Published: Clamor Magazine; Nov/Dec 2005
Reprinted with permission

The Simple Life: Boston's Haley House
By Anna Clark

1.

Thoreau quotes are slapped onto calendars, date books, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, T-shirts, canvas bags, Hallmark cards and even—I kid you not—individual tissues. And they all urge us to choose simplicity. "I say, let your affairs be two or three…" or, more to the point, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Most of us look upon these familiar turns of phrase and we think, Yes.

2.

There are days when I'm brimming with inspiration. After turning the pages of my super-highlighted edition of Walden, I'll spend an afternoon, an evening, a day, a weekend, and I will purge my closet. "I still own this?" "I guess I can do without this…" And after filling a hefty bag or two, I lean back, exhale, and exclaim to whoever's listening about how much better it is to have chosen the simpler life. Maybe the books will go to a library, the clothes to Goodwill. Maybe I'll host a yard sale—simplicity, plus profit. And I feel quite good about my life. 'Liberated' is a word that has come up.

3.

Meet Adam Campbell. After years of traveling, Adam—and his journal—arrived in Boston in October 2004.

"Hounded by the rootlessness of travel, I was anxious to get to work, with people, in the city. And also, to grapple with homelessness."

A fortuitous trip to a neighborhood bakery introduced him to Haley House, (www.haleyhouse.org), an intentional community inspired by Dorothy Day's anarchist Catholic Worker movement and founded by a Buddhist in 1966. The idea is to actively work in the space between privileged and non-privileged. Today, it operates the only soup kitchen in Boston without an armed guard, as well as a street magazine (Whats Up), a food pantry, an organic farm, and several affordable housing units—beautiful brick buildings in one of Boston's ritziest neighborhoods. And of course that corner bakery that enticed Adam is still there. It doubles as a job-training program.

 Simplicity is a major tenet of the live-in community; as the community maintains the house and supports its programs, it relies on the same food bank resources they serve in the soup kitchen. Despite donation offers, they've never gotten a dishwasher for the live-in community or the soup kitchen. Community members arrive after paring down most possessions. The community keeps consumption to a minimum in order to live in voluntary poverty—that is, in solidarity—with the people it works with. 

Beautiful idea, right? 

"I came... to give the live-in community a try for a couple weeks. Which went famously, save one issue. All the while, working in the soup kitchen, I felt this nagging reality that there was a palpable barrier between myself and the 'guests'—and no matter how many times I ate with them or they beat me in chess, we lived on two totally different sides of the counter. … I still had no idea why they were there, what they did during the day, what the other shelters and service providers were like, if/how they could make it out. A complete mystery. Well, we all know how I handle mystery..."

4.

After the hollow self-congratulation quiets, it comes down to simple observations. If I was loudly lamenting the over-consumption of my country, what was I doing justifying the purchase of a new book when there were still unread ones on my shelf, not to mention a nearby library? Why can I afford to eat out the same week I tell a canvassing environmental group that, sorry, I just don't have anything to spare? If there's only so many resources in this world, and I have more T-shirts than I can count, who has too few? 

Ready to raise the stakes simplicity from an occasional closet-purging to a way of life, and ready to push social justice work from so many isolated hours a week into ordinary behavior, I left Michigan for Haley House, a community that places both ideals at the top of its mission statement. 

I was picked up at the train station by Judy, a community member in her fifties who sold her home in Syracuse to make a permanent commitment to the house. As we blustered down Dartmouth Street that February night, just past Copley Square in the South End, she gestured to the pretty brick buildings we passed. Initially, when Haley House opened its doors, the neighborhood was a war zone. People sleeping on the sidewalk—and there were a lot of them—were invited in for the night. Buildings were chipping away. Property was cheap. It wasn't all that long ago that Boston transformed this area into the sort of place that causes my other Boston friends to say 'ooooo.' 

"They're all renovated and most are condominiums and they're worth millions of dollars," she informed me. "Millions." 

Why, I asked, when the neighborhood gentrified, hadn't Haley House sold its building for an astronomical profit, moved shop over to Roxbury or another neighborhood more directly located in the community we intended to serve, and used the money for some noble cause? 

Judy said that not selling was actually the more noble cause. 

"I believe we're a prophetic presence here, in this neighborhood," she said. "We break up the economic segregation. People who live here won't forget we're here." 

"Do a lot of the neighbors volunteer with us?" I asked. 

"Not really, no."

5.

"Seeing mystery as invitation and seeking understanding through experience, my response was to go homeless for a week in Boston. Ya, ya: 'Campbell, don't be ridiculous. Just by the nature of your privilege, the fact that you can back out at any time, and by only going for a week totally preempts you from having any sort of genuine 'homeless' experience.' Well, better than nothin'… The plan: to leave Haley House Wed. morning and 'be homeless' for a week, whatever that meant. To survive the streets of Boston with relatively nothing, to be part of the invisible subculture, to experience life from the other side of the counter. No keys, no money, no I.D., no info. Stuff, however, was important to have, as figuring out what to do with your crap during the day is a key issue for the homeless."

6.

So, it's true that Haley House, by nature of living in community and relying on the food bank and not having a dishwasher, we live a somewhat simplified life. But it's also true that we have, and use, a TV, DVD player, stereo and a computer (all donated to us). Most of us have cell phones. And most of us have the luxury of leaving this "voluntary poverty" whenever we choose. If worse ever comes to worse, we have people in our lives who will take us in. 

And another thing: who said simplicity is just about material things? Living and working with the community is consuming, and between regular shifts and the endless small-but-essential tasks, we are all often as crazed as we'd be working traditional jobs. As utopian as they sound, neither community living nor working with the poor automatically equate into 'living the simple life.' 

Sometimes I miss books or photo albums or other things that I left in Michigan. Or I'll miss receiving paychecks. Most of the time, I don't. I often complain about rummaging for food and I often supplement my meals with $1.60 slices of tasty pizza from Nicole's, just around the corner. I don't often feel deprived. Which means that I haven't challenged myself to make sacrifices in the name of simplicity. Which reveals where my priorities are.

7.

"I'd been working with roughly the same batch of homeless dudes for a couple weeks now. It would be uncomfortable, at best, should I be recognized. Luckily, my beard had been growing since Alaska, normal hair past the shoulders…it was time to call the clipper cops. So out to the street, where the only thing I knew was 'Pine Street Inn,' a homeless shelter around somewhere. Seemed a good place to start. A taxi driver pointed me the right way, and eventually I found it, but had missed breakfast, so they gave me directions to St. Francis, another service provider 15 minutes away. But by the time I found it, they had also stopped serving … 

St. Francis… held us outside 45 minutes longer than the posted 11:30 lunch start. During that time, a drug deal went down directly in front of me, a guy in a full blue felt running suit said, 'That's troble! T-r-o-b-l-e. Troble!" and was corrected by a guy wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh biking helmet "Uh, I think there's a 'u' in there…" and a loud lady in line screamed at a college student walking by, literally inches from her face, for no reason at all. 

St. Francis smelled like the high school cafeteria on Thursdays, with its too sugary tomato sauce pizza. Once I cleared the bag check and metal detector, I entered the rather non-descript chow room: packed out capacity of around 80, dominated by middle aged African-American men. A tense space, loaded with transience and testosterone. Bags stashed around the room, minimal eye contact, hurried eating void of enjoyment."

8.

Though our cultural understanding of simplicity tends to make Thoreau the poster boy, simplicity is a major tenet of major faiths. Jesus invited his disciples to leave their over-crowded lives behind and follow him. He encourages us to be "like children" in spirit and famously said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Buddhism similarly applies its commitment to detachment to both material and spiritual matters. While that doesn't necessarily call us to erase these matters from our lives, it asks us to erase our clinginess or dependence to these things. To take what is for what it is, without burdening it with our cravings, our wishes, our narrations, our euphoria or our disappointment. In Hinduism, the third stage of life, vanaprastha, is marked by increased detachment and contemplation, implying that simplicity is a natural state for humans. 

And on. There is this common theme of complexity in our lives distracting us from each other and from ourselves; that is, from a spiritual reality that we are usually blinded to by our things and our things-to-do. Sitting still and not doing anything in particular is something for vacations and retreats, not ordinary lives. Material simplicity typically comes in the form of those occasional closet purges, again not as ordinary life. 

But when a group gets together to make simplicity a part of life, in order to connect to others, as we do at Haley House, can we possibly succeed? What does 'succeed' mean, anyway—are we looking for enlightenment? To model ideal behavior? To make a political statement? To not feel the weight of privilege quite so much when we hang out with guests? 

And if I rarely feel the weight of my sacrifice, does that mean I haven't pushed far enough? Can I claim to understand poverty any better now than I did before I came to Haley House?

9.

"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." 

Rabbi Abraham Herschel said that. I don't see it on coffee mugs. But I've always liked it.

10.

"On the hill, by the statue, overlooking the active open area in a spot of practical invisibility lies a dirty bomb ground zero marked by the blanket/cardboard/trash shrapnel. The bodies responsible, who call themselves 'the family', number around 20 (all white) … The family is amazingly kind, and loyal to each other to the end. They are protective, yet welcoming, and have Boston dialed. They inform me how to get freer ides on the subway and the silver line (bus), free clothes/food/shelter, where and here not to sleep … 

A one point during my day with them, hm004 tried to give me a nickname to make me an 'official' member of the family. Luckily he was drunk enough to easily distract. But getting in too deep with a fiercely loyal and subtly paranoid group, and then suddenly disappearing, and then reemerging for the rest of the year in a homeless service provider… well, lets just say this isn't a group you want thinking you crossed/abandoned. Better to befriend for a day on a wandering path..."

11.

I've made lots of friends in Boston. There's people I take walks with and people to listen to music with and people to play soccer with. I love the getting-to-know each other part. And I won't pretend that I can understand what it's like for my friend David to have made his home in a tunnel for the past six years, any more than I can understand what it's like for one of my community members to have lost her mother. No matter how I actively 'place myself in someone else's shoes,' there's things I simply can't understand fully until I've lived it. 

But, being here, I am thinking about it more. Adam, in his week living homeless, met and talked with and watched a lot of different people. 

"The only thing they all seemed to share was an amplified concern for survival, spit up from the surrounding sea of abundance. A friend I met in the soup kitchen who had made it out called it the 'dark consciousness,' and when enveloped by it, when forced to think only of survival day in and out, it is impossible to think beyond food/clothes/shelter to job/joy/peace, and anyone shouting or thinking 'get a job' only exposes the ignorance to such a state. This particular guy, by the way, was now choosing to remain on the streets though he had money for a house. His reasoning? Having survived the streets and made it out, he has chosen to dedicate his life to helping the homeless. But he spoke of seeing others succumb to the drastic allure of money—of surrounding themselves with house and opulence (relatively speaking), and forgetting about the people in need. They began to choose things over people and safety over life, and soon they spent all their time protecting what they had, without realizing that now, forgoing experience, they had nothing to give." 

Maybe it's true that the voluntary poverty at Haley House is, in many ways, flawed and conditional. But they're there, and what's more, they're not stagnant—we're constantly talking about ways to simplify our lifestyle, and we move towards the ones we agree on. Any flaw in our efforts doesn't negate the important consequences of our acts, for ourselves, our environment and those around us. Too often, despairing about the ultimate limitations of living life simply is an excuse not to make any steps in that direction at all. 

Are we able to better connect with impoverished people, given our ideal of voluntary poverty? It's not that easy of an equation. But the connections are growing—both among the impoverished guests and the wealthier Boston set, and I'm reminded every day of my luxuries of time and materials and spirit. I remember how little I need, how much I want. Rather than sitting back and feeling grateful, I'm motivated to spend those luxuries better. It is a better life.