Simplicity seems simple, in fact, even childlike. Most children are content to play with boxes rather than complex toys. But if simplicity is simple, why is it that for most of us it is something we have to live into far along on our journey into Christlikeness? I don’t know about you, but I spent a large portion of my childhood excited to become an adult. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly enjoyed being a kid and played hard, but I also longed to be mature. And now that I’m in my mid-40s and technically considered middle aged, I’m finding the scriptures ringing true—Jesus calls us to come full circle and like a child once again.
I grew up listening to a song by Peter, Paul and Mary called “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I wanted to share my love of that song with my kids, so I would read and sing our Puff the Magic Dragon board book to them. It’s no exaggeration to tell you that I cried every single time I read it. If you’re unfamiliar with the song, it’s about a boy named Jackie Paper who played with his imaginary dragon named Puff. But as Jackie grew and put his childhood behind him, he began to lose his imagination and Puff disappeared as the poignant lyrics reveal:
A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys
One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar
His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane
Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave
So Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave
“… unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In his book on simplicity, Richard Foster says, “[Christian simplicity] is a call given to every Christian” and is a “natural and necessary outflow of the Good News of the Gospel having taken root in our lives.”
I may be partial since Quaker Thomas R. Kelly had an undergraduate degree in chemistry like myself, but I do love him. He wrote, “The outer distractions of our interests reflect an inner lack of integration of our own lives. We are trying to be several selves at once, without all our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us. Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves. There is the civic self, the parental self, the financial self, the religious self, the society self, the professional self, the literary self.”
Simplicity brings about freedom. One model of simplicity Foster describes is that of the Desert Abbas and Ammas (Fathers and Mothers) who “renounced things in order to know what it meant to have the single eye of simplicity toward God. … [They] renounced possessions in order to learn detachment. They gained a great freedom when they surrendered the need to possess.”
Possession isn’t just material though. Detachment becomes a way for freedom from something in order to have freedom for something. Detachment frees us from idols—the things we put before God—and frees us for God—to put first things first, namely to center our life on the Trinity first. When God is front and center, the other things will rightly align.
Kelly said, “Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center. Each of us can live such a life … if we really want to. … But too many of us have heeded the Voice only at times. Only at times have we submitted to His holy guidance. We have not counted this Holy Thing within us to be the most precious thing in the world. We have not surrendered all else, to attend to it alone. … John Woolman did. He resolved so to order his outward affairs to be, at every moment, attentive to that voice.”
John Woolman was all about simplicity. He was a Quaker, who lived from 1720–1772 in what is now the U.S. state of New Jersey. As a young adult, he found a great deal of success but became convinced that less was more. In his Journal, Woolman wrote, “[I] was early convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart doth love and reverence God the Creator and learn to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures; that as the mind was moved on an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible being, on the same principle it was moved to love him in all his manifestations in the visible world …”
Woolman moved from inward to outward simplicity. He was intentional about needless consumption and was concerned by what he saw as colonialization expanded. He was a prophetic voice in his time, riding by horse to various colonial states to discuss with fellow Quakers the link he saw between the colonists’ desire for the “love of ease and gain” as the “motives in general of keeping slaves.”
He was intentional, taking great care in what he purchased so as to neither benefit from nor profit from the harm of God’s creation, whether nature or fellow humankind. This led him to live in simplicity. Woolman lived out Christ’s call to us: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”
About Woolman, Kelly continues, “He simplified life on the basis of its relation to the divine Center. Nothing else really counted so much as attentiveness to that Root of all living which he found within himself. … John Woolman never let the demands of his business grow beyond his real needs. … I said his outward life became simplified, and used the passive voice intentionally. He didn’t have to struggle, and renounce, and strain to achieve simplicity. He yielded to the Center and his life became simple. It was synoptic. It had singleness of eye. … His many selves were integrated into a single true self, whose whole aim was humbly walking in the presence and guidance and will of God.”
Again, we discover that simplicity is a grace, and we yield to this gift from God. We relinquish, not because material things are bad—after all, God created matter—but so that we make space for God to fill us. With Christ as our treasure, all else pales in comparison. At the end of A Testament of Devotion, Kelly asks us to consider these questions:
Do you really want to live your lives, every moment of your lives, in His Presence? Do you long for Him, crave Him? Do you love His Presence? Does every drop of blood in your body love Him? Does every breath you draw breathe a prayer, a praise to Him? Do you sing and dance within yourselves, as you glory in His love? Have you set yourselves to be His, and only His, walking every moment in holy obedience? … Is love steadfastly directed toward God, in our minds, all day long? Do we intersperse our work with gentle prayers and praises to Him? Do we live in the steady peace of God, a peace down at the very depths of our souls, where all strain is gone and God is already victor over the world, already victor over our weaknesses? …
Do you want to live in such an amazing divine Presence that life is transformed and transfigured and transmuted into peace and power and glory and miracle? If you do, then you can. But if you say you haven’t the time to go down into the recreating silences, I can only say to you, “Then you don’t really want to, you don’t yet love God above all else in the world, with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” For except for spells of sickness in the family and when the children are small, when terrific pressure comes upon us, we find time for what we really want to do. … I find that a life of little whispered words of adoration, of praise, of prayer, of worship can be breathed all through the day. One can have a very busy day, outwardly speaking, and yet be steadily in the holy Presence.
This is something for which I’ve secretly been hoping and praying. These are challenging questions and exhortations, but they are an invitation wooing us to abandon ourselves to God. After all, Frank Laubach reminds us, “It is our duty to live in the beauty of the presence of God on some mount of transfiguration until we become white with Christ.”
