Contentment with more

Wanting, materialism, the u-shaped happiness curve, & divine abundance

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Gentle reader,

I was thinking today about how my key ring used to be full of little plastic cards for loyalty points and discounts at stores (which kind of makes me nostalgic. I’d take a pile of those over another app!)

Mixed in with all the cards for purchasing things, I had one that came with a Christian book on contentment. I think it had a Bible verse printed on it. It was meant to be a little jarring, to run into that thing when looking for your Panera card, and it was.

Truthfully, I hated that card, and I felt guilty about hating it. I like muffies (Panera card), and I’ve always thought of myself as not at all good at contentment: bad at it really: discontent, malcontent, ill content, and maybe downright covetous. I was supposed to have a God shaped hole in my heart, and I was embarrassed that sometimes I could stuff a chocolate chip muffie in that hole and feel like I had patched the thing up pretty well for the moment.

I’ve been rethinking contentment, as God works in my life to show me something new. I’d always thought of the virtue as somehow calling me to settle for less, and I was grumpy about it. I’m starting to think of contentment differently, to think of it as a drawing of the Spirit to long for more.

I like stuff.

I want to be refined, all minimalist modern, but I’m drawn to maximalism. The reason I have no wallpaper in my house is that I like too many wallpapers too much, and I know that it would be ridiculous to have twelve. But how can I choose between those little foxes for the half bath, some kind of big japandi mural for the guest room, and the variety of gorgeous patterns that would fit my my living room so nicely?

My wanting goes way beyond muffies. I love danishes and brownies and cake pops and pecans. I love color. Also throw pillows, bedding, dresses, and ninety different kinds of daffodil bulbs. And roses. Ooh, and hydrangeas. I know I can’t get away with 40 different wallpapers, but could my backyard overflow with nine types of hydrangea? (I have five. I had six. One died. One is feeling iffy. I’m rooting for it.) I love the appetizer platter and the dessert sampler, a big steak and a buttery baked potato. I love a frill, a silk, a velvet, a linen. I love pajamas printed with bright animals and stripes, and I know white dishes are chic, but I can’t resist the brilliantly colored ones. I love a dog with too much ear and a cat with too much fluff. I write too many clauses, and I use too many semicolons and ands and ands and ands. I’m ravenous; it’s unattractive, I know. I want and want and want. You could call it a lust for life. You could call it needy and greedy.

I’m too much. What a horrifying creature, the woman who is too much.

There’s this thing called the U-shaped happiness curve. As we move through life, our happiness tends to decline until it hits rock bottom somewhere in early middle age. Then, happiness begins to rise again, perhaps sometime in the late forties or early fifties.

Apparently, we humans share this curved happiness journey with other primates. There are any number of possible explanations. The author of the article about apes, which I’ve just linked to, thinks the happiness nadir may be an evolutionary push to work hard and better oneself. I’m generally not impressed by such explanations (I’m not opposed to evolution, I just don’t think it explains all social and moral behavior). An obvious explanation is that the sad part of life just tends to be hard. It’s a period where folks are raising kids, trying to get established in careers, and juggling mortgages. Maybe we just get happier once we get a little more stuff. There’s probably some truth in this, but I’d rather believe that our later-in-life increase in happiness is a kind of wisdom. Perhaps we get happier as we learn contentment.

There’s an explanation for the u-shaped curve which suggests older people have simply learned to be content with less. Maybe they’ve just stopped hoping and dreaming, and have learned to circumscribe their little lives to their little circles and deal with it. I don’t buy it.

What if, as we get older, we learn to be content with more?

I think the uptick in happiness coincides with that point in life where people start to enjoy watching birds.

The child is fascinated by the goldfinch on the windowsill. The teenager and frantic adult has no time for such things. If we’re lucky, at some point we start noticing him again. We’re drawn back in by his yellow fire and tiny beating heart.

Is a happy hour watching a finch being content with less? Or is it a reopening of life, an expansion into a space where we notice more and appreciate more. Is it a broadening of the kind of content that makes us content—beyond survival and success—and into the wild, cosmic goodness of all creation?

What if the key to contentment isn’t wanting less? What if it’s wanting more? What if contentment expands our wanting to the most important things? I don’t think a happy home with a goldfinch on the feeder is a giving up on hope. I think it’s a return to and going beyond the hope of childhood. It’s a reenchantment of the world, not on a societal level but on an individual one. At some point, we lose the contentment of the goldfinch. At a future point, God willing, we regain it. Now we are content with so much more, as we add the goldfinches, the squirrels, and the stars—along with a thousand million other little things—to the content of our contentedness.

What if wisdom is finding contentment in the constancy of God’s work in the world? What if contentment is drinking up the abundant goodness of God?

But what ought we make of that, theologically? If all that wanting is greed, then expanding that greed to the goldfinches can’t be a good thing.

But what if all that wanting is a recognition of the God-shaped holes in our expansive hearts? What if muffies and goldfinches aren’t sad replacements for what only God can give us? What if they are testimony to the very goodness of the God who made the goldfinch, became incarnate among us to be our daily bread, and knows when a sparrow falls?

There’s a kind of materialism Christian faith must reject. It’s the materialism that stops with the material, as if muffies and money were the point, as if there were nothing of the spiritual interlaced with this world.

But there’s a deeply Christian, deeply biblical materialism which begs us to to expand our contentment to more and more and more. We believe in the God who is:

maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.¹

We believe all the content is God’s, cut through with revelation of the divine. If we stop with the goldfinch, we will despair, but if we know that goldfinch is God’s, all creation, spiritual and material, is opened up as the playground of our contentment. God is generous; “And my God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

What if all that loving and wanting is ordered toward God and caught up into a stream of praise?

I’m struck to the core by George Herbert’s poem,

Love(II)

Immortal Heat, O let Thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it; let those fires
Which shall consume the world first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires.
As may consume our lusts, and make Thee way:
Then shall our hearts pant Thee, then shall our brain
All her invention on Thine altar lay,
And there in hymns send back Thy fire again.
Our eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust,
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:
All knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise Him Who did make and mend our eyes. 

“Thou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind.”

God recovers the goldfinch. God recovers the quiet afternoon. God recovers even me, turning all that “usurping lust” back to “true desires.”

I no longer see contentment as a whittling down, a settling for less. I throw myself into a contentment in which God is all and all.

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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A few great books with birds; they’ll have you panting for God.

Courtney Ellis’s Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief

Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Kevin Henkes, A Good Day

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1. The Nicene creed.