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?