Don't Aim at Happiness

Amos 8:1-12

Colossians 1:15-28

Last week we got together and worked – we cleaned, we raked leaves, we cut brush, we moved furniture, we mowed, we took care of kids, prepared food, and roofed a house.  Many of you were here and participated – but even if you missed it, you know what it’s like to commit yourself to a project aimed at helping someone else – the difficulty of the work is offset by the fun of doing it together with a team; and by the feeling that you made a difference.

Now let me ask you: did our shared work projects make you happier?  It’s hard to say, isn’t it?  I can’t answer for myself, because I fell asleep.  I was too tired to ask myself how I felt about what we did.  And those of you who’ve been spending time at Mercy’s Convenient Care all week getting shots for poison ivy and poison sumac, perhaps you would answer in the negative on this one!!

We’ve been talking about the biblical theme of happiness.  So you might think that I’m suggesting that we make happiness the goal of our lives.  But I’m not suggesting that.  Because it won’t work.  Don’t make happiness the goal of your life.  If you aim at it, you won’t hit it.  If you search for it, you won’t find it.

 

Several weeks back I mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s best-selling, self-help book,  The Happiness Project.  And there are hundreds of titles like it.  And most of them, Rubin’s included, assume that my own personal happiness is the most important thing in the world.  

To be honest,  I think “happiness” is a questionable goal.  It’s kind of hard to square it with biblical stories about what makes life meaningful.  Don’t get me wrong – I think that God creates us and blesses us so that we can flourish, learning and growing wise in loving God and others.  But whether “happiness” is a good word for that, I’m not at all sure.

There is a backlash against all this happiness talk in our culture.  I’ve come upon a book I rather like, Eric Wilson’s, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.  Wilson admits that serious depression is a real problem for some people.  And in those cases medication is the right choice.  But Wilson argues that moderate forms of sadness and depression are a necessary part of life.  And further, he argues that this sadness is enormously productive – we shouldn’t wish it away!  It leads us towards innovation and creativity and problem solving that would NEVER happen if we were happy and content.

Our oven died last week.  So we need to buy a new one.  Which is depressing because I don’t like our kitchen anyway.  It’s small, and poorly laid out.  And that reminds me, there are many things about my house I don’t like: our bedroom is always hot because it has a flat metal roof; there’s not much yard, no place for a garden, and really no good place for a basketball goal for our kids.  There are several houses nearby that aren’t taken care of.  So there has been this thought coming to birth in me lately: I’d be happier if we sold this house and got a better one. 

Then I came across an article on the connections between your house and your happiness levels.  (God does things like this to me occasionally).

Elizabeth Dunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, recently explored the impact of housing on people’s happiness for her new book, “Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.”

“Between 1991 and 2007, researchers tracked 3,658 people . . .  who moved to a new home because there was something they didn’t like about the old one. Although the participants reported a significant boost in satisfaction with their home for the first five years, they didn’t feel any better about their lives overall after they moved.”

It turns out that a new house, a better house, wouldn’t make me happier.  Oh, it would distract me for a while.  But after a few years of increased satisfaction with a better house, I’d be back to my same old level of happiness, searching for something else to artificially distract me from the real work -- the real life-project and human responsibility of crafting a life that’s wise and satisfying because it’s full of joy, friendships, laughter, celebration, good work, simplicity and compassion.

So here’s the question for the day: is it possible that you’d be happier if you quit aiming at happiness?  (I know, that’s kind of a Buddhist koan thing).  But you get what I mean.  Is it possible that aiming at happiness is getting in the way of you actually flourishing and becoming the person God has called you to be?

Amos 8:1-12

The words of Amos the prophet are ferocious, and unmistakable in their meaning.  The God who creates everything, who calls Israel into being, and who calls us now into this family of Jesus Christ – this God is actively at work to care for the poor and needy, to help the vulnerable, to provide for the orphan and the widow.  And if we as God’s people fail to shape our lives in a similar way, we come under God’s terrible judgment.

The ferocious judgment here in Amos 8 is really about self-centeredness.  It’s a judgment on the way of life that is preoccupied with getting ahead.  It’s God’s condemnation of the temptation to spend all our energies angling for a personal advantage.

Amos addresses people who are going through the motions of acting religious, but underneath that charade their hearts are still bent on accumulation and success at the expense of others.  You observe the sacred festivals and the weekly Sabbath day, says God, but you can’t wait for them to be over so you can get back to “trampling the needy.” 

Notice the kinds of behavior mentioned: this person isn’t being judged for selling grain.  He or she is being judged for the ruthless and heartless obsession with personal gain.  And he or she will stop at nothing to get ahead – “skimping on the measure, boosting the price, cheating with dishonest scales, and selling even the sweepings with the wheat.”

But God will put a stop to this outwardly religious selfishness.  All the singing will be silenced.  The festivals will be shut down.  And the people will wear sackcloth like they’re grieving a terrible loss.  God will send a famine – not of food or water – but a “famine of hearing the words of the Lord” (vs. 11).  That is, God will withdraw and hide his face and voice from the life of the people.

Now Amos was an ancient prophet in the Middle East – but it sounds so contemporary.  So spot on.  We live in a culture where you’re deemed a fool if you’re not getting ahead.  Aim at happiness, we’re told.  Aim at your own happiness and do whatever it takes to enhance the ease and comfort of your life.  In fact, much of the happiness advice we receive boils down to advice about how to live selfishly.  But that advice is at odds with the kind of people God has called us to be.

Colossians 1:15-28

The reading from Colossians helps us move past our smallness by shattering it, and by offering to us a breathtaking glimpse of God’s Son, Jesus Christ:

What I want you to notice about this passage of Scripture is that it’s not about ME!  And it’s not about YOU either!  It’s about the worthiness of God’s Son Jesus Christ to receive all our attention and praise and thanksgiving!

The Son of God who took on flesh in the man Jesus of Nazareth is, in fact, the eternal and glorious image of God. 

This Son has first place in all of creation – everything that exists is created in him, through him, and for him.  And the Son is the creative power that sustains all things and holds them together.

And this Son also has first place in the church.  His resurrection from the dead is the hope of everyone who belongs to him.  And God used his terrible suffering and death to turn our hostility into friendship, to turn our wickedness into a sharing in the Son’s perfect obedience and holiness.

So when we catch a glimpse of the Son’s supremacy in all things, it begins to change us.  No longer are we consumed with selfish matters of getting ahead at any cost.  Now we’re becoming people who, like the Apostle Paul, can gladly take up our small piece of Christ’s suffering for the good of others.  We can rejoice even when we lose or fail or fall behind, because we’re learning to live the Son’s way of life.  We’re not obsessed with “feeling happy” all the time.  We welcome the mystery of the gospel, the “Christ in you” surprise.  We want that presence of Christ in us to take shape, flourish and come to maturity more than anything else.  There is a deep joy in this way of life that perhaps isn’t captured very well by the term “happiness.”

Oliver Sacks, who writes prolifically about how our brains work, wrote about what it feels like to be turning 80.  “I feel glad to be alive,” he writes.  And then he continues, “”I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.”

Sacks continues – “I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.  I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever ‘completing a life’ means.

Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things in life.”

If you are 80 or nearing 80, then you can perhaps identify with Sacks when he walks outside and says, “I’m glad I’m not dead!”  But for the rest of us who are not yet 80, it is a pretty good spiritual exercise to imagine yourself at 80.  And ask yourself honestly, “How can I organize my life right now, so that I will still find my life deeply pleasurable at 80?”

People who reflect on their lives in their later years tend to focus on the enjoyment that comes from deep relationships with family and friends, from memories of doing good work and being good neighbors -- not on accumulating things like houses or cars or possessions.

There was a teacher who moved from Chapel Hill, NC to England for a new teaching job.  He mentioned to a colleague over lunch that a few times a week, he was suddenly hit with nostalgia for his previous home at the University of North Carolina: memories of old friends, Tar Heel basketball games, fried okra, the sweet smells of autumn in Chapel Hill.  His friend suggested he was depressed.  But he said no, he found that thinking about the past was rewarding for him.  So he started a research project on the benefits of nostalgia – of remembering fondly and valuing the past.

“The defining features of nostalgia in England are also the defining features in Africa and South America,” he writes.  “The topics are universal — reminiscences about friends and family members, holidays, weddings, songs, sunsets, lakes. The stories tend to feature memories of ourselves surrounded by close friends.

Most people report experiencing nostalgia at least once a week, and nearly half experience it three or four times a week.”

So what about you?  When you are nostalgic – what are you nostalgic FOR? What is it that you remember fondly?  If you pay attention to the affection of your good memories, it will connect you to the best parts of who you are and who you want to become.  Rarely do we fondly remember some selfish project or accomplishment.  Because we know that’s not what makes us happy.  Rather, we remember those people, places, and connections that are very close to the heart of who we want to be.

So if you want to increase your happiness in life: Don’t aim at happiness.  That is, don’t go for happiness as the primary goal of your life.  Happiness always emerges – when it comes - as a byproduct of a life wisely lived.

Let me remind you of a quotation from Ellen Charry’s book, “God and the Art of Happiness”:

“Happiness characterizes God-lovers, and loving well is the key to happiness. . . . Therefore, ultimate happiness is becoming wiser and better by loving God.”

Here’s the recommended practice for the week:

My guess is that every single one of us here is committed to something because we think it will make us happy.  But it doesn’t.  And yet we keep doing it.  Why?  Because we’re enslaved to it.  And we settle for living far beneath what God wants for us.  But God has already set us free.  Free to be ourselves.  Free to love God and our neighbors and to take great delight in getter better over time.

So I am challenging to take five minutes (do it seated, take a walk, whatever works) to ask yourself a hard question.  Ask yourself prayerfully, “Is there some way I’m seeking happiness that isn’t working?  Is there something I’ve been spending energy doing because I thought it would make me happy, but it isn’t?”

Maybe you worry over much about your reputation.  Or you seek happiness in food or sex or alchohol or some other physical indulgence.  Or in being financially secure – making and saving plenty of money.  Or in the approval of someone – your parents or peers.  Or through sleep, television, social networking, or shopping.  And once you’ve identified a life-goal that isn’t working, begin to root it out of your life.

And in its place, can you find one thing to start doing that has a better chance of making you glad to be alive.  What is that one thing you do occasionally that brings you joy and gives you energy?  Why not do it more often?  Why not rearrange your schedule and your priorities so it can become more a part of your life?

Aim at becoming wiser and better at loving God, and happiness will tag along.