Photo: by Firmbee.com via Unsplash.
Back to basics: Joseph Jones on the Friend’s new website
‘Sometimes the only way to work out what’s important is to get rid of everything that isn’t.’
When people ask me what Friends mean, exactly, by simplicity, I cheat. I quote a much-forgotten essayist called William George Jordan. Jordan mostly wrote what we might now call self-help books for the Victorian era, some of which don’t stand up to contemporary scrutiny, but he had his moments. Although he wasn’t a Quaker he sometimes sounded close to it (if we can forgive him the universal male pronoun): ‘The true Christian’s individual belief is always simpler than his church creed, and upon these vital, foundation elements he builds his life… He cares naught for the anatomy of religion; he has its soul’. Here’s the bit I quote: ‘Simplicity’, he said, is ‘restful contempt for the non-essentials of life.’
