While I was recovering from an accident last July, injuring both back and pride, a parishioner sent me a Gary Larsen "Far Side" get-well card. It shows a building on fire, smoke and flames pouring from its windows, floating down a fast-flowing river and about to take a precipitous plunge over a huge waterfall. The sign on the building says, "Crisis Clinic." Inside, the card says, "Everything's about the same here. How are things with you?" This parishioner, both astute and compassionate, went on to write, "I couldn't find the right get-well card for you, so maybe this spot of humor will do as well. It's no consolation to you, but welcome to the club!"
We all belong to the club - it's called humanity, but the only dues we pay are the pain of struggling through lives which sometimes seem aflame with crisis. Or is that too bleak a picture, too harsh a depiction of our lives, too severe a judgment of what it is to be alive?
One of life's most bewildering questions is whether happiness or sadness is the default mode of human existence; which is the basic condition of life? Is life basically joyful, with occasional moments of pain, or is it basically tragic, with occasional bursts of glory? It's another version of that old conundrum - is the glass half empty or half full?
I rather suspect one's answer to that question depends on one's stage of life, or the year, or the month or the day or the hour, or even the moment. For example, how is each of us feeling right now? No doubt we exhibit a full range of answers. Am I happy? Well, yes and no. But then, I don't expect to be happy all the time, nor could I stand it if I were constantly unhappy.
Consider the Garden of Eden myth. While orthodox theologians see the Adam and Eve story as the explanation of Original Sin, others define what happened in that legendary garden as the happy sin - and I don't have sexuality in mind.
The deeper significance of this fortunate fall is that in their rebellion against God, Adam and Eve struck the first blow for human freedom. At first all they could do was obey God; then they decided the hazards of freedom were better than the boredom of security.
As poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti put it, "The world is a beautiful place to be born if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun, if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine - because even in heaven they don't sing all the time."
Happiness is one of those fundamental values everyone wants and no one can define. As Americans we will defend to the death our right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Note that we are not guaranteed happiness, only the right to pursue it. Jefferson does not tell us what happiness is. As a good Unitarian, he probably assumed we could figure it out for ourselves.
Not only are most of us clueless as to what happiness is, but I recently read "Why The Happy Are Nuts," from The Journal of Medical Ethics. In it Richard Bentall of Liverpool University contends (with tongue only slightly in cheek) that "happiness (is) a psychiatric disorder," reflecting "abnormal functioning of the central nervous system," and "is associated with various cognitive abnormalities."
Bentall asks whether happiness is rational or not. Happy people tend to repress negative events from long-term memory. They are sometimes naive about the harsh realities of their physical and social surroundings. Happy people tend to overestimate their capacity to control their environment. So while some psychiatric researchers focus on depressive realism in unhappy people, the happy ones tend to be decidedly unrealistic and irrational. Furthermore, happiness meets other criteria for psychiatric disorder - it is statistically abnormal and exhibits a decided lack of contact with reality.
Perhaps the best example of "why the happy are nuts" comes from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who must now be very happy, since he recently became engaged to an attractive financial analyst, with whom he had been keeping company for 13 years. His own dire warning to investors about the dangers of the current bull market surely suggests why the happy may be nuts - beware, he said, of "irrational exuberance."
No doubt we have all seen such "irrational exuberance" around us - people who, through thick and thin, seem unconscionably happy; people to whom bad cards are dealt through no fault of their own, who display an irrepressible love of life; people who seem to have so little, but enjoy life so much; people who, paradoxically, seem strangely happy in giving their lives away.
Try this thought experiment, a kind of 20th century Faustian bargain. I have here in my hand a contract for you to sign. If you sign it, you will be guaranteed happiness. However, if you do, all your powers of thought will be taken away. It is a binding agreement.
Will you sign it? Probably not. At least not if you are a Unitarian Universalist. Why? Because we cannot conceive happiness without thinking, no matter how troubling thinking is.
Another way to look at happiness is through virtual reality. Try another thought experiment called "The Pleasure Machine." Suppose scientists have figured out how to produce, on demand, particular sensations that make for happiness by directly stimulating appropriate clusters of brain cells. Imagine yourself in a room at a piano so wired that pressing a particular key produces a distinct pleasurable sensation.
You want a pizza now? Press middle C. You've got it!
Want your back scratched? Press D-sharp at the bottom. Voila! The G-flat two octaves up simulates the sensation of floating in water.
If you wish more complex pleasures, work on your chords and enjoy the pleasures of fine wine, the sounds of a beautiful hymn, a magnificent work of art, a joyous time with family and friends. We can enhance our virtual reality capacity enabling us to live out all our fantasies - doing brain surgery, or conducting a symphony orchestra, or accepting an Academy Award, or capturing an audience with dazzling guitar riffs.
Now, the only catch is that you have to spend your entire life in the room with the pleasure machine. All these intense experiences of happiness are illusory; none of them are real. If what you care about is feeling good, experiencing happiness, this pleasure machine does it all. But if you consider life to be more than a series of hedonistic events that stimulate a cluster of brain cells, you may be hesitant. Living in a room with a pleasure machine provides not nearly as much happiness - or sorrow - as living in the real world.
Why is that? I suspect because the pursuit of happiness is better than happiness itself. But, then, I'm not really sure we can pursue happiness.
In fact, I suspect that happiness is simply a by-product of a much more religious pursuit - the quest for meaning - the distinctively religious route to happiness.
It's not that we consciously go out and seek to find meaning in every experience. It is that as religious creatures we sense - sometimes vaguely - that there is something more to life than seeking pleasure, something more significant than getting and spending, something more fulfilling than accumulating "stuff."
If we understand life as an expedition with a purpose more than meaningless meandering, then the journey will have its happy times. It is almost as if life were asking us - what are you doing here? It's as if life were asking us - what is your job on the planet?
I believe each of us has a job on the planet - a purpose - not necessarily in the customary sense, but a job that moves us to paint, to write, to compose, to raise a family, to take care of the hurt, to work for justice.
It is the sometimes happy work of a lifetime to discover what that job is - and hope that we have the energy and the skill to do it.
With the pace of life so breathless, we seldom have time to catch that breath - to determine what all our comings and goings are really for. We have spent so much time on accumulating things, we seem to have forgotten how to enjoy non-things - like being.
Recently I read about "monks in overdrive," an article about the potential destruction of Benedictine monastic life. Evidently, the monks who formerly were able to support themselves by farming and by producing simple but high-quality products have fallen victim to the pressures of the market. To make even their modest ends meet they are increasingly forced outside the monastery into secular jobs in academic, governmental and ecclesiastical settings, leaving precious little time for the contemplative life.
One said, "The institutions we work for no longer are satisfied with part of our time and interest: They now want our souls." The balanced life of work and prayer has been disrupted.
With the frantic scramble for worldly goods, the often tawdry products of our amusement industry and our obsessive drive for happiness, our culture has become dreary - people are exhausted - there is too much to do in too little time for too puny a reason.
A young friend of philosopher Bertrand Russell's once found the philosopher in a state of profound contemplation. "Why so meditative?" asked the young man. "Because I've made an odd discovery," replied Russell. "Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."
The problem with savants is that they are looking for ultimate happiness in order to dissect it, intellectually reduce it to its lowest terms. The gardener is intensely involved in the much more immediate experiences of existence and sees a purpose in what he or she is doing. The gardener has a job on the planet that gives meaning - and therefore moments of happiness.
From all this I conclude that happiness is not a steady state phenomenon, but a precious and sometimes precarious occasion when we glimpse the meaning or one of the meanings of our life. I don't believe we can seek happiness directly, although there are plenty of happiness gurus out there who will tell us just how it is to be done. Happiness is what comes to us in moments of meaning. Happiness is a virtue we experience from time to time when we seek merely to live the good life. As Jesus said, "Seek first the Kingdom and all these things shall be added unto you."
Perhaps the wisest words I found in my study of happiness come from our Unitarian Universalist poet laureate, May Sarton.
"I've been thinking about happiness - how wrong it is to ever expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness."
That is a good thing to remember when the virtual reality of our pleasure machine gives way to the real world of joy and sorrow. There are moments in every day when it seems we are in a fiery crisis clinic floating down the river toward the falls. But there are also moments in every day when we experience happiness, when the frayed and tattered threads of our lives all seem to come together in a pattern that amazes and inspires - if only for a brief moment.
Perhaps it is irrational to be happy - after all, we're all going to die one day. But I am sustained by those moments of happiness that come to me unbidden as I seek to do my particular job on the planet. And so I ask you to make this pledge with me for 1997 and beyond: "I pledge allegiance to the rainbow and to the elation for which it stands, one circus, one ringmaster with balloons for all." So may it be.
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