Tag: Contentment

by Ronald R Johnson

Seeking contentment isn’t a private affair, according to Lloyd Douglas. “The influence of just one fault-finding, captious, crabbed soul in a household will sour the whole institution. The radiant personality of one well-poised apostle of contentment will pervade and inspire a whole social group.”

This is from a sermon by Lloyd Douglas on January 4, 1920, at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.) Douglas says:

“Here is a family where life runs at sixes and sevens every day. The members of the household are very much on edge all the time. Everybody ragging and badgering everybody else. Not often does a remark of commendation get by for anybody, anywhere, without someone’s qualification. You can depend upon it that some one member of that institution is responsible or was responsible. Maybe it has gone so far nothing could stop it short of a miracle of grace. The children of the household go out, at length, to set up establishments of their own, where they are more than likely to conform to the traditions bequeathed to them; and so the bad work goes on.

“Here is another home where harmony and happiness are more to be desired than anything else. Slow to anger; plenteous in mercy; in honor, preferring one another; generous, even to a fault. You can depend on it — there is a soul in that establishment who has learned the secret of successful living, maybe in the old home, possibly through contact with a splendid friend, maybe through a consistent study of that Life that towers majestically above all other lives.

“It is no new philosophy that makes thought responsible for all action. It was not new when the Lord stated that thoughts and actions had so very much in common that an unlawful wish was equivalent to an unlawful act. It is a simple psychological law that any type of thought, if entertained for a sufficient length of time, will, by and by, reach the motor tracks of the brain and finally burst forth into action.

“Moreover, we build our philosophy of life — by which life becomes increasingly beautiful or ugly for ourselves and everybody related to us — by the attitude we take toward the more or less inconsequential events which belong in our everyday experience. For it is not in the great and heroic tests of life that we stand trial so much as in the attitude we take toward the minor events, where we develop the strength that may be drawn upon at a moment of sudden stress, or where we neglect to store the energy whose lack, in a critical moment, spells our disaster and defeat.

“Waiting patiently, graciously, smilingly, for the belated train means considerably more than just that. It means a very distinct gain to the permanent character, by which life is charged with a certain static energy which may be drawn upon in an hour when there is much more desperate waiting on hand than for a tardy train.”

[This next part refers to Douglas’s earlier reference to a scene from Christopher Morley’s Haunted Bookshop, in which a Mr. Mifflin talks about turning the drudgery of dishwashing into a moment of meditation.]

“And when the dishpan begins to take on what Mr. Mifflin calls ‘a philosophic halo’ and the warm, soapy water becomes a sovereign medicine to retract the hot blood from the head, there is decided gain in mental poise that means very much more than the transfiguring of an ignoble task. It means the storing of a peculiar kind of spiritual energy that may be taxed someday for larger uses than dishwashing.

“I fancy that if our generation needs any one remedy, more than another, for its ills, that remedy can be found in a patient, consistent effort to achieve contentment in the particular phases of life that have seemed most trying. A little less rush and a little more thought. A little less scramble and a little more simple-hearted enjoyment of and contentment in the homely, the commonplace acts and tasks which are as gall and wormwood until we transfigure them by our changed attitude toward them.”

by Ronald R Johnson

This is from a sermon by Lloyd Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on January 4, 1920, on the subject of contentment. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

He has just finished saying that people seem to value being (or at least appearing to be) busy, but he expects to see the pendulum swing back to a desire for contentment.

“Assuming, then, that contentment of mind is, after all, a virtue — a laudable pursuit of normal life — how better may one seek it than in attempting to transfigure as many of the common drudgeries of life as possible into desirable avocations.

“The merchant’s inventory may be a great trial, or it may be good fun, I suppose, depending altogether on the merchant and the state of mind with which he approaches his task. The professor’s bushel of blue books [examination booklets that must be graded, in other words], collected at no little effort on the part of a good many people [students, that is], can make his soul sick, or afford much entertainment and satisfaction, according as he regards them.

“Once I heard a woman say of the daily labor of her house: ‘I hate greasy pots and skillets; and I thank goodness I do.’

“Of course, it would be rather unfortunate to arrive at the point of preferring dirty things to clean ones, and I daresay there is comparatively little danger of that, in the average case; but surely, if clean things are so greatly to be desired above dirty things, there ought to be some joy to be had in the business of making dirty things clean.

“So much of our time is spent in preparing to be happy, and anticipating contentment, which happiness and contentment we hope to experience after this particularly hateful business that we happen to be at, is done. By a subtle process of investing the hateful task with some such mental attitude as that of the dishwashing bookseller [in Christopher Morley’s book, The Haunted Bookshop, which Douglas mentioned earlier in the sermon], we need not make so much of our life merely a stretch of arid desert to be crossed that we may reach the promised land.

“In very many respects, we are becoming a much better disciplined people than were our forefathers. In the matter of being purged of the worst of our fears, for example, we are much indebted to the light thrown upon our pathway by science. Not a great while ago, people were afraid of the dark. Hobgoblins inhabited the unknown. Ghosts were common. Nobody could be found who had seen one, but almost anybody knew somebody who, if he had not seen a ghost himself, was acquainted with another who had.

“It hasn’t been so very long since the great forces of Nature were thought to be humanity’s enemies. Altars of propitiation to unknown terrors made life hideous with bloody sacrifices, not so very long ago, even among people who were reputed for wisdom. The earthly life was crammed, from birth to death, with terrors; and almost everybody was mortally afraid of the life that was to follow, as if The Ruler of the Universe was endowed with all the malevolence one could possibly imagine of a super-fiend. All that is changed now. There are very few dark corners where ogres lurk to reach out and clutch at passersby. The old fears have been banished.

Again, we are undeniably a better generation physically than any previous. We have discovered that a great many diseases, formerly charged up to the mysterious ways of Providence, are to be accounted for on grounds much less divine — such as bad sewerage, polluted water supply, and plain dirt.

“We have reduced the heavy manual labor of life to a fraction of its former burden and have thereby given mankind a better chance to live, while it lives, with fewer aches and pains. Modern surgery has achieved wonders in refashioning the bodies of hundreds of thousands who, otherwise, would have gone out of this life much sooner than necessary.

“Again, we have achieved better processes for conserving our time than ever were known before. Time means a great deal to people who really wish to accomplish many things and are aware that only a few years are given them in which to do their work. Instantaneous communication and modern means of transportation have added years to the working life of the average man. Indeed, we are rather better fixed to live than were any of our predecessors, in this earthly existence.

“But when one takes stock of the manner in which we spend our lives — rushing from here to there, and there to yonder, and from yonder to thence and back again, panting — one doubts whether, with all our modern improvements, we are getting as much out of life as our forebears who, while they lacked our conveniences, apparently contrived to enjoy the few things they had much more fully than we have the capacity for enjoying the many. In the simplicity of their lives, they did not fret much about drudgeries. I suppose they had so many of them that if they had begun to hate their drudgeries, they would have come very nearly hating life as a whole.

“We, for whom life has become so complex, will do well to dignify and transfigure the few irksome duties that are left, and which must be performed, persuading ourselves that these activities aren’t so bad after all.”

Douglas went on to give many practical applications, which I’ll share in my next post.