Perhaps the most difficult Friends’ Testimony to understand is simplicity.  That may be because it is both amorphous and changing over time.  In fact, it can be thought of as having three components:

1) turning away from worldliness;
2) finding a middle way; and
3) living lightly on the Earth.

But each component is tangled up in the others.  Turning away from worldliness is perhaps what early Friends had most in mind.  As London Yearly Meeting puts it, “Inwardly, simplicity is spiritual detachment from the things of this world.”  That is a very traditional Christian view.  The need to turn away from the things of this world convinced Christians during the Middle Ages that the only way to be a true Christian was to leave the world and live in cloistered religious communities, to vow chastity and obedience, to eschew possessions, to refuse to eat meat, to spend their days in a litany of prayers and psalms.

Turning away from the world can take even more extreme forms, and, as strange as it seems, it is a human impulse the world over. In India, Jainists especially, among many others, practiced extreme asceticism, so do Sufi mystics in the Middle East, and among Native Americans vision quests have always depended on extreme asceticism.  When Christians felt a similar need, they explained it as imitatio Christi – the imitation of Christ – particularly Christ on the cross. Some saints carried fasting, for example, to such extremes that they subsisted entirely on things like spiders and puss or, more palatably, but just as improbably, on communion wafers.

These kinds of things never particularly appealed to Friends.  I have not read much of George Fox’s journal, but whether or not he realized it, by proposing simplicity, rather than asceticism, he was proposing something very similar to the “middle way” of Buddhism: to be in the world but not driven by its vanities, to be neither self-indulgent nor self-punishing.  Living lightly on the Earth is a more modern approach.  In the seventeenth century, the natural world seemed endless and much more robust than it does today after two centuries of spreading industrial exploitation.  For many centuries people had wavered between seeing the physical world as corrupt and seeing it as the greatest work of God.  Today Friends are mostly united on the latter view and many of us are very worried about the health of the environment.  This gives the idea of simplicity a new edge; if we live simply we might be able to save the world.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this testimony is that its day-to-day application often seems inadequate or even simple-minded.  Do we have to give up our comfortable lifestyles? Or is it enough simply to be shabby?  Anyone comparing how Friends dress for meeting with how most others dress for church might be forgiven for thinking so!  But surely neither of these can be the sum total of simplicity.  London Yearly Meeting says, “Simplicity does not mean drabness or narrowness, but is essentially positive, being the capacity for selectivity.”

The idea of simplicity as a thoughtful effort to select the best alternatives sounds helpful.  It tells us that it is how we use the things of the physical world that matters, not the fact that we do use them and that those things are material.  Using the resources of this world mindfully, gratefully, and with a view to sustaining them, seems to be the important message of simplicity for today.