I have a very deep conviction that life is simple; in the sense that actually experienced life is simple insofar as we are leading it as God intends.
I believe that what Jesus taught, what Jesus wanted from us, was very simple. That someone could, in principle, grasp it and become fully-Christian in an instant - if only he could ask the right question, and focus on what he was meant to focus on.
So, I regard complexity either as a result of misunderstanding, or deliberate obfuscation - or, at best, en route towards an ideal simplicity.
And by this I mean not the the whole of created reality and God are in total simple; but that life as it comes to us 'a bit at a time', and as we seek out and grasp it, is very simple: comprehensible by a child.
This, I think, is God's doing. It is how God 'manages' our lives - so long as we are aligned with God and our divine destiny. Everything we need to know, think and do at any moment, is always simple.
Only when we start planning, projecting, engaging in 'what if's and 'but supposing's - only when we try to put everything together into something overall comprehensible - do things start to get so complicated that they escape from our mental capacity; and we begin to feel overwhelmed; to struggle, to start trying to combat the complexity by more and more work and planning...
Life seems complicated, Christianity seems complicated; but only because we our-selves have made it so...
Or else we have allowed our-selves to be duped into considering it so; by those who are themselves confused; by those prefer us to be slaving and flailing in deluges of detail and intricacies of hypotheticals - which are never quite sufficient, and which we never quite manage to grasp; often promised but always just out of reach...
Indeed. The mind is a terrible master and needs to be made a quiet servant.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. An accomplished artist can make a beautiful painting in a matter of seconds. But that's just because he put thousands of hours of work behind it, in order to have this skill at his fingertips. The best art is produced when an artist loses himself in the creative process, when thinking is concentrated into a single act of doing. So in the same way, God did not create the world overnight, but expects us to act out the story here-and-now. The symphony is already there, if we tune into it. So in a sense, there is an inverse relationship between material complexity and spiritual simplicity. Doing things simply takes a great deal of complexity. Yet, if you complicate things, you might actually be very simple-minded.
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