Less is More: Pope Francis on Ecological Conversion
In 2015, Pope Francis published a letter on care for our common home called Laudato Si’. If you’re thinking about reading it, skip the first five chapters, and start with chapter six. I’m serious. It’s a great letter as a whole and quite accessible, but I’m telling you, chapter six is where it gets really exciting. There, he claims an ecological conversion will solve the current ecological crisis.
I imagine you and the Pope already know about rising temperatures and the effects of climate change. With this topic, conversations often move from talking about facts to sharing motivations. I imagine you know what motivates you, or doesn’t. I bet you already have a place in our world where you try to make a difference, but what about the rest of the world? What about the whole universe? If motivation and inspiration were simply about facts and projections, people would have made other choices by now. Pope Francis uses the sixth chapter of this letter to lay out an ecological spirituality which is his vision for a solution to the ecological crisis.
His argument is preceded in the letter by a sense that everything is connected. Most-importantly, people are not separate from the rest of the material world. He calls this idea “integral ecology.” Next, the pope says we have made bad choices but ultimately retain the dignity to make different choices and form better habits. This is the beginning of conversion. One of those choices is to realize that everything is connected. The second is to come to understand the saying, “less is more.”
We realize that everything is connected through attentiveness. He writes, “Nature is filled with words of love, but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances? Many people today sense a profound imbalance which drives them to frenetic activity and makes them feel busy, in a constant hurry which in turn leads them to ride roughshod over everything around them” (225). We need habits to slow down, to listen.
In the summer of 2010, I worked as a summer student naturalist at Saint John’s Abbey Arboretum, and I always looked forward to our weekly walk when we would go out as a staff to identify plants. We rarely made it very far because there were so many new plants to identify each week. This practice helped me to appreciate the small things and the opportunity to laugh and connect with my colleagues and with our world. I had never returned to a place so regularly in order to be present and connect. The change of the seasons always has a profound impact on me, but returning weekly brought me into deeper connection.
The second habit is to live a “less is more” lifestyle. Pope Francis talks about the value of humility and sobriety when describing this ancient wisdom. When I read it, I hear him contrasting it with addiction. One of the dynamics of addiction is that it demands more and more from you in order to produce the same reward. Who doesn’t have something like that in their own life? Earlier in the letter, Pope Francis calls out the way people think technology will save us from the problems we face. He frequently derides the lifestyle of consumerism. I think we know that neither of these will ever satisfy us. What truly gives life requires less and less of us in order to feel satisfied.
“Even living on little, they can live a lot, above all when they cultivate other pleasures and find satisfaction in fraternal encounters, in service, in developing their gifts, in music and art, in contact with nature, in prayer. Happiness means knowing how to limit some needs which only diminish us, and being open to the many different possibilities which life can offer” (223).
Imagine that he is not just talking about individual conversion. He’s talking about families and communities and the whole world. Everything is connected. Less is more.
