The Freedom of Simplicity

What Foster's book describes is the core of the spiritual disciplines; it is to me the essence of the Christian life. I rarely come across a book that I would consider “mandatory” for people of all walks of life, but this is one. Possibly the best way for me to document my growth through the book is to show a few of the passages I marked from each chapter. The lessons I learned from praying my way through this book were remarkably fitting for my daily experiences here in India. I thought about editing this and making it shorter, but then I was like, “Hey, if you don’t have time to read my entire post, you can just read the parts that interest you.” Ok, here we go:

1. The Complexity of Simplicity
“It is a strange combination and quite difficult to explain, though quite easy to recognize. It produces focus without dogmatism, obedience without oversimplification, profundity without self-consciousness. It means being cognizant of many issues while having only one issue at the center—holy obedience.”

2. The Biblical Roots: the Old Covenant
“Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream?”

3. The Biblical Roots: the New Covenant
“He knows that we have an almost compulsive need to secure ourselves by means of earthly things but tells us no to do that, and proceeds to give three reasons why we should not amass earthly treasure but should store up heavenly treasure: (1) this world is a very uncertain place...(2) the fact that whatever we fix as our treasure will take over our whole life...(3) the provision has already been made.

4. Simplicity Among the Saints
“The Desert Fathers’ experience has particular relevance, because modern society is uncomfortably like the world that they attacked so vigorously. Their world asked, ‘How can I get more?’ The Desert Fathers and Mothers asked ‘What can I do without?’ Their world asked, ‘How can I find myself?’ The Desert Fathers and Mothers asked, ‘How can I lose myself?’ Their world asked, ‘How can I win friends and influence people?’ The Desert Fathers and Mothers asked, ‘How can I love God?’ ”

5. Inward Simplicity: The Divine Center
“Oh blessed simplicity, that seizes swiftly what cleverness, tired out in the service of vanity, may grasp but slowly” –Kierkegaard-

“One of the most profound effects of inward simplicity is the rise of an amazing spirit of contentment. Gone is the need to strain and pull ahead. In rushes a glorious indifference to position, status, or possession.”

6. Inward Simplicity: Holy Obedience
“Holy obedience is the insatiable God-hunger that will make a person dissatisfied with anything less than the pearl of great price.”

“There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends, and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.”
-Meister Eckhart-

“Fenelon is, I think, far wiser when he says simply, ‘Self-love prefers injury to oblivion and silence.’ To be silent is probably the best way to deal with self-love.”

7. Outward Simplicity: Beginning Steps
“But we must not shrink back from our task. We must risk the danger of legalism, because to refuse establishes a legalism in defense of the status quo. Until we become specific, we have not spoken a word of truth.”

“Precision without legalism...practical accommodation without ethical compromise”

“Poverty is a means of grace; simplicity is the grace itself.”

8. Outward Simplicity: Longer Strides
“God calls some of us to increase our income in order to use it for the good of all. Again, I emphasize the danger of this ministry. We are dealing with dynamite. Wealth is not for spiritual neophytes; they will be destroyed by it. Only the person who has clean hands and a pure heart can ever hope to handle this “filthy lucre” without contamination…we will be living close to hell for the sake of heaven.”

“If we imprison them in ghettos of affluence, how can they learn compassion for the broken of the world? So let us walk hand in hand with out children into pockets of misery and suffering.”

9. Corporate Simplicity: The Church
“In a world of limited resources, our wealth is at the expense of the poor. To put it simply, if we have it, others cannot.”

“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” –Pascal–

“A final personal disposition for embodying Christian simplicity is increasing our proclivity toward risk-taking, that God’s reign might be known.”

10. The Simplicity of Simplicity
“Simplicity is essential in the way that an engine or wheels or brakes are essential to an automobile.”“To be sure, the cost of simplicity is great, but the cost of duplicity is greater…simplicity may be difficult, but the alternative is immensely more difficult.”

I don't know if I'll be able to keep up with myself, because I have so much to say about Wilson's Ten Fingers for God, Claiborne's Irresistable Revolution, and Tolstoy's Confession. I guess I'll have to suck it up and only give you the crux of what God taught me through the books.