Contentment

At my most recent Holy Hour, I was struck by the fact that I was happy. That might not sound particularly striking as I am generally a fairly happy person, but what I realized in that moment was that what I was feeling was a deep, undisturbed contentment. There is nothing exceptionally exciting happening in my life right now, nothing worth pulling out the champagne for, and I have no idea what will happen in the future, either for the world or for me personally but right now, in this moment I am truly, peacefully happy. I like the person that I am, the person that God has created me to be.

I have written before about my desire to be a saint and how I am not there yet. That is certainly true. I am not yet fully who I want to be and yet, who I am right now is good. What caught my attention about this peaceful state was how foreign it felt, almost forbidden. There is a sort of nagging feeling that I shouldn’t be content. We live in a world that is at war with contentment. This war is fueled in part by rampant consumerism. Isn’t there a myriad of ways my life could be improved? And shouldn’t I then constantly be purchasing one of the myriads of products promising that improvement? I need to look different, make more money, travel more, drive a fancier car, own cuter shoes, and many, many more books before I can actually be happy.

Consumerism though is only one manifestation of a deeper issue. The whisper, the nagging sense that somehow I am not enough and that I couldn’t possibly be happy as I am, has deeper and more sinister roots. It is the same lie that Satan whispered to Eve in the garden. She had everything she needed but he led her to question that reality, claiming that there could be more, some greater good that she was missing out on, something she should desire that was just out of grasp, but if she reached out for it, she could finally, truly be happy. What a vile, despicable lie, a horrid empty promise. She was already happy, nothing more was needed!

The lie is still the same, just dressed up differently. Our contentment is so often shattered by this pressure that we ought always to be grasping for something better, something more. Our happiness broken by the possibility that we could be missing out on that next best thing.

There is of course a rightly ordered desire to be better, to grow in holiness and expand our capacity for charity. But this desire is rooted in wanting to be more who I am, recognizing the goodness of who that is as God created me to be. The uneasy, striving, grasping feeling comes from the lie that I should want to be something else, that happiness lies in being something other than, different from who I am. It makes me at odds with myself, because fundamentally it is a claim that who God made me to be and how He has worked in my life isn’t right, isn’t enough, isn’t good.

The reality is, that despite the very real and evident fallenness of the world, God is good and his plan, as it unfolds both in my life and in the world, is good. Who God has made me to be is good, even though not yet perfect, so, even though I would of course welcome more books, I am currently, deeply, unapologetically happy.