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?  

What does mercy look like?

Dzokhar Tsarnaev
dailystar.co.uk

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber, gets the death penalty. According to eye witness accounts of his trial, he expresses no remorse, anymore than he did after the crime itself. He smelt the blood and heard the screams but casually went off to purchase a bottle of milk at a nearby shop and then tweeted “there is no love in this country”.

Later, in court, he cried at the sight of his aunt, but his tears, it seemed, were for her and not for those who had lost children or friends in the bombing. But before then, as he remembered the event itself, he had told Sister Helen Prejean who visited him in prison that “No one deserves to suffer like they did”.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev is 21, officially an adult but still a juvenile, a person not fully formed whose emotions are still in a state of flux and able to be shaped by others. At the same time, he seems old before his time. His face is set in the defiance of old age, as it is seen in the faces of those who have lived selfishly and refuse either regret or remorse. Is he in his right mind? Is he as much himself as he was perhaps ten years ago? What kind of a human being could he yet become if he was healed of his hatred? If we kill him we will never know.

Neither will we know what the murdered child and student would have become if they had lived. In all this unknowing, those who were tasked with administering justice wanted Tsarnaev to give them a sign which would help them to be merciful, but he remained impassive. In a society for whom retributive justice is a moral imperative, public opinion would have gone against them had they decided on mercy in any case, and Tsarnaev himself did not seem to want his life to be spared.  So would it have been a harder punishment to allow him to live?  

This begs a further question about what punishment is for. Is it simply to hand out retribution measure for measure, an eye for an eye? If so, what purpose does it serve? Towards what end does it lead? Where something serves an ultimate end, it has a future, a time ahead in which change might be effected in a killer’s mind and heart. The question also turns on the fact that punishment is not handed out simply because it will deter future criminals but because justice demands that criminals should be punished on behalf of their victims.

A quid pro quo approach to justice denies any possibility of a punishment leading towards some better end. Furthermore, it constrains the idea of justice itself within the narrow confines of a problem which can only be solved through payback. But payback is not really a solution for the victim, or for the wider community or for the perpetrator of the crime. Payback justice can only lead to a life-denying outcome for everyone, in other words to more death. It deprives all parties concerned of their humanity, whether that humanity is understood as life to be cut off or spared, or, in the case of criminal justice, the quality and fruit of a lifespan which has run its natural course.

How many victims of terrorism, who have had someone they love taken from them arbitrarily and violently, feel that their own humanity has been restored, even enriched, in the longer term by the fact of a life being taken for a life in the moment of  the judgment handed down in court? Has this judgment healed the victim, or has it simply given them permission to carry on with their own retributive hating? In the case of the perpetrator, the death sentence will prevent further hate-driven activity, but it will not stem hatred. It will simply pass it on to someone else, or disseminate it in the wider group.

 If the death penalty were to be commuted to life imprisonment, would it not offer Dzokhar Tsarnaev the chance to convert his hatred into something life giving and all the more valuable because of the change of mind and heart needed for life to be born out of the ashes of hatred?  If we do not believe such a thing to be possible, have we not already forfeited something of our humanity?

The Christian message of salvation is one of mercy, the kind of mercy which pertains to God and which transforms minds and changes the way people live their lives. To deny mercy is to deny the possibility of the transformation of hatred and of another person changing as a result of this transformation. It also denies our own need for mercy, our need to be embraced by God.  To feel the effect of mercy we have to own our need of it, first to God and then to those we have wronged who are also in need of mercy, each in their separate ways.

Our world is much in need of mercy. Until we all recognise this need, whatever our perceptions of the other religion, the other  nation or the other person, we cannot begin to hope for a future.

Absence

We are approaching the shortest season of the Christian year. It lasts a little over a week and is known as Ascensiontide.

Ascensiontide is a season for celebrating absence, a season of paradox.

Edward Hopper 'Automat' (1927)

Absence correlates with loneliness. A great deal is being said these days about loneliness and whether or not the problem of loneliness in our society is either helped or exacerbated by the internet. Are we living in an increasingly ‘virtual’ world, one which is, by implication, false? If so, loneliness, in its various manifestations, especially those related to addiction and abuse, must also be connected to loss and bereavement, the loss of what is real and true in human relationships.

It is at first surprising that the Christian Church should treat this interim season, between the Ascension of Christ into heaven and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as one of joyful expectancy. For the disciples, it was also a time of disorientation and emotional disorder. Ascensiontide is a time of conflicting emotions. A certain tension prevails which needs to be broken, so that negative and sad emotions can be dis-ordered and then reconfigured in ways which change how we see things, and perhaps how we see God. Ascensiontide is, like Advent and Lent, a time of preparation in which we know God in his absence, prior to knowing him in a new way.

We get so used to a negative experience of absence in our lives, absence associated with separation or bereavement, and to what it does to us, that at times it is hard to imagine how life would be if that absence were to be filled. Absence speaks of a space that has been vacated, either because someone, or some animal we love, has left us or died, or because we ourselves have left another person or a place we associate with happiness, so absence also resonates with loss.

How does such a seemingly bleak situation connect with the season of Ascensiontide? I think the answer comes in the form of joyful expectation, or ‘hope-filled waiting’. Hope involves risk. It means being prepared to have our sadness questioned and then thrown into disorder while we remain realistic about what caused it in the first place. Hope comes with being realistic about how human beings connect or engage with one another, and about life itself and our own mortality. The disciples waiting in the upper room were acutely aware of their connectedness with one another in the one whose presence they so missed. They also feared for their physical lives.

A sense of connectedness is essential to our physical and emotional survival, especially in times of separation or danger, but connectedness does not have to be limited to our immediate family or social ‘circles’, to employ the language of social media. We are also connected to all those who, in these times of religious extremism and global turmoil, fear for their lives. This is the wider context in which our own particular sadness, and whatever emotional violence we may be experiencing, is held and healed.

Connectedness also has to do with having a sense of history, our own, that of our society and of the planet which we share. When connectedness is understood in this way it sustains us because it allows us to understand life as an unlimited, or eternal, creative event. There are scientists who are even beginning to think of the universe, or universes, as an eternity of eternities. Presumably it is ‘uncreated’ life itself which connects these eternities.

Such a way of thinking might also help us to make sense of conflicting emotions. The moving unbounded event of life anchors the chaos of our negative or destructive emotions. It reconnects them with the interdependence of all living things, and reconnects the present moment with both the past and the future. The way our individual lives have touched upon those of other people, including those whom we have perhaps never met, is part of this continuum. Where our connectedness with others is interrupted we experience a profound sense of absence, or loss, a kind of relational vacuum. Perhaps the internet makes us feel this loss all the more keenly.

But it is in this acute sense of loss or absence, this vacant space, that we wait with joyful expectation for the renewing event of Pentecost, for a sudden surprising ‘wind of change’ which derives from a single source, a single energy. It derives from the energy of God’s love, of truth itself, at work in the present moment in which a particular absence is perhaps being most acutely felt. 

By their fruits...

Big Ben and Houses of Parliament
insights4u.co.uk

The advantage of an eclectic schooling, or even a disrupted one, lies in the way it conditions a person to the possibility of seeing things in more ways than one, through different cultural prisms. The casualties of such a primary intellectual formation lie chiefly in the realm of mathematics and history. It is hard to get a grasp of numeracy when it is taught in more than one way and, as in my case, in more than one language. But the patchy impression one gets of history, from going to different schools and not always in the same country is, in the longer term, a far greater risk to intellectual health.

For one thing, if you change schools often, you don’t put down intellectual roots. This means that you don’t properly belong to any one thread of history. You have become disconnected from your own historical thread, the one you left behind when you went to live in another country, and you have arrived too late in the academic year, or even in the trajectory of your life, to pick up that of your adopted land. You feel disconnected from its particular contextual flow, from how your peers are already being shaped and acquiring their political identity from within their history. This puts you in a defensive position, one which makes it difficult for trust to take root, so you switch off during history lessons and, as a result, become even more alienated.

Perhaps one of the important things to learn from this election is that we are in the process of re-thinking our history, a history which is being shaped demographically. We can look at this demographic re-shaping of history in a positive light, if we choose to do so, or we can feel threatened by it. The choice is open to all of us. 

Our history is also being shaped by a fluid ‘pick and mix’ approach to politics, and by rapid change and temporary party alliances within the political system. It is arguable that these temporary alliances are in part a response to the rapid changes we experience at every level of our consumerist collective life. We have become a pick and mix society, picking and choosing between different party policies but seldom clear about how we coalesce as a nation. Even so, this political fragmentation may yet bear fruit in surprising ways.

What is needed is the re-establishment of trust, beginning with a genuine renewal of the system itself. The old two party system is faltering because a sizeable proportion of the population does not feel connected to it. This feeling of disconnectedness has grown out of a sense of disillusionment with the political system itself and with the people who govern through it. The system is a closed one by virtue of the way votes are counted and power subsequently allocated, and by the forced obeisance imposed through the party Whip.

It seems almost certain that the outcome of this election will lead to one of two things; either a marriage of convenience similar to that of the last parliament or, preferably, to a minority government in which all will have to listen to each other for the sake of the common good, and thereby begin to shape a new and better history for this country. They will do this by taking shared decisions on a policy by policy basis. The difference between these two methods of governance lies in their potential for re-building trust in a political system which has been strained to the limit as a result of the last two general elections.

On the one hand, and most recently, coalitions, despite their moderating effects, ultimately reduce governance to deal-making behind closed doors, to which all parties to the marriage are obliged to sign up even if they played no direct part in the brokering of the deal and know that those who voted for them disagree with the policy in question. On the other, lies the possibly less efficient but more transparent way of reaching decisions whereby policies are agreed upon openly and collectively on the basis of what is most good and sensible for the nation as a whole.

As with the system, so with the people who hold the power within it. Cameron’s recent Freudian slip suggests that politicians must speak and act in ways which protect their careers, even if the speaking and the acting do not ultimately coincide. As a result, those standing for election to the highest office in the land are tainted with the same distrust which many feel towards the political system as a whole. This will continue for as long as politicians choose to retain the present electoral system and operate within its protective confines, but history has proved that disillusionment in the people who take advantage of flawed systems, and govern through them, has serious consequences. Politicians may be just like the rest of us but more is expected of them. That is the real price of power.