CONtent/conTENT - The Monday Morning Memo

CONtent/conTENT

The content of your heart is what your heart contains.

Are you content? Same spelling, different meaning.

We distinguish these words only by the syllable we stress.

Words are amazing, don’t you think?

If you are content, (satisfied, happy, at peace,) it is because of the content of your heart. If the content of your heart is anxiety, fear, envy and anger, it is difficult to be content.

Who determines the content of your heart? Is it you?

We can assume, I think, that the content of your heart will be whatever you have chosen to put in it.

What have you put in it? Is there anything in there you might want to take out?

Sadly, our success-driven culture considers a person who is content to be somehow deficient. We are supposed to be driven, never satisfied, always fighting for more, for better, for higher, am I right?

But the golden carrot that is dangled before our donkey eyes is that we might someday be content.

Oh, what a cruel master is that bastard with his carrot and his stick!

Wait, the bastard is me.

Roy H. Williams

“It happened this way: some troubled governmental bigwig hit upon the idea that the United States was going astray. Surveying our internal turmoil and strife he concluded that America’s many eruptions of discontent were interconnected and symptomatic of a single pervasive illness… He decided that the U.S. had broken with the Protestant ethic that nurtured it; that we as a nation had ‘fallen from grace,’ as he put it. He detected political, economic and cultural degeneration. And at back of degeneration he saw a bankruptcy of traditional Christian values. This gentleman convinced several other well-placed figures in government of the validity of his critique… Half the people who consider themselves Christians are dissatisfied with the church because it’s too big, too impersonal and too commercial: it doesn’t penetrate their lives as deeply as it does their pocketbooks. They’re impatient because it isn’t changing fast enough. The other half are uptight because it’s changed too much already…. The Christian establishment, no longer in touch with real life, was quaking and shaking in a crisis situation.”

- Another Roadside Attraction, p. 153, p. 156, p. 157, a purely fictional novel written by Tom Robbins in 1971. Nixon was President of the United States that year and Ted Cruz had only just been born. It would be 8 more years before Jerry Falwell would launch his Moral Majority and Pat Robertson wouldn't run for President until 1988, fully 17 years after this book was written. It was during that same window that Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart would be caught with their pants down. Weirdly prescient, huh?