Liturgies

 Today, January is almost over.

“How’s your New Year’s Resolution going?” Someone once asked.

“What exactly is a New Year’s Resolution?” some wise crack responded.

“It’s a TO DO LIST for the first week of January”.

Or another piece of wisdom I never heed is, ‘my New Year’s Resolution is to stop hanging out with people who ask me about My New Year’s Resolution’.

On the eve of another New Year while at Woodford a group of my family and friends were discussing the year that had just passed and someone asked me. “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” and I responded immediately by saying I would like to live more simply, to which most in the group responded sympathetically by articulating similar aspirations.

My unusual immediate response came on the back of hearing two talks during that day, one by Professor Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University; and tiny house advocates, Lara Nobel and Andrew Carter.

Professor Ian Lowe as President of the Australian Conservation Foundation and author of numerous books about solutions for addressing the Environmental Crisis spoke as he has for many years of the need for each of us to live more simply – especially for most of us in affluent countries to consume less: to examine our lifestyle choices such as where we live.

The average number of people per Australian household has been steadily decreasing for several decades. About one-third of all households now consist of one person, about another sixth of two and a further sixth of three. So households of one, two or three people together account for two-thirds of the total. And houses are getting bigger, on average, as the numbers of people living in them are getting smaller.

Put simply, if on average two people live in a house, we need twice as many houses than if each house had an average of four people, as was the case 50 years ago.(I grew up in a house of ten or a similar number as many of you may have done.)

Twice as many houses means more land used for housing, much more energy for lighting and heating, many more roads to connect the houses to services and so on. People are no longer content with a three bedroom house but want one that has five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a double garage and a granny flat.

Australian houses are the largest in the world with an average of 243 square metres, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average Australian house emitting 18 tonnes of greenhouse gas according to the Environment Protection Authority.

One small car is no longer enough for some people, who want a large car or a huge four-wheel drive urban assault vehicle as well as a motor boat for the weekend. These huge houses get filled with furniture and appliances that are much more than what is needed.

Each year in Australia we are spending more on things we don’t really need, or on activities that needlessly degrade the environment and waste resources. Our lifestyles have become extravagant. If the planet is to have a future we will need to live more simply so that others may simply live. To live more simply it is not a dour de-energizing experience. Letting go the excess brings a lightness and joy. For as our Gospel readings reminds us today, “How happy are the poor in Spirit; theirs is the unfolding of the Divine Dream. “Happiness is the result of embracing simplicity of Spirit.

This is precisely the motivation of the next two speakers I heard at Woodford, Lara Nobel and Andrew Carter who are part of a growing band of Australians who are ditching the idea of a big home and mortgage for something smaller and more affordable known as a Tiny House. It is a global movement that took prominence after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in the USA when so many people lost their homes.

Now it is making inroads in Australia. They are small homes generally 2.5 metres wide and 7 metres long. There is limited space with no room for clutter.( which is a good thing for me, an expert clutterer) Many of the homes are portable and on wheels. They are designed to be OFF GRID with composting toilet, laundry and a grey water processing unit on one side, and a lounge room with a bed that drops down from the ceiling; solar panels on the roof and a tank to store rainwater.

As houses become less affordable and people wake up to the need to live more sustainably with less, these Tiny Houses will be embraced by more and more people.

Radical decisions like downsizing and living more simply will be decisions we will all be invited to make as we wake up to what is really happening to our planet. Our unsustainable lifestyles are having devastating consequences on millions of other species we share the Earth with and future generations, for whom we hold it in trust. For all life on this planet now and in the future we have a moral responsibility to act courageously and decisively on their behalf.

Before I finish I would like to show you a brief 1 ½ minute ABC News Report from November last year which gives you a better picture of these Tiny Houses, and I will finish with some more wisdom from Ian Lowe.

“I have argued the case for steering toward a sustainable future. You might well feel that this view of the future – a world of stable population and consumption, zero waste, low carbon emissions, new social and political institutions to make sound decisions about the future, is so remote from where we are today that it is Utopian.

In one sense it is, but most of the significant social reforms throughout human history were once considered Utopian.

1. It was Utopian to advocate a world without slavery: the abolitionists were accused of economic naivety and told the economy could not function without slave labour.
2. A hundred years ago it was Utopian to urge votes for women, and the Suffragettes were publicly attacked or went to prison for their idealism.
3. 40 years ago it as still Utopian to dream of Berlin without the Wall or South Africa without apartheid.

These social reforms have been made real by people, visionaries who worked systematically to achieve their dreams of a better world.

Each of us is invited to be that visionary who believes that living more simply will make a difference and in particular if we do it together. In the words of the little Brazilian Bishop Dom Hélder Câmara “for when we dream alone, they remain merely dreams, but when we dream together our dreams can become Reality”.

30-31/01/2016 by Terry Fitzpatrick