BitterSweetLife

Simplicity Takes Humility


How difficult it becomes to be basic, in the way that a child is basic. Each year the distance lengthens but there is still a great Back Then that we can all refer to: Motives were simple and seldom unexpressed. Thoughts tended to be crude but clear. Actions took place without Hamlet-like deliberation. Regret, when it came, was simple—to be sad was to cry. Joy, when it arrived, was plain in a beatific sense. To be happy was to laugh and smile. Trust was instinctual.

Only later in life does living become so veiled, so etched with conflicting emotions, so complicated. We’ve reached the Here & Now, which means, in case you missed it, that we have become older and wiser, but in some ways we have been reduced. We have gotten older and smaller at the same time, and now we are smaller than the three and four-year-olds we were.

Truisms are doubted, not because they have been found false but because they have been found childlike. Sayings like If God doesn’t give me what I want, it’s because he has something better are considered too simple, too purely speculative, to be of much use. Surely it’s like admitting defeat to seize maxims as basic as this. Surely we can see further into God’s purposes. Surely being a Christian doesn’t require trust that leaves so many questions on the table. But the echoes of early days are not entirely gone…

Maybe God’s favorite graces are designed with children in mind. There are reasons to think so, like the fact that God said so when he was down here, and I am starting to think I should believe him. Maybe Jesus wants humble followers and not know-it-alls with smarmy grins.

I’m uncomfortable with the humility it takes to embrace simplicity in faith. Rejoice in all things and Do not worry about tomorrow sound like easy outs. Maybe that is because they are intended to be that way, heavenly escapes so easy that only a child will grasp them, and maybe I am a fool for walking away.