too inexperienced to take on such a large task.
Neel was given very little time to put the program together. It quickly overwhelmed him, as it did all of his colleagues. He was asked to come up with a stimulus sum, and quickly create seven teams to disburse the funds. He had no idea how much money they should ask for. He initially told Paulson that he thought $1 trillion might do it, but Paulson said that they'd never get that amount through Congress. So Neel came up with a formula: there were $11 trillion in troubled residential mortgages, and $3 trillion in troubled corporate loans, so take 5% of that and you get $700 billion. Kind of arbitrary, but there was no manual.
Everyone had an opinion on where the money should go, and no matter where he sent the funds, people were unhappy. His friends thought he was crazy for taking the job, and they urged him to use the money to buy the Cleveland Browns and fire the coaches.
As soon as Neel and his teams started designating where the stimulus funds should go, he became the favorite target of critics, especially the Wall Street Journal. Members of Congress, who would agree with him in private, slammed him in public. He was constantly called into hearings to explain what was going on, but he soon learned that the Congressmen and women were holding hearings so that they could be seen as doing something about the economy. They didn't care what Neel had to say.
Neel barely slept. He rarely got more than 6 hours of sleep a night, and those 6 hours were usually interrupted by his blackberry, which went off at all hours of the night. His marriage slowly crumbled. By May of 2009, he felt like a zombie. When he initially appeared before Congress for hearings, he would answer questions smartly and with passion. By May he appeared, but his answers were often distracted, and he spent much of his time looking forward with a glazed look.
Then he abruptly resigned in May of 2009 soon after one of his colleagues suffered a heart-attack. He didn't want to have one of his own. So Neel and his wife decided that the way to put their lives back together was to move north of Truckee into a small house in the woods, where he would chop wood, build a shed, lose weight, and eventually help Hank Paulson write his book.
What Neel was doing, in essence, was simplifying his life. He realized that his life was disturbingly out of balance, and that he needed to change everything. In doing so, Neel discovered a wisdom that Christians throughout the centuries have discovered, forgotten, discovered, forgotten, discovered and forgotten a million times. The wisdom is that whenever we find ourselves becoming overwhelmed and putting God to the side, the answer is to simplify. Actually, Christian wisdom says to keep things simple and to always simplify our lives, but often we don't discover that wisdom till we become overwhelmed.
The problem with the idea of simplifying our lives is that to do so seems to go against the wisdom of our culture. We live in a 24/7 culture, and we act as though that’s a good thing. We constantly hear praise for people who are available to others 24/7, and who appear to be able to accomplish everything with little sleep, rest, or relaxation. What drives much of this 24/7 culture is our technology, which makes us available 24/7.
I remember when I first became aware of how technology was making life harder by making it more complex. It was back in 1990, and one of the members of the church I was working in at the time, Gary, told me about a struggle he was having with fax machines. They had only been widely available for a few years. He told me that faxes were ruining his life. Too many of his clients (Gary was a respected attorney) were faxing him documents for him to work on at 4:30 in the afternoon, and expected him to get back to them first thing the following morning. Or they sent documents at 5:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon and expected him to work on them over the weekend and get back to them first thing Monday morning. He felt guilty if he said no, and felt intruded upon if he said yes.
Things have only gotten worse since then. If only fax machines were our problem. Today we have email, Facebook, the internet, cell phones, and more, and they all impinge on our lives. There's rarely any opportunities for quiet and simplicity because we fill our lives with technology, which constantly demands our attention with bings, pings, ringtones, or just the implicit message, "You're bored. Come and play with me." They all add to complexity.
The problem is that we weren’t built for complexity. We were built for simplicity. Let me prove my point. Answer this question: Are you good at multitasking? If you say yes, you're wrong. You may think you're good at it, but you aren't. If you are a woman, you're good at multitasking in comparison to a man, but that's not saying much. Men are typically terrible at multitasking. They're not built for it. That's why, when you try to talk to a man while a football game is on, he can't respond. He can't watch and talk to you at the same time.
What makes women better at multitasking than men is that they have a bit more of a bundle of neurological fibers, called the corpus callosum, connecting the two halves of the brain. The increased connection allows information to flow more between the two halves of the brain, allowing them to communicate better. Still, that's not saying much because even women aren't built for multitasking. They have two halves of their brain, not full connection.
Brain researchers have found that the human brain really only has the ability to hold two thoughts at once. There's an experiment that researchers have used to demonstrate this. They've taken volunteers and placed them in a long hallway with many doors. Then they've asked these subjects to walk to the door at the other end of hallway and tell the person there a four digit number--something like 5438. About half the subjects were stopped at the midpoint by someone opening a door and offering them a piece of cake. About 70% of those offered the cake forgot the number by the time they got to the other end of hallway. Almost all of the subjects who weren't offered cake remembered the number. The distraction of the cake presented too many thoughts at once, and the first one was forgotten. Our brains are built for simplicity, not complexity.
A lot of movements throughout history have recovered the need for simplicity and have connected it to the life of faith. Probably the first big simplicity movement in Christianity occurred in the 3rd through the 5th centuries with the Desert Fathers movement. Later women, called the Desert Mothers, joined them. These were people who went out into the deserts of Egypt to live simpler, more God-focused lives, where they could grapple with their human foibles and their need for attachment to things. The monastic movement also arose in the 4th and 5th centuries in the Italian peninsula in response to a world going to chaos. The Western half of the Roman Empire was crumbling under the weight of barbarian attacks. Eventually, a Germanic tribe, the Lombards, conquered it. The economy and the culture was in chaos. The original monastics were reacting to a complicated and chaotic world by creating a culture of simplicity within their communities. Other movements has similarly tried to move people to simplicity. The Quaker movement was one. The followers of George Fox tried to simplify by creating simpler ways to pray, to worship, and to live. The Shakers grew out of the Quakers, and became known for their simple styles of furniture and houses.
There have been similar non-Christian simplicity movements such as the Transcendentalists in the 1840s, such as Henry Thoreau, who called on people to live simply and to "suck the marrow out of life." Also, the commune movements of the 1960s and 70s were a simplicity movement.
Jesus pushed the idea of simplicity in so many of his teachings. For example, he told people, "Do not worry. Look at the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Look at how God cares for them. Won't God care even more for you?" He also tells the rich man, who has followed the commandments and wants to know what more he can do, to sell all he has, give to the poor, and follow him. He's not against wealth, but he knows that wealth brings with it complexity that pushes out simplicity.
I believe in this idea of simplicity not only in faith, but in life. I've tried, in my life, to live somewhat simply. I try to bring this to my preaching and teaching. For instance, my goal, in most of my sermons, is to try to communicate a spiritual message simply so that you can hold onto it. Usually I have one simple idea I try to hammer home. Think about this sermon. What's the message. I teach in a similar way, trying to take what can be difficult concepts and making them simple. Even in the way I try to lead the church I try to integrate simplicity. For instance, I've often held back on instituting programs because I didn't want to overload the church. When I came to Calvin Church I also did things to simplify ministry for our elders and leaders. Back in 1996, the elders of this church not only had to chair committees and attend session meetings, but they had to be ushers, count money after church, and serve communion once a month. I thought that was too much, so I led them to delegate the other duties, and just focus on leading committees and the session.
If we are to grow spiritually and draw closer to God, we need to live more in intentional simplicity. But what does that mean, especially in our modern age where we can’t get away from technology and the demands of work, kids, and life? I don’t think it means that you have to be like Neel Kashkari and move to Truckee, California to chop wood and build a shed. Nor do I think we have to dramatically unplug, which is increasingly harder to do in our culture, unless you feel called by God to do so. The answer to simplifying is to have technology, but not be of technology.
We need to resist the temptation to be ruled by our need for constant stimulation. We all have that need. You've given in to it many times. If you have a smart phone, how often, when you're bored, do you pick it up and start fiddling with one app or another? How often do you check your emails or your phone for texts? How often do you feel the need to text someone for no reason? That’s being of technology.
To simplify means letting go of that need, and being able to sit periodically in stillness. It means letting go of the things that don't matter, and to be able to figure out what does and doesn't matter. It also means taking time, in quiet, to pray, reflect, read, slow down, and even stop and smell the roses.
The fact is that life is overwhelming, but there is something you can do about it if you choose to do so. You can simplify.
Amen.
