The Contented Heart

Let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts.

Our Worry

Happiness and Content

Contentment is not the same as happiness. Job was not happy, but he was content, “The Lord hath given; the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!” The sick, the mourning are not happy, and yet are often content. Hospitals and sanitariums have many hearts beating contentedly within stricken and tortured bodies. Happiness passes; content abides. Content is the smile on the face of patience; it is the temperance of desires. Discontent is fretfulness and rawness of heart and soreness of soul and the riot of desire. In content we say, “I have not everything I want, but I am determined not to be disappointed in what I have.” Saint Ignatius of Loyola spent many years of his life building up what he named the Company of Jesus. To see that established was his life’s ambition and his heart’s desire. If his newly recruited religious army were to be destroyed, it would take fifteen minutes, he thought, to be reconciled to that disaster. After that he would be content, although, of course, he would not be happy over the fact and not satisfied at the condition of affairs.

The Brood of Unsatisfied Desires

A modern instance may illustrate the absence of content. A father wished very much to make his little son happy on his birthday. He thought in his great kindness that it would be good to allow the boy to choose his own gift. A fatal decision! The boy went with his father to a toy-store and was about to choose the first thing which met his eyes when unhappily something else was detected, possessing qualities the first object lacked. There was no more content in the boy’s heart and there could not be. Had the father been a millionaire, he could never buy a present to suit. The fairyland of a toy-store with all its colors and shapes and sounds had dazzled the boy’s eyes, passed into his childish imagination and awakened a multitude of desires within him. He went away grasping one present, but discontentedly thinking of a thousand other possibilities. Saint Ignatius would be content, though he lost what he loved better than life; the boy was discontented, though he possessed the gift of his choice. The desires of a millionaire joined to the income of a day-laborer will never fail to produce the fretful heart of discontent. Lazarus had more content with his crumbs than Dives at his banquets, and Herod on the throne was troubled while his intended victims exiled themselves into Egypt, sadly but contentedly.

The False Healing of Pride

Would you like, worried dweller of this world, to have a contented heart? Have you not looked upon life with a child’s eyes, disappointed, dissatisfied, with one toy, a little wealth, a little fame, a little fashion, and with a thousand dreams of other brighter toys, dreams never to be realized but always vexing and tormenting your heart? Have you any of that unalterable content the saints had? Could you face with equanimity the undoing of your life’s work, the loss of all you hold most dear? Would fifteen minutes reconcile you or would even fifteen years reconcile you to the taking away of even one little source of slight happiness? If you answer that you have not a contented heart, then I say, do not look for it in pride. Pride hides disappointment; it does not heal it. The world will suppose you are contented, your friends will think so, and you would fain persuade yourself that you are contented because you vehemently and persistently tell your heart that it is and must be satisfied. A coat of mail will not cure a weak heart, and contentment is no surface thing like the imperturbable, unyielding expression of pride. Neither does contentment, like pride, harden or make callous. Contentment goes deep below the surface and permeates and fills the heart and leaves it tender throughout.

The Illusory Distraction of Sin

Look not for contentment in dissipation. Dissipation postpones the inevitable. The swiftest ride must come to an end; the most humorous and dazzling play has its last fall of the curtain, and the banquet hall must after all be deserted, and you shall have to tread it alone where “lights are fled and garlands dead.” No, you cannot pluck contentment out of the mad whirl of pleasure. The contented heart forgets much and should forget much, but when its sorrows are submerged, they go down to fathomless depths and rise not again. Dissipation disgorges in sadder condition whatever goes down into its turbulent waters and strews the shore with wreckage and debris. The truly contented heart can remember and still be at rest.

The Imperfect Remedy of Paganism

Seek not contentment where the pagans of old sought it, in stoicism or in fatalism. The stoics did not admit the evil; the fatalists made themselves callous to it. The stoics said, “Pain, poverty, disaster, death, should not disturb you, because they are not real evils.” The fatalists said, “These things should not disturb you, because they cannot be helped.” The former cried, “Don’t worry: what’s the sense?”; the latter cried, “Don’t worry: what’s the use?” Both systems contained elements of good and stoicism made nobler men, but both succeeded in making a contented heart in one way only, by the simple process of turning it into marble.

The Perfect Remedy in Christ

Where, then, will you find the contented heart? Let Saint Paul answer you: “Let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts.” The meaning of the word which our English version renders “rejoice” is in reality “arbitrate or decide,” and Saint Paul advocates making the peace of Christ the arbitrator and judge in our hearts, the settler of all disputes, “He Himself is our peace.” Christianity accepts the estimate put on virtue by the stoics; it accepts the truth of the fatalists that evil must be, but Christianity introduces a Divine Person to both classes of pagans. God, a living and loving Being, permits the evil of the world and out of it draws good in time and will draw eternal good when time is no more. The will of God, the Providence of God, are the principles which give true, permanent content to the heart. “God’s will be done,” is the cry on Christian lips, and the echo of that cry in the heart is contentment.

Our Peace

God’s Will In Christ’s Birth

If true content means a heart-beat in unison with God’s will, then Christ, our Lord, had that true content in a preeminent degree. Contentment might be called peace which has found its way down into the heart and sheds its daylight there, A casual glance at the life of Christ will show that peace ever filled His Heart. The Angel of the Annunciation bade Mary fear not. His precursor, Saint John the Baptist, was to precede the Orient from on high and bring all to true content. When Zachary’s prophecy of his son rose to its exultant height, it closed with that crowning duty of the precursor: “To direct our feet into the path of peace.” The angels of Bethlehem made peace in the Heavens the burden of the song they sang over the stable where Christ was born, and down in the manger His Heart beat with peace and content. In everything, in the four sides of His crib, in the four walls of His first home, in the swaddling clothes, in the gloom, the sordidness, the dishonor, He saw the will of His Father. All this was the very sign and evidence, designed by Heaven to prove He was the Saviour. “This shall be a sign to you.” Christ lived the prayer of the “Our Father” before He taught it to His Apostles, and His Heart beat in harmony with His Father’s will from first to last. Here at Bethlehem if one had the ears of faith to hear its throbbing, in every throb there would be contentment and perfect accord with Divine Providence. No one bad a better will than the new-born Christ; no one had a juster claim to the contentment that was promised that night to men of good will. When the angels sang in Heaven, “Peace on earth to men of good will,” the Heart of the Babe of Bethlehem reechoed in the manger, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

God’s Will in Christ’s Life

Contentment possessed the Heart of Christ when the Father’s business made Him leave Mary and Joseph in the Temple. Contentment swayed His Heart for the thirty years that, in obedience to God’s will, He was subject to them in Nazareth, In sadness, but in peaceful content, He went out to His public life, humbling Himself to John’s baptism because so it became Him to fulfill all justice, burying Himself in the desert under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When He cried to the angry waves, “Peace; be still!” He gave a proof of His power to give greater content to the human heart in the many occasions in which He said to the suffering, “Go in peace and be thou whole,” and proof too of His sway over the stormier waters of the sinful hearts which He reconciled to the will of the Father by pardoning their sins: “Go now and sin no more.”

God’s Will before Christ’s Passion

In peace and contentment He entered upon the closing scenes of His life. On Palm Sunday, “when He was now coming near the descent of Mount Olivet, the whole multitude of His disciples began with joy to praise God with a loud voice, for all the mighty works they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord; peace in Heaven, glory on high.'” But as His followers echoed the angels’ song of Christmas, He wept over the city of Jerusalem because it had not the contentment of being true to God’s will. “If thou also hadst known and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy peace; but now they are hidden from thy eyes.” It was to procure for us the things that are to our peace, that Christ was now going into Jerusalem. He had taught His disciples to make the prayer for peace their first wish on entering a house: “Peace be to this house,” and now, as he was leaving them He made that peace His last wish: “My peace I leave you; my peace I give you.”

God’s Will Doling Christ’s Passion

With the same consecration of His Heart to God’s will and therefore with the same contented Heart, Christ went to His agony and death. The bitterness of the chalice, the sting of the lash, the sharpness of the thorns, the keenness of nail and spear, the poignancy of separation, the torment of thirst, the maddening anguish of insult and mockery, the horror of Divine abandonment, all fell upon His Heart and rent it, but robbed it not of content. “Father,” He could still say, “into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” To pursue the story farther is unnecessary. “Peace be to you,” was ever on the lips of Christ in His risen life, and from Him the wish passed to His disciples, who went forth, “preaching peace by Jesus Christ.” Saint Paul took up the prayer and began, continued and ended his Epistles with the prayer for peace, and so down the centuries the prayer that the peace of Christ be with us, that contentment be in our hearts, has been taken up and uttered with fervor and then passed on to a new generation. “Let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts,” is the prayer of time and the pleasure of eternity.

God’s Will the Foundation of Peace

The peace of Christ will bring true content of heart. It is deep and lasting, not founded on forgetfulness or dissipation, not seen in the self-blindness of fatalists or in the flinty hardness of the stoics. The peace of Christ is based upon a true principle, not on whims or false theories; it rests upon the firm, unchanging foundation of God’s will. Christ’s Heart will make contented hearts, if they will live and act as He did. Pain, sorrow, poverty, disgrace and other misfortunes are not able to destroy the content of a heart which models itself on Christ. Neither can sin, the only evil, an evil which attacks the very principle of content by opposing, not admitting, God’s will – neither can sin destroy content, if we remember that Christ’s Heart lived and died to rid the world of sin and has “reconciled us in peace.”

Resignation to God’s Will not Stagnation

The peace of Christ does not mean passivity. Resignation to God’s will does not spell stagnation. Growth, improvement, is the will and law of God. We see that law in every living cell, in every member of the body, every faculty of the mind, every ambition of the soul. God gave capacities and wanted them to be realized. “The Kingdom of God is as if a man should cast seed into the earth and the seed should spring and grow up – first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest is come.” So body, mind and soul are to be fully developed in God’s way and produce a full harvest. Resignation does not mean acquiescence in stunted growth, but it means contentment after best efforts for improvement. Christ’s Heart is the example of true content and is the guarantee to us that even evil has no power to destroy our content or injure the principle upon which it is based. The human mind cannot imagine a greater evil than the murder of a God-Man, and yet out of that greatest of all evils God’s will has drawn the greatest of all goods. The Heart of Christ crucified and content is the brimming source of the world’s contentment.