The Value and Purpose of Happiness
Service Offered by Sharon Hogan
Sunday, August 17, 2008
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
Rocky River, Ohio
Peace (from Tao Te Ching) by Lao-Tse
[born 604 BC]
If there is to be peace in the world,
there must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
there must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
there must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
there must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
there must be peace in the heart.
Part – One
What is Happiness?
Today I’d like to talk to you about the value of happiness. This may seem like an unusual topic for a sermon. Shouldn’t a church sermon be about sin, sacrifice, discipline, the nature of evil and how to avoid temptation? Don’t we come to church to learn to be better people and improve ourselves and our community? What does happiness have to do with that?
Well, I’ll tell you. Happy people are stronger and more resilient than unhappy people. Happy people have more energy and are more likely to help others than unhappy people. Happiness is an indication that you are doing something right. Just like good health is a sign of proper care of the body, happiness is the result of leading a good life.
If you can increase your happiness, you will as a natural consequence increase your goodness, your value to yourself and others. It’s good to be happy and being happy can make you good. Being good can make you and those around you happy and good.
I know that some of you may be skeptical of this and may actually be thinking about things that would make you happy that would not appropriately be encouraged in church. Alexander Woollcott, a member of the famous Algonquin group said, “Everything I like is either immoral illegal or fattening”. Now I have reminded you of the immoral illegal or fattening things you might think of in a happy fantasy.
I’m imagining maxing out my credit card, ignoring all family or job-related responsibility, going off my diet, and saying whatever I want to whoever I want to. Imagine yourself indulging in the things you are probably too well-behaved, disciplined, and moral to ordinarily do.
Let’s assume you took a few months off from your usual dutiful, moral, thrifty, generous, polite and disciplined behavior. You might be happy for a short period of time, but, how happy do you think you’d be after a month of this behavior? How about 6 months? I can picture my obese and friendless self penniless jobless and unhealthily miserable. Not a happy scene.
You might even look at the seven deadly sins as a recipe for happiness. Indulging in Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride, will interfere with True happiness. I think this is a difference between eastern and western thought, The Judeo-Christian philosophy describes what you shouldn’t do and says basically don’t because it’s just wrong or “because I said so”. Eastern traditions are more likely to describe how to think and behave so that one can be at peace or happy and the world will be better. Let’s take those seven deadlies one at a time:
· Lust—over done or in the wrong place, the wrong time or with the wrong person, object or –you get the idea—can lead to a world of trouble, heartache and pain.
· Gluttony can be indulged in on holidays without to much in the way of bad repercussions, but gluttony on a daily basis will make you sick.
· Greed: Our culture encourages us to work hard to accumulate wealth and to a degree, this can be useful, and even admirable, but a cycle where a person becomes so interested in getting more money, all other aspects of humanity become neglected and this leads to emptiness and sorrow.
· Sloth: If you fail to take care of important business, you will later regret what you didn’t do when you find yourself unprepared to survive.
· Wrath: If you give into anger you will alienate your friends and loved ones and find yourself lonely and possibly remorseful
· Envy: If you focus on what others have that you don not have, you will fail to appreciate what you do have and be unhappy
· Pride: Now, pride can lead to a happy feeling, but it can also be addictive leading and person to seek more recognition and admiration. While a humble person, on the other hand is more likely to be pleasantly surprised by recognition and admiration while an overly prideful person will expect recognition and admiration and find difficulty getting enough. This can lead to the kind of obnoxious behavior that leads to alienation and loneliness.
I get skeptical when people claim to have the truth about anything. Most of the most important things that are hard to quantify are referred to as true…something. True Love, True art, true meaning—what are they talking about?
When I get into theological discussions with good, kind, generous people who call themselves Christians I am often tempted to ask them to explain to me how groups who also call themselves Christian use the same book to justify hateful, selfish and destructive behavior. The few times I’ve asked, I have been told that they are not “True” Christians. I am tempted to ask them if those others might say the same thing about them.
I know that this is a very intelligent and skeptical group so, I’m going to get scientific on you and define what I mean by happiness—true happiness--if you will.
True happiness is not a temporary thrill or diversion. The kind you can get in a rush with a shot of morphine, or cocaine. There are two parts of the brain that are activated with feelings of happiness. One is deep in the primitive lower brain that we share with most of the other creatures that crawl the earth. We all have similar responses to fear and relief. This reactive and temporary emotion is not what I call True happiness because while a chemical or electrical zap to the pleasure center deep in the lizard brain might feel like ecstasy, chasing after his feeling will not lead to long term survival or contentment.
True happiness is sustainable and long-lasting. It is experienced in the forebrain and involves thought as well as emotion. It might better be described as contentment than euphoria. Recent collaborations between neurologists and Buddhist monks have found that the Monks who devote their lives to meditating on compassion and happiness actually have enhanced their capacity for this kind of contentment. They have more neurons, connections and activity in the part of the brain right above the right eye. They respond to most situations with warm, positive, emotion, and can react with kindness and cheer to almost any situation. When the unpracticed person feels a sense of well-being and joy, this part of the brain is active. The meditating monks have found a way to strengthen their capacity for joy and contentment. This increases the capacity for compassion, patience, and kindness. This has become their default response to life’s unexpected events.
I have so far told you what true happiness is and where in the brain it is. Science has discovered some other information about happiness by studying who is happy and where happy people live. This is a relatively new area of study. Psychological and sociological researchers have spent most time and energy trying to find the cause of misery and dysfunction. The study of what makes the healthy happy and successful the way they are is a much newer endeavor.
If you look carefully at the data about happiness, you will find that people are happiest before they grow up and enter adolescence. They are least happy when they are in young adulthood and they become happier as they move from middle age to old age. There are exceptions to the general times of happiness. Deep poverty, violence, mental or physical illness, heartbreak and grief over lost loved ones can wreak havoc on happiness. There is also a genetic or biochemical roll of the dice that makes some of us more happy-by-nature than others. If you just look a the data it will tell you the secret to true happiness is to live in Thailand, Iceland or Bhutan, be younger tha13 or over 45, practice a religion be married and be born to people with a genetic capacity for happiness. So, for most of you this is hopeless. That is what science tells us, we need to also use philosophy and wisdom to determine the truth about happiness.
Happiness is so important the Nation of Bhutan that it has made gross national happiness a measure of success. It was so important to our founding fathers that when Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence he started with:
"We hold these truths to be self evident:
that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
While people in this country are not the happiest in the world as a group, it is something we believe in along with liberty, equality, and democracy. Unfortunately we have not been as successful with the pursuit happiness as we have with freedom and the pursuit of wealth. One of the reasons for this seems to be related to another failure. While our constitution guarantees equality as one of those inalienable rights—at least for land-owning white males first and others a century or two later—we have not achieved this ideal as well as other countries. People seem to be happier where there is more social and economic equality. There are places like parts of India where there is more happiness on the whole compared with the US, while experiencing greater disparity in social and economic opportunities. Perhaps when inequality is part of a culture it is easier to accept than when you are promised equality by the constitution and have been disappointed.
Part – Two
Happiness In Relationships
Another Chinese proverb tells about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell, you are seated with others around a pot of wonderful food, but you starve because affixed to your hand is a spoon with a handle that is so much longer than your arm, that you can’t get the food to your mouth. In heaven, you have the exact same situation but people cooperate and feed each other. While to a modern western mind, this proverb might bring up questions about contamination and the mess of food dribbling down one’s chin—but to people who are all too aware of starvation, this story informs the importance of relationships and community.
We are not meant to live as individuals, like bears or some reptiles, but as communities more like bees or ants. Our western culture encourages individuality over community and many successful individuals feel depressed or empty and in spite of their abilities and in intelligence, can’t quite figure out what is wrong. We have difficulty recognizing loneliness. Our belief in individuality and achievement can interfere with recognizing our need for community and relationships. We set priorities that conflict with the health of our relationships and become attached to our possessions freedom and achievements at the expense of our friendships families and significant others. We fail to appreciate and nurture relationships and don’t often realize how much we need them until we loose them. We sometimes don’t miss them until we need them. We work hard at being independent and after achieving as much independence as possible, find ourselves alone and lonely.
I often make a new year’s resolution to be a better, more attentive friend and better nurturer of relationships. I have to admit that I often fail to achieve much improvement in this area. I have managed to somehow remain married for 24 years and 11 months, and 7 days to Carlos the musician over there. And he has managed to stay with me. I wish I could tell you the secret of a long, relatively happy marriage, but after almost 25 years, I’m still working on figuring that out. This much I know--it’s complicated.
Relationships are as complicated and difficult as they are necessary and rewarding. There was a famous study of children born into very dysfunctional families to determine why some of them become well-functioning adults in spite of abuse, poverty, mental illness, drug and alcohol problems of the adults. The answer to this question was found in the resiliency studies. Hundreds of children were followed from birth through adulthood. The children who where able to make connections to other people were able to find the nurturance and tools they needed to become strong resilient people. Those with poor interpersonal skills ended up as expected, in trouble, on drugs, in jail and unable to maintain healthy relationships.
It is all too easy to focus on what has gone wrong in past relationships and what could go wrong when relationships are taken to the next level. Listen to a country music station for more than 5 minutes and you will hear many stories of heart ache. Kvetch with any random group of people and you will hear stories of love gone wrong, friendships turned sour betrayals and pain. This pain should remind us how important good relationships are to us but it sometimes becomes easier to shut down and withdraw in fear from connecting in any meaningful way with others.
On of the books on happiness I read was “the Geography of Bliss” by Eric Wiener. He found that where there was more inter-connection between people, there was greater satisfaction and contentment. There seems to be a balance between a completely dependent tribal community and a very independent and isolated society that works best to make people happy. Most American communities do not have enough interconnection to create a level of happiness that can be found in most European and Asian countries. I suspect the nature of American individuality is due to the genetic make up of the descendents of people who valued freedom, adventure, and economic opportunity so much that they chose to emigrate from their native lands. There is a difference sense of interconnection in American sub-groups that did not choose to emigrate, but were refugees or slaves. We can observe the difference between refugee Americans and immigrant by choice Americans and see that the priorities of relationships are placed higher in the refugee populations.