Wanting to be happy

Two out of the eight dogs we have owned over the years have been smilers.  One of them, a wiry black creature of indeterminate breed, smiled when he felt one of two emotions – guilt, or untrammelled delight. Sometimes the two went together, as when on arriving home unannounced we would find him gazing down, grinning and sneezing, from the top of the stairs, where he should not have been. But smiling and simultaneous sneezing seemed to have an expiating effect on his conscience – probably because we would react with an answering smile, if not with a sneeze.

That particular dog had the right jaw structure for smiling, and his whiskers were not too heavy. Our present dog would like to smile, and tries, but he is heavy of jaw and lip, so his efforts end in a slightly louche expression. In his case, it is the wanting to smile which is so endearing. We want him to smile as much for his sake as for ours, and this is where smiling dogs have something unique to offer. They make us want the happiness we already have and they make us grateful for it.  

Wanting to be happy is like having a healthy appetite. Wanting to be happy, and being OK about it, is natural and good. One of the worst ills of our times is that in the face of the suffering of so many people today it is easy to feel guilty about wanting to be happy, that it is somehow selfish. But guilt is the work of moral deception. It deceives us into believing that we do not deserve happiness, that in the face of so much cruelty and hardship in the world, we have no right to pause for even a second and know the joy of being who we are in our present surroundings. It tells us that we have no right to celebrate anything and that if we do, it should be done almost furtively, keeping the blessings of life and the joy they bring at arm’s length.

This is where dogs, and any animal which allows us to be physically close to it, put our lives in perspective. Both our dogs (one is very large and the other extremely small) do this by being fully who they are. As dogs, their emotional intelligence operates on a number of levels, most of them inaccessible to us. But one thing they make quite clear, and accessible through sheer physical activity, is that they know when they are happy – and that they are OK about that.

They also know when we need to be happy. Our big dog will decide when the news is taking me into a dark emotional place before I am ready to go there. He will signal this by putting his large head on my lap  prior to slowly clambering on top of me. He is pretty well unstoppable once this process has begun. But as he clambers up, he puts things in perspective. He obliges joy, even if this comes as I am in the process of battling him off the sofa and back on to his ‘mat’, that section of the carpet which is reserved for him and his small friend. By the time we have sorted ourselves out, a sense of connectedness with what is real and what matters in the immediate here and now has quietly re-asserted itself. The news goes on but there is also a whisper of hope in the room. 

As with the intelligence of dogs, hope, which is part of our spiritual intelligence, is of a different emotive order than many people assume. Christian hope is not blind optimism or the denial of reality. Rather, it is a certain kind of knowing, a knowing which takes us to the very depths of our own darkness and to the depths of human conflict and suffering, only to find in these dark places the simplicity of God and the purity which we know as joy.    

How to be happy

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‘Happiness is a right, but you have to catch it yourself’ said Benjamin Franklin of the American Constitution. It was a very English thing for an 18^th century American to say. We English have traditionally held that pulling yourself up by your own boot straps is something of a moral imperative. This is why Pelagius, writing in the 5^th century, was a very English heretic. Pelagius argued that human beings did not need divine grace in order to fulfil God’s purpose for them because they could perfectly well fulfil that purpose through their own efforts and character. Part of his argument entailed the denial of original sin, as it was then understood. Original sin was seen to have been inherited from Adam’s wilful disobedience to God as a stain on a person’s soul, on their essential being. This stain could only be eradicated by the grace imparted through baptism.

Today, original sin translates as our natural propensity for the furthering of self interest at the expense of anyone or anything which gets in its way. It arguably has its origins in the instinct for survival which we have inherited from our earliest humanoid ancestors. So original sin, the result of being separated from God’s grace translates as original selfishness. In modern society unredeemed original selfishness leads to a state of collective and chronic loneliness.

In terms of the individual, those who have led selfish lives can find themselves alone and unvisited in their final years, a situation exacerbated, perhaps, by the selfishness they have passed on to others. In cosmic terms, the tendency to collective greed and individual selfishness suggests that its ultimate casualty will be the demise of our species within the next couple of centuries.  But our denial of this increasingly obvious fact does not seem to be making us less selfish, either in terms of how we think about the planet we are bequeathing to the next three or four generations, or how we conceive of our own happiness at this moment.

Perhaps the difficulty lies primarily in the question of ‘the moment’, in the way time itself has become a kind of currency. We are used to thinking about disposable assets, but we seldom think about disposable time. Disposable time, and how it is used, is central to the question of happiness and to that of loneliness. Too little disposable time forces us to compress our lives into a rapidly diminishing time framework, usually at the expense of our relationships and of our mental and physical health. Later in life, the sacrificing of relationships will lead to us having too much disposable time, too many hours to fill and too few people left with whom to share them.

 Do we simply write this scenario off as the inevitable price we pay for living in the times we live? Or can we change this scenario or, better still, is there a way for re-connecting with the source of true happiness from within it? Can we find ways of being present to a greater stillness from within any one transient moment in daily life?

There are two stories from the Gospels which hint at how we might re-think our happiness priorities and so arrive at such a mental vantage point. The first story is that of the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man who wants to know what he must do to inherit the kingdom of God. Like many religious people, he has led a good life but he is afraid of parting with his possessions. Material assets may not constitute happiness, but they do impart a feeling of safety, so to let go of them willingly is frightening. This was the young man’s problem. He found it hard to come to terms with the fact that his assets were in fact disposable. Like many of us today he felt that he was defined by what he owned, or by what he had achieved, so his happiness depended on maintaining his ‘profile’.

The other story concerns two sisters, Martha and Mary. Jesus is having supper at their house and Martha chides him for allowing her sister to sit listening to him instead of helping her with the meal. (Where is their brother, one can’t help wondering?) But Jesus replies that Mary has ‘the better part’. The story concerns the proper deployment of disposable time when it comes to what makes for real happiness.

This is not to say that spirituality (whatever that word signifies) is more important than practical action or rational thought, but that there are deep human needs which take precedence over everything else. The deepest of these is our need for God. Meeting our need for God requires time, rather than money. Neither is it a matter of effort or of personal strengths and attributes.

This alters the way we think about disposable time. Getting our priorities right helps to address the problem of how we use our time, and our priorities are intrinsically bound up with happiness.

If what we have, when it is significantly more than we need in order to lead a life which is physically and emotionally healthy, does not allow us to be at peace at least for a part of each day, what is it we lack?