THEREWITH TO BE CONTENT

 

When a maturing offspring makes a decisive but unwise choice and we get into a quarrel about it, what do we mean when we say, “... but I just want you to be happy!” I’m wondering about that this morning because I just read an interview with an author who contends in her new book that we overload ourselves with romantic fantasies when we expect a relationship will bring lasting happiness. I agree that many of us may grow up with expectations of romance that are unrealistic; we only need to listen to a few country/pop songs to verify that observation.

Fairy tales of our childhood sometimes ended with the line, “... and they lived happily ever after.” Our childish imaginations had to fill in what the rest of their lives were like... compared to ours, possibly.

Defining happiness as relief from suffering, boredom, pain, fear, abandonment, etcetera might have some merit if such relief should bring on a feeling of euphoria. We might also talk about happiness brought on by conquest... winning can be smile-bringing. Or perhaps we could link happiness to the achievement—real or imagined—of invulnerability, being so well walled-in that nothing can assail us. None of these satisfy completely, mainly because a place of endless variety, a place of invulnerability, a place where the “I” always wins doesn’t exist. This is probably why we distinguish between happiness and pleasure. We intuitively feel that happiness should be a descriptor for something that lasts, while pleasure comes to us like the cool sweetness of ice cream—good, but short.

Christians might—with good reason—bring Paul’s letter to the Philippian Church (4:11, KJV) into this conversation: “... for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, emphasizes the struggle to find meaning beyond oneself in every circumstance as being that which enables our survival (Paul’s contentment?) even through very hard times. (Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Summary and Lessons - Dan Silvestre) But being content with one’s lot, whatever it is, is not a matter of flipping a switch. Paul in a Roman prison, Frankl in a concentration camp saw purpose and therefor meaning in survival: Paul’s was the need to continue to spread the gospel, Frankl to learn from his horrific experiences lessons he must teach the world if he should survive.

“Whatsoever state I am [in], therewith to be content,” is not a function of the personality with which we’re born, into which we’re raised. It’s a cultivated way of living. For us in the West in the Twenty-first Century, it takes a special effort. Our culture is pleasure-addicted; the urging to access variety, possess material things, accumulate wealth to the point of invulnerability, all of these postpone the personal development of contentment as a way of life. We reveal our most significant leanings in the happiness/pleasure department in our day-to-day choices: what, for instance, we do with wealth that’s surplus to our living needs.

I’m now at an age where "therewith to be content” has become critical. Many have faced choice-terminating turns in life through accident or illness, have had to find a way to be “content” in a wheelchair, or on a gurney, or in the loneliness of bereavement. Self-pity can be an ugly, debilitating thing; contentment demands that we wean ourselves of that luxury. And that’s not easy.

We rightly assert that discontent can be a virtue as well, as in the sentiment that if we’re satisfied with how we and our circumstances are now, we’ll never be motivated to make things better. Certainly, living more comfortably, bringing more romance back into a stale marriage, spending more time with friends and family, relishing pleasure events and intervals, decorating the living room, replacing, fixing, planning, all these responses to the myriad impulses coming at us may arise from a patina of discontent with the status quo.

But none of this is adequate as a preparation for the inevitable eventualities that shrink our choices. So many failed the test when COVID struck, so many were unwilling and therefore unable to “be content therewith” and insisted that they would force choices if they had to, would not shrink their reliance on pleasure choices even for the sake of fighting a global threat.

So, what do we really mean when we say, “I just want you to be happy?” I’m pretty sure that we who are caring parents mean, “I want you to be content, and in that contentment to find the courage to be a good, a generous person.”

I’m also certain we’re not wishing that our children will expect and experience life-long, fairy-tale romance, endless sequences of pleasure, and ice-cream every day.

And I expect that, most of all, we want them to understand the difference.

Perhaps, though, if I were a teenaged girl running and hiding under the rubble of a bombed building in Poland during the war, knowing the Nazis had murdered my family, bandaging a bullet wound to my thigh with a rag torn from my skirt, desperately cold, thirsty and in pain and hearing the steady march of jack boots and the noise of explosions and gunfire through the only opening to my hiding place, maybe then I’d see this entire matter differently.