The Spark

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

Cheerful
Restless mind

Picture: The Wedding Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1566

Your mood runs light, and you are at your best with something to do. A quiet week makes you restless, and a full one suits you. People catch your energy.

What you bring

You make hard things feel lighter.
People relax around you.
You get things done.

What it costs you

You can skip past what is wrong.
Pleasure can quietly become the point.
Rest can feel like losing.

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 restless mind

Gregory says some minds are so restless that time off only makes their thoughts worse. They should work hard, and not force themselves into long stretches of stillness.

“there be some so restless, that if they have cessation from labour, they have only the worse labour”
St Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job

Who else was like this

St Augustine, as a young man

Before his conversion he loved talk, jokes, reading together and friendly arguments. In his Confessions he calls it “a restless youthfulness”. He is honest there, too, about where his love of pleasure had led him.

Augustine, Confessions

St Philip Neri

His biographer says he had “a very lively temperament, and without the least tendency to melancholy”. Philip hated idleness so much “that no one ever found him unemployed”. His door was always open, and his room became known as “the Shelter of Christian Mirth”.

Pietro Giacomo Bacci, Life of St Philip Neri

Its opposite

The Deep Well

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

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

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