Happiness

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - May 11 2013

All of my life has been a search for happiness.

That may sound simple enough, and true enough, that is covers most of us, right? I mean who of us does not want to be happy?

I even categorize this as the chief aim of my religious quest. I feel that Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly. And that means sucking the marrow out of life. So I have tried to always be eating in new restaurants, always travelling, always setting off on new adventures in search of happiness.

I pretty much have felt that this was the meaning of life.

Then someone wisely said to me, in one of those glum moments when I was feeling sorry for myself, that I am never going to find it.

“What?” I screamed, “of course I will, how dare you tell me I cannot be happy!” to which the reply came, but when these things make you happy, what happens when they stop?

When… they… stop? What happens when the lobster dinner is over, when the sun has set on the beach, when the night in the hotel is over, when the basketball game ends? Do you feel happy? And the answer, for me, honestly, is that I do not. I was happy while doing it, but that feeling is tied to the activity, to the action, to the moment.

Maybe you all know this. I feel like I should have got it long before I did. But the point of life is abundance; it is fulfillment; it is joy… which is not the same as happiness.

In the very first pages of the Bible we are reading about the concept of joy. God makes all these things, so the story goes, and each creation brings a sense of joy, of completeness. At the end of the day, with the feet up on the coffee table, God says, “This is good!”

So much so that morning brings a chance to do it all again!

When Jesus was talking about Abundant Life, I now understand that he was not talking about hang gliding and beach vacations. He was talking about a sense of joy and fulfillment that lasts. One of the main reasons I go to church is that I have always thought the teachings of religion, the ideas Jesus had on living, would make me happy. Turns out I was right, but wrong in so many ways.

So here is the secret… what we need to do is to turn it around, things do not bring happiness, we need to find happiness in things.

Just do not tell the advertising people this. There are billions of dollars being spent to convince you that happiness is found in a new car, a new rug, a new flavour of chocolate bar…

Well, what if it is the other way around. If you go looking for happiness, for joy, in everything you do, you will find it. This is approach I am working on. So I go for a walk in the sunshine and look for birds singing, I sit and stare at the falling rain and listen to the music, I eat a meal and taste every bite…

In other words, I am convinced that the world, as God said, is GOOD! And I go trying to find the good in everything. It is not easy, and there are certainly days and things that happen that bring back the depression I constantly fight against.

But I am no longer looking for the one thing that will finally make me happy. I realize nothing ever will. Happiness is something I was created with, and I need first to find it within me. 

Maybe we all can.

New Life

I have some colleagues who claim a bump in attendance this Easter.

Not the regular, more people than every other Sunday except Christmas Eve; but rather, more people than last Easter. I do not know if this is a phenomenon that is repeated in other United Churches or even other denominations this year; but it does give one cause to think.

Someone claimed that the media attention given to the new Pope points to a similar conclusion… are people getting interested in religion again?

I knew a man, a minister, who has been one for a very long time. In fact, of clergy I have heard of he has been doing it the longest, and he pointed out that in his lifetime there have been cycles, up and down; from the relatively non-religious days before the Second World War, through the religious days of the 1950’s, The loss of authority and religious belief of the 60’s etc… up and down.

He is not alone in this belief, in fact, experts agree that there are larger cycles as well. Some, like Karen Armstrong, argue for massive 500 year cycles, or perhaps even longer. The reality they point to is the fact that we are a people who move through our beliefs.

Humans come to know a truth, then we think about it long and hard and abandon it, then we realize we are living without a part of ourselves and embrace it. That is just who we are.

The thing is, all of the 1900’s, all of these relatively small changes we saw over the last 100 years, are all part of a larger cycle of change that we are in the midst of which is only half way done. Take our side of the religious coin alone, and think about Christianity over the last 4000 years.

First there was this belief that there was a god for everything, sheep and farming, rains and sunshine. Then, somewhere, there was this period of religious and social upheaval that led to monotheism, the belief that there was one, all powerful, God who controlled everything. That lasted for a few generations and along came another period of upheaval and change which eventually brought about Jesus and the idea that God is not distant and all powerful but relational and here with us. Then at the turn of the last century this began to change again.

It started changing with the industrial revolution, it changed when more people moved to cities than lived in the country, it changed when we published books, started scientific inquiry and built computers… it has been changing for a while….

Sorry to wax so philosophical, but I am fresh off a month of thinking about what Easter means to us here in the modern scientific skeptical age. It is hard to figure that out, because we truly do live in an age of not yet… the religion that was the cornerstone of our great, great, grandparents; that led to the idea that Christians would conquer and convert the world, that was sure life here had meaning because it would continue in heaven… that religion has been dying a slow death for a hundred years. And here we are a decade into the next hundred and we truly have no idea what it will be like 5, 10, 100 years down the road.

I write these columns to make people think. And for so long I have been hearing about the death of the church; I have been hearing that people are not religious anymore and that the ideas we hold are quaint. But that is not true. We are just changing.

Some people hate it and are holding on with clenched teeth to the traditions. Some people are afraid and do not know what to do. Some people are exploring what needs to change and what makes sense today.

So perhaps things are coming around. Perhaps we are on the other side of the current age of lack of faith and things really are going to start growing again.

Whatever the case, I write these columns in the hopes that you will join the last group, those who want to think about what next. Those that want to work at making sense of what we have been handed. Easter is about new life and I believe there is new life for the religions of the world, for the faithful… I just don’t know what it will look like.