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• Wise Counsel for Cultural Warriors

Wise Counsel for Cultural Warriors

By Msgr. Charles Pope

The following three nuggets of wisdom come from Ecclesiastes and are especially appropriate for those of us who engage and struggle with our troubled culture. They can help us to keep things in perspective.

Do not in spirit become quickly discontented, for discontent lodges in the bosom of a fool (Eccl 7:9).

We certainly do live in times that challenge our sense of well-being. There is much to lament in these times: broken families, confused sexuality, secularism, and growing hostility to the teachings of our holy faith.

And yet we must not yield to the temptation to become too sour. As the proverb says, we ought not to become too “quickly discontented.”

At the center of every Christian heart should be a deep and abiding gratitude to God for his many—indeed countless—gifts. Every life, every family, every community, every culture, and every nation experiences a mixture of many beautiful blessings along with struggles and hardships.

The proverb here warns us against “discontent,” a word that is derived from the Latin continere, meaning to contain or hold. Thus to be discontented is to refuse to hold within us the joy and gratitude that we ought to have for so many rich blessings, even in the midst of difficulties.

Every day, trillions of things go right and only a handful go wrong. It is no exaggeration to speak of “trillions” of things going right when we consider that every aspect of every cell within our body, every molecule that makes up every cell, and every atom that makes up every molecule are all functioning by the grace of God.

And beyond our bodies is a vast ecosystem with myriad complex interactions such as photosynthesis enabling plants to produce oxygen for us to breathe, the Gulf Stream moderating our temperature, the Van Allen belts protecting us from the harmful radiation of the sun, Jupiter and Saturn out there catching comets, and the Earth carefully maintaining its nearly circular orbit thus keeping the temperature change between the seasons relatively small. Our sun remains stable, unlike many other stars, and we live in a relatively quiet section of the Milky Way galaxy, largely free from the space debris that flies about in most other areas.

And troubled though America is, people are still (literally) dying to get here. Our roads are paved and we have a reliable electrical grid, a stable government, and a good market system.

We ought to be filled with immense gratitude as well as wonder and awe at the countless blessings that God bestows on us from moment to moment.

To become quickly discontented, or worse, to allow discontent to lodge in our hearts, is deeply foolish. First of all, it is foolish because it is so myopic. Refusing to see or to reflect frequently on our manifold blessings is a kind of self-imposed blindness.

Consider a rich man who thinks himself poor. Only a fool would close his eyes and refuse to see the millions he actually has in the bank. Why live as a poor man, always running from creditors? A man with such resources who believes he is poor must be blind, a fool, or both.

And this is true for us, who have so many blessings. How easily we become discontented and negative!

Thus, even though there are things about which we must be very sober, there are many others about which we must be exuberantly joyful. If we don’t maintain this balance we are, as the proverb says, foolish.