The Hearth

Light-hearted, and at your best when life is quiet.

Cheerful
Quiet mind

Picture: A Luncheon: the artist, his wife and the writer Otto Benzon, Peder Severin Krøyer, 1893

Your mood runs light, and you are at your best when life is quiet. You enjoy things as they come: a meal, a long talk, an evening at home.

What you bring

You make hard things feel lighter.
People relax around you.
You think best in quiet.

What it costs you

You can skip past what is wrong.
Pleasure can quietly become the point.
A crowded week wears you down fast.

Where the trap is set

Pleasure

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

“pleasure borders on mirth”
St Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job

So your temptation rarely looks like temptation. It looks like a good time: one more helping, one more episode, one more thing you enjoy a little too much.

The gift in it

Your gladness is a gift. Kept close to God, it becomes the joy Christ promised, the kind nobody can take from you.

“I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man shall take from you”
Christ, quoted by Gregory in the Pastoral Rule

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 Antony the Great

He spent twenty years alone in the desert. When he came out, Athanasius says, his friends were amazed at how settled he was, and his face was cheerful because his soul was at peace.

Athanasius, Life of Antony

St Cuthbert

Bede says he was “affable and pleasant in his character”, and spoke “with cheerful and soothing language, as he was accustomed”. He had long wanted “the secrecy of solitude”, and at last he lived alone on the island of Farne. Made a bishop, he went back after two years to “his much-loved solitude”.

Bede, Life of St Cuthbert

St Guthlac

He led a war band for nine years, then became a monk and began “to long for the wilderness”. He spent his last fifteen years as a hermit in the fens, and “evermore sweetness was in his temper”. When two visiting monks hid their ale under a turf, he knew, and asked them “with merry countenance and laughing words” why they had not brought it along.

Felix, Life of St Guthlac

Scripture records joyful moments more often than joyful people, so no Bible figure is named here.

Its opposite

The Forge

Serious by nature, and at your best when there is something to do.

St Paul The Forge
St Barnabas The Hearth

When the church in Jerusalem was still afraid of Saul, Barnabas, the “Son of Encouragement”, brought him to the apostles. Later the two fell out over young Mark, who had once left them. Barnabas wanted to give him a second chance. Paul would not. “Their disagreement was so sharp that they parted company.” Years later Paul wrote, “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is useful to me in the ministry.” Both are saints.

Acts 4:36; 9:27; 15:36-40; 2 Timothy 4:11