The (Beginning) Simplicity of the Christian Faith
Life often goes: Simplicity --> Complexity --> Simplicity. What might that look like for the spiritual life in general? Or for Christianity in particular?
Finding the Profound Simplicity of Spirituality
I want to talk about the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Meaning, it seems like once a person masters any given subject/craft/skill-set/etc, once they’ve fully embodied the complexity of their given field, it has a way of slowing down and transforming in to a renewed kind of simplicity.
You might call it a second kind of simplicity.
Or, a Profound Simplicity.
But before I get to all that…
before one can get to the second simplicity, one must first make their way out of the original simplicity so that they can achieve a stage of complexity.
The Beginning Simplicity
We all must start somewhere. And where you start on any given endeavor is typically with the basics. The most simple aspects of a thing.
Ideally such early steps are there to serve as the onramp into something deeper, more complicated, more nuanced and skilled. The more you work at anything the more you begin to discover the complexity that comes on the other side of the beginning simplicity. Eventually you level up from the fundamentals.
While you must start with the basics, you oughtn’t stay there.
So you begin with simplicity and then make your way to complexity.
Any number of analogies here will do:
Music: You first learn the simplicity of the basics of individual notes, then scales, then chords and so on. You don’t play Mary Had a Little Lamb forever, but it is where you start so that you can move into more interesting, complex compositions.
Cooking: You begin with basic techniques about chopping and cutting and temperatures. You learn to scramble an egg, make a grilled cheese, and cut an onion. With simple skills acquired you can then move to more complex maneuvers like soufflés and a pan-flip.
Painting: Primary colors, contrast, brush strokes, you start simple. Then as you go you can add shading, layering, different brush techniques and styles. If a college art student’s project looks about the same as the kindergarten water color hanging on the fridge, then it’s fair to say they haven’t really progressed much.
In each of the above examples you can notice the progression from simplicity to complexity. We tend to grasp this intuitively. We each can think of areas from our own lives that illustrate this. (More examples: the different colors of Karate belts; learning spelling and basic grammar so that you can write sentences and paragraphs; any sport has the fundamentals of the game you must master in order to become proficient in the more complex parts of the game.)
The fascinating bit is how the mastering of a given subject tends to lead the practitioner to a second kind of simplicity on the other side of complexity—a subject I’ll return to in a later post.
But for now I think I can make the point like this:
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