The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life
By Paula Huston
Loyola Press.
PB, 358 pg. US$15.95
ISBN: 0-8294-1441-X

Seeking simplicity through God

By Steven Martinovich
web posted December 22, 2003

That the world can be a loud and complex place is in little doubt.
As we scurry from one obligation to another, juggling ever more
responsibilities at work and home, it's hard sometimes not to feel
overwhelmed by the very fact of living. Even in quiet times we
consciously work our brains to get our to-do lists ready for
tomorrow and we feel guilty if we fail to cross everything off the
list at the end of the day. We quite literally seem to run in order
to standstill.

It is possible, however, to make the conscious choice to reject
the reality we've created for ourselves and choose a different
path. That's the message that Paula Huston has for us in The
Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life. Once trapped in the
same rat race, Huston decided to use simplicity to achieve inner
peace. It is a long spiritual journey but one that promises at the
end a peaceful life that allows one to concentrate on those things
that really matter.

For Huston that path was Catholicism, a faith that has a long
history of seekers of inner peace. Taking advantage of a nearby
community of Catholic monks and researching the lives of saints
who embarked on the same path she did, The Holy Way is a
guidebook that charts her progress over years of work. It is not
Inner Peace for Dummies and she doesn't claim that the journey
is one you can complete in days or weeks. Making the conscious
decision to seek simplicity in your life and then take the actual
steps to bring it to fruition is a long and arduous one. It took
years to create the person you are and it takes years to modify
learned behaviors, thoughts and patterns.

"It is extremely difficult to let go of these longtime of thinking,
emotional response, and reaction. When Jesus reminds Peter
that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, this is in part what
he means. Too often we are tripped up not by serious temptation
or dramatic sin but by ingrained patterns, some of which are so
much a part of us that we can no longer even recognize a
different approach. It is far easier, far more comfortable, to do
what we've always done than to change our ways."

Huston is proof positive of that as The Holy Way shows it was a
constant struggle -- a long learning process -- for her to discover
the changes she needed to make in her own life. She gradually
learns that you can't make a change to one aspect of yourself
without others being influenced. Changing who are you to find
simplicity demands that you take stock of who you are in totality
and addressing the entire soul, not just the obvious bits that you'd
like to be different.

Each chapter in The Holy Way sees Huston examine the
different aspects of her life she addressed, the challenges she
faced and what the saints have to teach us with their own
examples. As she illustrates, although the saints were remarkable
people, their struggles were little different -- at least in a spiritual
sense -- from what we would face if we undertook the same
spiritual journey. Taking those steps changes who we are and
how we relate to others, it smashes illusions that we have used to
buttress our worldviews and forces us to see who we really are.
Solitude and meditation brings us inner peace but not before we
take a good look in the mirror and begin to see our faults.
 
Is The Holy Way a realistic path for others to experience the joy
of true simplicity? It wouldn't be too difficult to argue that
Huston's experiment isn't easy to replicate, that her struggles and
answers were her own. Those arguments might even be correct
but they would ignore her central point, that simplicity is a path
that travels through the middle of each of us, that it is up to us to
make the decision to seek it and take the steps necessary to try
to get there. Whether we reach the end of the road or not,
however, is only half the battle. Just as important for us to
recognize, argues Huston, is that the spiritual journey for
simplicity always brings us closer to having a deeper and more
personal relationship with God and ourselves.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario,
Canada

Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com