The Pursuit of Happiness
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
My mother used to tell a story about a time when she and a friend drove through Beverly Hills whilst at a meeting out in Los Angeles. She said that it became comical that as they drove through increasingly wide streets with increasingly large houses with increasingly expensive cars and...well, you get the idea....as they drove along, her friend would say, ‘but you know they can’t be happy...’. The bigger the houses, the more expensive the cars, the louder and shriller Roberta became. Happiness is one of those measures that we use to assess a life, or at least it seems to be.
An old friend tracked me down once. We had been away at university together but had lost one another. We exchanged letters – yes, through the post – and did some catching up on what had happened to us both. Somewhere in the midst of it, my friend began to reminisce about various events and especially about people, giving me updates about this person or that. And things went awry. I tried to tell her that my time at that university had been in fact very difficult, and that it wasn’t a great time for me. She made an attempt to convince me that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, then began to defend herself against what she experienced as my attacks, and we agreed to end the communication. Her last communication with me was to say she hoped I’d find some happiness, though as she said it, it felt more like an accusation or an attack.
I wanted to tell her – though it was useless since the two of us were talking past each other and unable to find a way to rediscover the friendship that had nourished and sustained us back then – I wanted to tell her that I didn’t much care about happiness. It seemed then – and has through most of my life – a frivolous sort of pursuit. Though enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in a phrase that we Americans repeat over and over and over again, the pursuit of happiness never had for me the sort of weight that other values and goals and ideals had. Happiness just seems too insubstantial, too light to bear the weight of a life. Happiness, at least at first glance, doesn’t seem to require us to give of our whole selves. Happiness, not to go on and on about this, but happiness doesn’t seem to be the sort of topic that warrants attention in a religious setting. ‘Blessed are you who are happy’ does not have the sort of ring of meaning that I want from my religious leaders.
So what do I want? What do you want if not happiness? But this is part of the point of it all, isn’t it? Sorting out what it is we want, what kind of life we hope to lead has to be near the heart of the spiritual enterprise. Though the outlines of the destination may be vague, and the destination itself might be in question, we have to have a sense of where it is we are trying to get to if we have any hope to arrive.
Now, when someone who you think of as wise and capable – even if you’ve already dismissed a thinker like Thomas Jefferson – when someone wise and capable says that happiness is what we are seeking in our lives, it deserves a bit more of a glance. When there’s a whole book dedicated to the art of being happy that is based on the thinking of the Dalai Lama, I don’t know about you, but it gives me pause. While I don’t immediately change my mind, I need to look more deeply.
Howard Cutler, a physician who spent some days interviewing the Dalai Lama and then writing a book about what they discussed, summarised his thoughts this way:
The turning toward happiness as a valid goal and the conscious decision to seek happiness in a systematic manner can profoundly change the rest of our lives.
Clearly, they mean something different from what I mean when I talk about happiness.
The psychologist, Martin Seligman, can help to sort out some of the difficulty. You see, perhaps like you, when I think of happiness, I think of people laughing, I think of high positive emotion, and jolliness. Seligman, in his work in the field of Positive Psychology, has sought to identify and describe what makes for a satisfying and successful life and to do so he has looked at this pursuit of happiness.
He acknowledges that most of us think of happiness as this sort of ebullience. It’s what he calls the Pleasant Life. You know what this looks like. It’s people with lots of positive emotions, who seem to enjoy everything, who don’t seem to be as weighed down and burdened as the rest of us. There are probably people like this in your life. There are some things that seem to be true about this, if we are to believe the teachings of positive psychology. This seems to be in some good measure, inherited: you are born for this or you are not, it is more about how you’re put together than about what you can learn. However, what you have of it can be enhanced by techniques of savouring and mindfulness. As well, you become habituated to this sort of happiness very quickly, it doesn’t last in life. Like the woman in our reading this morning, her life was pretty much just her life, even now that she was in a new big house and able to travel.
There’s more, though. A second type of happy life is the Good Life. This is the kind of life in which you are deeply engaged in what you’re doing. I suspect you’ve had those moments. You are in the midst of a task, something that truly captures your attention and suddenly time has stopped moving. You are fully in the moment, fully present to what you are doing. The Good Life is characterised by a lot of these ‘flow’ experiences. This has nothing to do with smiling necessarily, and isn’t perhaps what we’d define as happy, but it is one kind of happy.
Unlike the Pleasant Life, this is one that it is possible to build. The Good Life depends upon us having a sense of our own strengths and creating a life that builds upon those strengths. It doesn’t have to be what you do for a living. My brother Michael has never held a job that he loved and that he found fulfilling. He’s always liked his work, even when he was a bill collector, priding himself on his sense of compassion when he spoke to people. His real strength is his love of social dance, and so he teaches people to dance, and helps to organise dances that enable people to come together in community and joy. His life, pleasant enough, is a Good life, too: it is filled with opportunities and moments when he can give himself over to what he loves and be in movement and in the music and in the moment.
The final kind of happy life that Seligman identifies is the Meaningful Life. As you might guess, this takes the Good Life another step and hitches it to a larger purpose. The Meaningful Life is that life in which you can identify your strengths and use them for touching the world. There’s an element here, too, of not just building for the time you are present to the world, but the ongoing work of building world that will continue to be better by lending your talents and strengths and love to positive institutions. In some measure, my brother also has a Meaningful Life, as he does what he can to build a community that contributes to the lives of those around him, and that fosters joy.
I suppose it can be said that I have been seeking a happy life all these years. And I suspect that you have, too. Not a pleasant life, though I appreciate all there is in my life that makes it so, and I work at paying attention and savouring and loving what I have in my life. No doubt you do that, too, try to pay attention to the world and its wonder and beauty, to make a pleasant life more possible.
Surely, a Good Life would be worth charting a course to find: discovering those moments when I am totally present, giving of all my heart and mind and self into the task at hand.
Interestingly, though, when the psychologists who are studying this look at what sort of a life offers the most sustaining satisfaction in life it is the Meaningful Life that wins out without any question.
And this is the life that the Dalai Lama suggests for us. ‘Let us reflect,’ he says,
on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities – warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes more meaningful and peaceful – happier.
So perhaps this is our task – ever our task – to be about the business of crafting a life that is truly and deeply happy:
a life that abounds in peace and contentment and pleasure, even in the difficult and troubling moments, may we savour what is there before us;
a life that engages us, in which we are drawn deeply into the moment often, flowing with energy;
and a life that points outward to that which is larger than us all, to a vision of what might be, a connection to that which is beyond our small life.
Over the years, I call back to that friend who made the wish for me, no matter the tone, no matter the intent in that moment of disconnection: yes, my friend, a happy life for me, and for you, too, a happy life for us all.
May it be so for us all.