I was at Quaker Quest last night (Mondays, from 6:30pm, Friends House, 173 Euston Road, London - not bank holidays) talking on God. I mentioned in my second half (what that means for how i live my life) that I blog, knowing full well that I've hardly been on here or anyone else's blog in the last month or so.
So, here I am again, prompted by my own big mouth.
In the question and answer session, one man pulled out some Jean Paul Sartre quote or other in which JPS says he'll become a Christian when he sees that the people coming out of church all have smiles on their faces.
Are you happy? He asked.
All three of us on the panel turned out to be remarkably happy. Actually, I'm delighted, is what I said, but it didn't get a laugh, so I expanded. I have the dark times still, but in the long-view I'm happy.
I've been most happy in the past 6 months as opposed to the previous 6 of the last year, because L and I have been living in the same place since February and it makes a big difference to me.
Next time you leave your Quaker meeting, after worship, have a look at people's faces and see where they're at. It's not a great barometer, for people might be smiling inside, but I'm interested to look now...
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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Oh my, I'd say just the opposite... If people come out of church all looking happy that means they haven't met Christ. Jesus was murdered, tortured in a horrible act and he told us that if we wanted to follow him we'd have to pick up his cross. The idea of that cross is central to a lot of early Quakerism, and central to many of us today. The point of life is faithfulness, not happiness and the two don't often correlate so very well. One of the class Quaker tests of discernment is checking whether an act is something you want to do--if it is then maybe it's motivated by pleasure seeking and not a true leading. Jesus is sometimes called "The Comforter" and happiness can certainly be a result of our interactions with the Inward Christ, but I worry about using it as a barometer. In fact, I'd run if I saw a bunch of happy Quakers regularly filing out of the meetinghouse!
At the end of Britain Yearly Meeting's Advices & Queries book is a paragraph from the writing of George Fox, 1656:
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.
Does that mean, martink, that I should look po-faced when I am walking cheerfully? I think not.
I am filled with joy in my journey, especially when I have had fellowship with Friends.
I'm not sure what "meeting Christ" is, or that anyone does for that matter. But I think Martin is right to highlight the fact that religion/spirituality worth its salt involves challenge and sacrifice.
Overall though, I think Jez is right. If at the end of the day it's not making us and others happier -- in the fuller and deeper senses of the word -- then we're doing something wrong.
Happy? I don't think of "happy" as being a particularly useful or meaningful word in a religious context.
A quick on-line search of the King James version of the Bible reveals 10 instances of the word "happy", but 187 of "joy" (and its various forms). Joy I understand.
I'm reminded of the verse, supposedly by Thomas Kelly:
I'd rather be a jolly Saint Francis,
singing his canticles to the sun,
than a dour, old, sober-sides Quake,
whose diet would appear to have been ...
... spiritual persimmon!"
I have known Christians who felt some obligation to be either happy or sad but I'm with the Buddhists on this one: mere human emotion is Monkey Mind.
I think the hallmark of a true Christian is both a broken heart and a joyful one. We've been to hell and come back. We know the pains this world can produce and we know the way out is hard, but we're not alone and we don't have to be afraid.
My recent leadings (and yes I'm a newly Convinced Quaker) have been both sad and joyful.
Being married to someone with bipolar disorder gives me a skeptical take on using happiness as much of a barometer of anything; to some extent I think our set point for happiness is as much drawn from biology as anything else.
To the extent that happiness is a matter of our personal choices, I'll go with tempering what Martin says (like Zach I think that any religion/spirituality worth its salt involves challenge and sacrifice) with that line from The Color Purple about God not wanting us to pass the color purple in the field and not notice (any religion/spirituality worth its salt also involves appreciation of God's blessings).
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people
My carriage may preach? I've always thought it a bit blasphemous to ask "what would Jesus drive" but maybe asking the same question of Fox wouldn't be, especially since he brought the topic up. Here I've been thinking that my little Chevy might be speaking of quakerly values such as modesty and thrift, but maybe it's just saying that I'm cheap. So what would Fox drive? It would clearly be English, and it would have to be rugged with all that circuit preaching and such. That's it! A Range Rover! Just the thing! I'm going shopping tommrrow.
A Range Rover? Surely not! If Jesus only wants 22 miles to the gallon of petrol at best, then it's going to be an expensive and earth-busting ministry.
Couldn't he have a bicycle?
My friend Roy cycled from Clacton-on-Sea to Stirling (approximately 450 miles) for Britain Yearly Meeting's Summer Gathering last month. It only took him a week and he reported no punctures or other problems.
And David Gee of Quaker Peace and Social Witness is currently cycling the length of Britain for his holiday - see http://sorebottom.blogspot.com
Last week I blogged on being "absurdly happy"--a theme that came to me after hearing Douglas Steere quoted at our yearly meeting. (Steere approved of Maltby's interpretation of Jesus's promise to his disciples, that they should be "absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble.")
To some extent happiness and joy are temperamental, to some extent a matter of neurochemistry, but I think they also involve learning to see either farther or more deeply, beyond the agonies that rightly draw our attention and shake our denial. We become aware of how God cherishes us, in part we experience the love of each other, perhaps most clearly and obviously when we're together in meeting, and we begin to understand that this love can actually sustain us.
After becoming aware of the moral bankruptcy of my mother's "cult of obedience" (one of the residues of growing up in a Hitler-poisoned context), and after witnessing racism drive my own sister from home, to her eventual death, just as my nation was becoming unglued by assassinations at home and interventions abroad, I was set for a life of permanent cynicism. Unexpectedly, Jesus told me that he could be trusted, and that has given me an access to joy that I didn't have before. I wanted to be with others who desired that same direct access to Jesus, without clutter, and who also believed that Jesus meant what he said (example: "love your enemies"). That's why I sought out Quakers.
Johan
PS: I don't have an important distinction to propose between "happiness" and "joy." I see happiness as a steady state and joy as more of a peak experience, but I don't insist on it, nor do I want to propose joy as a sort of elite version of happiness. "Happiness" is enshrined in the USA's Declaration of Independence, which may give the word more resonance in the USA than in other parts of the English-speaking world.
Good golly, Miss Molly! Martin writes, "The point of life is faithfulness, not happiness and the two don't often correlate so very well," and maybe that's sometimes true, or true for some, but I'm here to tell you, there's little in life brings me the amount of plain ol' joy I feel during and after an encounter with the Light in meeting. And faithfulness may not always be a bed of roses, but, well, my own perception is that my real faithfulness (as opposed to the times I get a kick out of admiring my own supposed holiness, earned through some self-important version of martyrdom I placed on myself) is pretty joyful, too. It's a bit like the acts of faithfulness in my marriage, I think--I'm perhaps more aware of the ones that are tough--like being the one to let the dogs out at the end of a very long and tiring work day, when I'd much prefer to wait until they nag my sweetie into getting off the couch and doing it instead--but I think I'm probably most faithful all the times when my face lights up when he enters the room, or I hear him out when he's got something to say, simply because I love the man.
I think that most of the most spiritually led good I've done in this lifetime, honestly, however fatiguing it might have been, or however much I might have preferred to stay on the couch and take it easy, has been really satisfying and full of joy. Not "pleasure seeking," exactly, but the pleasure of pleasing the Beloved.
That trust and joy Johan speaks of seems familiar to me, honestly. And, though I'll agree that "the point" is "faithfulness, not happiness," I think faithfulness itself is often the product of and the creator of...maybe not "happiness" in the way the advertising industry wants us to think of that word. But joy.
Which is not to say that the absence of joy necessarily means the absence of God or of seeking--at least in my mind, I understand that there may be dry periods ahead in my journey, and that there have been for better Quakers than I. Clearly, bad, sad, and empty feelings can happen to good people.
But when I feel God, I feel joy.
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