The Deep Well

Serious by nature, and at your best when life is quiet.

Serious
Quiet mind

Picture: Rebecca and Eliezer, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, c. 1660

You are serious by nature, and you are at your best when life is quiet. You feel things deeply and think them through. People come to you when something really matters.

What you bring

You take people and things seriously.
You are honest about sorrow.
You think best in quiet.

What it costs you

Hurts go deep and stay.
Heaviness can turn into irritation.
A crowded week wears you down fast.

Where the trap is set

A quarrel

Gregory says the tempter studies each person first, then sets the trap right next door. For the cheerful it’s pleasure. For the careful it’s fear. For the proud it’s praise. For the gloomy, it’s a quarrel.

“And because moroseness easily slides into anger, he offers the cup of discord for the morose.”
St Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job

So your temptation rarely looks like temptation. It looks like being right about how badly you have been treated.

The gift in it

Your seriousness is not a flaw to be fixed. Gregory says even the anger that can grow from it is not wasted. Held under reason, it becomes holy zeal.

“For some are possessed by anger, but while they submit this to reason, they convert it into service rendered to holy zeal.”
St Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job

A quiet mind

Gregory says some minds are so quiet that a sudden pile of business buries them before they start. They should not overload themselves. But quiet can hide faults as well as heal them, so they still need people.

“there are some of such inactivity of mind, that, if the labours of business fall upon them, they give way at the very beginning of their work”
St Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job

Who else was like this

St Gregory the Great

The man whose book this test is built on. His Dialogues begin with him sitting alone in a quiet place. He says it suited “a sad and melancholy disposition”. He also wrote that he loved the quiet life and had the busy one forced on him.

Gregory, Dialogues; Letters

Elijah

After his great victory on Carmel he ran into the wilderness and sat under a tree. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. The desert fathers remembered him as the one who “loved silence”.

1 Kings 19:4; Abba Nastir

Its opposite

The Spark

Light-hearted, and at your best when there is something to do.

St Augustine, as a young man The Spark
St Monica The Deep Well

Young Augustine loved friends, jokes and talk. He calls it “a restless youthfulness”. His mother Monica wept and prayed for him for years. A bishop told her, “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” Years later the two of them stood alone at a window in Ostia and talked together about God. Both are saints.

St Augustine, Confessions