New Testament Reading-Mark 8: 27-37
Ostensibly, a wedding should be a high point on the happiness continuum of life, and indeed for Eunita and I it was, but I must confess I may have made a mistake in trying to foster this happiness as we left Vancouver on our drive to Sacramento a few weeks ago. Eunita and I have done road trips in the past, and one thing we typically enjoy is listening to a good book on CD. Various members of my family have a decent collection of such CDs, so I asked them to send me something good. It was at this point that I made the perhaps regrettable suggestion that it be Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.
I am not knocking the book itself, but those of you who have read it know that it is not exactly a boost for someone on the threshold of matrimonial bliss. One of my sisters actually warned me of this fact in advance, but did I listen? No. So it was that after a few miles on I-5, Eunita and I began to listen to Gilbert’s agonizing tear-by-tear account of her divorce. The account starts with her “hiding in the bathroom” for the forty-seventh night in a row as she sobs about her crumbling marriage while her husband sleeps in the bedroom.[i] Prostrate on the floor in prayer, Gilbert wrestles with the gnawing thought that she does not want to be married anymore, that she doesn’t want to live in her big suburban house, and that she doesn’t want to have a baby.
At about that point, I was wishing that the new Dan Brown book had already been released on CD. Nevertheless, by the end of our honeymoon and after a very happy wedding, Eunita and I had finished listening to this book that both of us had come to appreciate, even if Eunita did not appreciate my listening to large parts of it twice because I had fallen asleep on occasion. My full review of the book is a little mixed, but it did provide some good food for thought. In the book, Gilbert recounts her travels to three diverse countries on her path to spiritual recovery. In Italy, she researches the art of pleasure amid helpings of gelato, pasta, and pizza. In India, she enrolls at her guru’s ashram and does an array of chants, mantras, and meditations. Then, in Indonesia, she seeks to strike a balance between the life of pleasure and the life of devotion. Along the way, she falls in love again despite her own initial best wishes. The book ends as a spiritual makeover success story for this thirtyish-something year old woman who was raised a Christian but prefers a mixed salad of religion rather than the single leaf variety of faith common to many churches.
The book is part diary and part how-to-manual for the pursuit of happiness. With its juicy and humorous blend of self-revelation, self-help, and travel adventure, Gilbert’s book has a predictable appeal in today’s market. Honestly, I could not but help to initially feel a bit of religious envy reflecting on the book’s success. As far as a spiritual road to recovery, pasta and meditation sound a lot more appealing than a religion that offers to lay a big wooden cross upon one’s back. Actually, the cross is technically not laid on our back. We are supposed to hoist it up there ourselves. Jesus says, “Take up the cross.” How are Christians ever too compete in the market place of ideas with an enticing slogan such as this? Forget inner peace. How about a couple of timbers on your back?
It would seem unfortunate for Christians that happiness is now in vogue. Happiness books are bestsellers. This past year The New York Times has done a number of stories on the pursuit of happiness. Among academics, the happiness trend started some years back. A couple of years ago Harvard Magazine ran a story on the budding field of happiness studies. The article began by describing a happiness conference that had recently taken place in downtown D.C. I have never been a particular fan of academic conferences, but this conference sounded different. The atmosphere sounded far more congenial and laid back. Participants would occasionally break into yoga-like stretches in the aisles or lay back in a relaxed manner against the body of a friend “as if resting on a chaise lounge.” To call back participants from their herbal tea breaks, the conference organizer would walk around smiling and ringing a dinner bell. The main difference, however, the author noted between the happiness conference and most other academic conferences appeared during the question and answer periods. At the typical conference, scholars might obsess “with poking holes in the argument” of a lecture-all “with the transparent purpose of one-upping the speaker.” Not so at the happiness conference. A more collaborative and uplifting spirit ensued. One professor of psychiatry averred that it was “an absolute joy” to present at a happiness summit. He added, “Here, people really laugh at the jokes.”[ii]
The article goes on to talk about one happiness scholar in particular who teaches at Harvard. He teaches a course entitled “Positive Psychology” that has been dubbed in the media as “Happiness 101.” When offered, the course has the largest enrollment of any course at Harvard with 854 students. Undoubtedly, some people initially respond to the idea of happiness scholarship with ridicule, but the notion of studying happiness in a way does make some serious sense. As the article notes, “For much of its history, psychology has seemed obsessed with human failings and pathology.” Positive psychology takes a different approach. Instead of looking at humans as miserable wretches in need of repair, positive psychologists look at humans as having strengths and virtues upon which to build and develop. For example, instead of looking at an alcoholic’s underlying pathology, they look at how a recovered alcoholic manages to be so resilient.
I like the sound of all this, so maybe we Christians need a new, modernized gospel of happiness. Instead of passing out crosses, let’s pass out twizzlers. I will admit, however, that all of these recent thoughts on happiness came as something of a rude awakening to me. Lately, I have been intrigued by that small question some of us ponder every once and while: namely, what is the meaning of life? In my ruminations on this subject, I had been thinking about how one of the values of being in a church is that we can raise and address questions like this. I also thought about how some environments by contrast really constrain the meaning we can find in life. For example, think of the teenager whose life is confined by notions of what it means to be cool. If one thinks of meaning as the square upon which we each dance in life, then narrow ideas about what it is cool to do and not to do, can seriously constrict the size of one’s square. It’s like going to the high school prom and having to dance like this all night (perform imitation). I don’t know what the teenage years were like for others, but for me, they were actually a time when I began to question some of those constrictions and I began to think about what activities and pursuits might make my life more meaningful. I began to write poetry, read thought provoking books, and volunteer at homeless shelters. My square started to get bigger and bigger.
But who cares how big one’s square is, if one is not having fun? Doesn’t everyone want to be where the party is at? For me and my pursuit of meaning, thinking about happiness all of the sudden only seemed to make me feel more depressed. What am I possibly going to preach about on Sundays when my congregation would rather have twizzlers? As it so happened, before my mind even contemplated preaching a sermon this Sunday, I walked into an Oceanside bookstore on our honeymoon where I laid eyes upon a tedious little book of philosophy entitled “The Meaning of Life.” I actually don’t like reading philosophy and a philosophical book of this nature might not seem exactly like honeymoon material, but I nevertheless bought it and stuck it in my bag for later. I confess I sometimes get obsessed with increasing the size of my square.
Well, as I later discovered in the confines of my office upon returning, this sleep-inducing philosophical treatise actually has some gems of insight pertaining to this dillema between happiness and meaning, twizzlers or the cross. The author Terry Eagleton talks about happiness as a possible goal for the meaningful life. He then raises the question of “what counts as happiness.”[iii] Does terrorizing old ladies count as happiness? (Perhaps, at this point I should assure you that I don’t find happiness in terrorizing old ladies.) Still, the question is a good one. Do we really want to live in a Lord of the Flies kind of world where none of us ever go through the stage of becoming self-reflective teenagers who blossom into caring adults?
Eagleton, however, points out that one can go all the way back to Aristotle and find the idea that happiness is perhaps best “attained by virtue.” For Aristotle, this notion of happiness went beyond the pleasure of eating pasta and the bliss of silent meditation. For him, virtue entailed a socially interactive life such that happiness arises more from a practical way of acting rather than a contemplative inner state. Simply put, the virtuous person reaps “pleasure from doing good” in the world.[iv] This would seem to provide a glimmer of hope for us do-gooder Christians in the pursuit of happiness, but we still have to face that uncomfortable subject of the cross. With our scripture for today, it helps to realize that this passage arguably says as much about the time in which it was written as it says about Jesus. Would the historical Jesus really have instructed the disciples to start preparing for the cross well before his own crucifixion? The notion of the cross wouldn’t have had any meaning for the disciples at that point, so why would Jesus even allude to it? For Mark’s time, however, the idea of taking up the cross would have had a lot of meaning. A number of Christians like Peter had already followed in the literal footsteps of Jesus by being crucified under Nero. In Mark, Jesus’s instruction to take up the cross therefore becomes an affirmation of what has already taken place.
While the literal cross might not carry the same kind of significance for us today, I believe the words of Jesus in this passage still have a relevance. When Jesus talks about saving one’s life by losing it, I think many of us read this as referring to a kind of daily dying to oneself. In other words, the dying of one’s ego such that one then paradoxically feels a sense of abundant life. The good feminist response is to reject this kind of self-giving life because it is often the subjected servant and slave who are compelled to live according to such a virtue by circumstance. This is true, yet Eagleton makes a good point in saying that if the self-giving life should sound “unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is only because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service.” It is this reciprocal service to one another that “provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love.”[v] Ah, there was a reason I was meant to buy this book on my honeymoon. Happy wife really does mean happy life.
This idea of love also makes me realize something else. Achieving happiness and meaning in life is ultimately not about increasing the size of one’s own little square, its about increasing the size of the whole dance floor, so that everyone can move and flourish in the divine dance of love. Amen.
[i] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, (New York: Penguin, 2006), 10.
[ii] Craig Lambert, “The Science of Happiness: Psychology Explores Humans at their Best,” Harvard Magazine, (January-February 2007), <http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/01/the-science-of-happiness.html>.
[iii] Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 81.
[iv] Ibid., 84.
[v] Ibid., 91.
