True contentment adoring Christ

"The path to contentment is fraught with detachment."

After posting yesterday's reflection on contentment in isolation, I read the biography of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church, who lived 331 to 420, a Greek educated in Rome by pagan and Christian teachers. He loved pagan pleasures of life, yet was baptized a Christian and enjoyed visiting tombs of martyrs and apostles to contemplate blessedness of the relics and to decipher nscriptions he found there.

Eventually, Jerome gave up hedonistic ways and embarked on a life of holiness. To free himself from worldly attachments, he went to the desert. "In this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself," he writes to a friend (according to an article at Catholic Online), "with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself watching the dancing of Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire. In my cold body and my parched flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was still able to live."

Jerome's memories of his past tempted him. His desires distracted him. They made him restless. Perhaps especially in the desert, Jerome wished most intensely for days gone by. He longed to be there again. He yearned to experience the joys and beauty and camaraderie he had known -- even if only now in his imagination.

Jerome knew, though, that in order to find true contentment, he must purge his heart and senses of these attachments, wash his memories of their grip on his will, and hone disciplines that would take him farther from the lures of the world and nearer to God.

From his experience in the desert, Jerome wrote further to his friend, "Alone with the enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, though I grieve that I am not now what I then was."

It seems that in yesterday's post, I was clinging sentimentally to distracting temptations and grieving that I am not today what I was several years ago. Even several years ago, as I recall, I longed for other aspects of days gone by and grieved that I was not what I was several years before then. And so on, and so on.... Several years from now, who knows what I will grieve?

The path to contentment is fraught with detachment.

I pray that the next time I long for those people, places and things that once were commonplace in my day and easily within my reach, I may turn my expectations, desires and tears to the feet of Christ on the Cross and be contented to be there among the souls who adore only Him.

by Nancy E. Thoerig (c) October 1, 2008

picture of St. Jerome from Catholic Online