Simplicity

I was happy to learn about the two high school boys who turned over to the
police a lady’s handbag they found near the cemetery during the recent holidays. The bag contained P100K, and some bankbooks. This took place in a town in Cebu.

When asked why they decided to return the money, their spontaneous answer was, “It was not ours.” They kept flashing their boyish grin, which impressed me as natural, not put on just for the cameras.

When the mother of one of the boys was asked the same question, her answer was direct and without much curly arguments.

“It did not cross our mind to keep that money, even if we needed money for my foot operation, because I’m sure the owner of this money must be crying now.”

True enough, when the owner came, she was in tears and overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. Her eyes were clearly puffed. A young enterprising woman, her face was twisted by the pain of the possible loss of some sizable earnings.

The husband, a rather tough-looking hulk, melted like wax at the experience of receiving pure goodness at the hands of strangers. And since goodness generates more goodness, he quickly gave some money to the boys and to the mother. A very beautiful sight, indeed!

Surely, the gesture of returning the money was one of honesty, but the words uttered expressed a deeper trait that served as the basis for honesty. This, to me, is none other than the trait of simplicity.

Simplicity is the virtue that keeps one to stick to what is fundamentally true and good, to what is the original order of things, refusing to get lost in the maze of rationalizations that one can invoke to get what he wants.

I would say it’s a virtue that enables one to keep his innocence in spite of the temptations and the great amount of acquired knowledge and experience that often are won at the expense precisely of one’s innocence.

With the young and the unexposed, simplicity is an innocence that is pristine, unspoiled but untested. With the older ones and those exposed to the world, simplicity is an innocence that is cultivated, defended and armed.

It’s a result of the interplay between God’s grace and our effort. It grows in the soil of trials and temptations. It can be wounded, but it can get healed. It can even die, yet it can also resurrect.

With it, one’s integrity is maintained and protected from the lures and tricks of corruption that can come from the acquisition of power in all its forms: superior physical and genetic endowments, wealth, fame, authority, etc.

Vanity and pride can cause the loss of simplicity in a person. Greed, lust and the other capital sins also can. They alter one’s perception of things. They spin illusions, a web of make-believe, that can truly complicate one’s life, as well as that of others.

Simplicity makes one to stay away from any trace of affectation and, more so, of hypocrisy. There is limpid transparency in his behavior, which can include the due amount of discretion. There’s consistency in one’s thoughts, words and deeds. Hardly anything is lost in the translation.

Simplicity has nothing to do with naivete and thoughtlessness. Much less is it a matter of genes, or a necessary consequence of some social environment. It’s not a static, inert thing. It is highly dynamic and alive.

It is rather a result of an abiding sense of piety that binds him to some superior law and to a superior authority. It never builds a self-contained life. It develops a life vitally linked to God and to others. That is its natural habitat.

It pursues a reasoning which, while allowing the requirements of prudence and discretion, is free from sophistry, malicious calculation, mental reservations, pedantry. There is an earnest and transparent quality to its logic.

It protects one from the virus of envy and jealousy. It makes one calm and
serene, open and compassionate with others. It’s a virtue that we have to propagate more actively these days.