Finding Joy
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, December 4, 1994
At first I thought it was some sort of parody, but eventually I came to realize that the guy was indeed serious. In the December 5 issue of The New Republic magazine is an article that is headlined on the cover with the title "Is Happiness a Psychological Disorder?". I first learned of the piece via a reference to it in last Thursday's Boston Globe. The New Republic article, by Maggie Scarf, is actually her review of an essay that originally appeared in yet another magazine called The Journal of Medical Ethics by a Dr. Richard Bentall. Dr. Bentall, who is a psychologist at Britain's Liverpool University, has indeed come forward with what he forthrightly calls, "A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder." He is proposing that happiness is, in fact, a "diagnosable mood disorder" and should be listed as such in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the "official" directory or compendium of diagnosable psychological and psychiatric maladies. [Now, before I go on with this, let me say that after that sermon on "Victimhood" I did a few weeks ago, I had resolved to myself that I would lay off psychologists and therapists for a good long time because I really do love them and value what they do; and I do not wish to convey the idea that I have some kind of an attitude problem about their profession when I don't. Its just that when something like this up and drops in my lap I cannot resist it.]Dr. Bentall's contention is that happiness is (quoting him now), "statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of abnormalities and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system." He goes on to note that this condition is recognized by such symptoms as "a positive mood, sometimes described as 'elation' or 'joy' or in its milder manifestations, 'contentment.'" The behavioral factors that accompany this condition, citing the Doctor again, are "less easily characterized but particular facial expressions such as 'smiling' have been noted .. Certain kinds of social behavior have also been reported to accompany happiness including a high frequency of recreational interpersonal contacts, and pro-social actions toward others identified as less happy." As for the causes of happiness Dr. Bentall refers to both environmental and heredity factors. "With respect to the environment," he says, "there seems little doubt that discrete episodes of happiness typically follow positive life-events ..... [but since] some people are generally happier than others .... heredity factors may also play an important role." (All quotes from Dr. Bentall are cited in "The Happiness Syndrome" by Maggie Scarf. The New Republic, December 5, 1994. p.28.)
Since Dr. Bentall apparently wishes to be taken seriously, I decided upon reading the piece that I would do just that. I realize that I do not have the primary source, and have been using someone else's report of his report; so I may be reading him out of context. It also occurred to me that since the man is British he may have been trying to make a case for the normalcy of the perpetual stiff upper lip. But suppose he's right? Is happiness or joy in such short supply in this world that its actual presence can be seen as an abnormality? Could it be that he's saying what he is so that all the unhappy people in the world won't feel so unhappy about being unhappy; so they'll know that they're actually quite normal and can indeed be happy about their unhappiness and lack of joy in their lives? If depression is normative maybe we don't need to feel so depressed about having it. I certainly would have to concede Dr. Bentall the point that anyone who went around in a constant state of joy would be at best a little odd, and at worst terribly self-deluded about the life they're living and the world they're living it in.
To stay with Mr. Bentall's idea for just a moment longer, if I were to ask any of you--or if I were to ask myself--to cite some of the more joyful and happy moments of our lives, we would probably recall certain special times when things came together in a way that just felt right--high moments, peak experiences, whatever we might call them. And, sure enough, they most likely would be seen as extraordinary times; as times that are set apart in our minds from the hum-drumness or the normalcy of our daily lives. In the most literal sense of the term many of our experiences of joy or happiness are "ab-normal"--that is to say, not part of the normal run of things. But, and here is where I would argue with Dr. Bentall--while acknowledging that I haven't completely heard him out, abnormality is not always a disorder; the abnormal is not always pathological. Abnormal can also simply mean infrequent or not too often.
"Discrete episodes of happiness", to use Mr. Bentall's jargon, are rather infrequent, and I think this reality does generate a fair degree of tension in this upcoming season of holiday and celebration. There is a heightened sense of expectation in that we are "supposed" to be happy now. This is the season when the themes of joy and happiness are trumpeted at their loudest. On the Christian calendar today is the second Sunday in Advent. One of the Advent themes (the theme of the first Sunday, actually) is "joy". Advent means "waiting" or "expecting", and whether one purposefully observes Advent or not a higher level of expectation and need to the are found in the celebrations of December moreso than at other times of the year. And the higher one's level of expectation and need becomes, the higher also becomes the level of anxiety that such expectations and needs will not be fulfilled. I think this is what gives this season its somewhat frantic quality--wanting it all to be right and meet all of our ideals as to how its "supposed" to be. In view of this perhaps there is some solace to be found in the idea that happiness or joy is actually a "mood disorder" and its really not so bad if we don't have it.
Well maybe, but maybe not. There are other perspectives to which I would now like to turn. I like to think of joy, or happiness (and I'm using the terms interchangeably--even as Dr. Bentall did) not as something we go out and grab off somehow, but rather as a state or condition that is always there in the fabric of our lives and that surfaces from time to time. I don't believe joy can be manufactured or summoned on command, but I believe it can be found if we keep faith with the lives we lead. I don't believe it is in the spirit of the upcoming season to be making demands upon ourselves that we "be joyful"; but this may well be a good time to reflect upon how we can live a life, and how we can maintain certain perspectives and attitudes that will make us a little more predisposed to the advent of joy when it does surface, whether it happens to be at this time of year or not.
In gaining those perspectives and attitudes I get some help from John Taylor and that meditation of his I read earlier about fun and joy. I'll lift up a few lines here: "It is not difficult to bring fun into our lives, but it is a life-long task to find joy ... Fun arrives, contributes its brief sensation, and leaves ... Joy, however, is something else ... it is a product of effort, time and sacrifice ... it is both sought after and waited for ... [It] is pried from the great stones of existence ... Joy often arrives at the end of a long, exhaustive effort, and occasionally it surprises us in the midst of effort. Fun is escape which we all need; joy is fulfillment which we all seek...." In the spirit of Rev. Taylor's words, I offer this morning five "perspectives", I'll call them, that while not guaranteeing joy can keep us predisposed to its arrival; perspectives for keeping alive the possibility that the "fulfillment which we all seek" can, on occasion, be found. I'm sure there are more than five, but these are the ones I've settled on for today.
The first perspective is that we have to live the choices we have made and the choices that have been made for us. I've had some interesting conversations with a few of you on this subject of choice over the past few weeks, so its been on my mind. The theologian Paul Tillich once noted that we are creatures of what he called "finite freedom." We are freely choosing creatures within certain boundaries. We cannot choose, for example, our race, our gender, our parents, our families of origin, our time in history, and the like; those choices are made for us. We have free choice in the face of certain immutables; and its also true that what appears immutable for some may not appear so--or be so--for others. The paradox of free choice, however, is that to exercise it is to also curtail it. We choose a spouse or partner, to have and raise a family, to pursue a certain career, to live in a certain locale, to join a certain religious community, etc. and each such choice narrows and shapes our boundaries. To be sure, many of these kinds of choices are not irreversible. There are times, in fact, when a reversal becomes necessary for the sake of one's well-being, if not one's survival. And the choice to reverse and re-choose also carries a price and shapes yet another boundary. We make our choices without ever being fully aware of their outcomes since no one can predict the future with absolute certainty. We make them in the faith and in the hope that they will be positive ones, and then deal with the outcomes whatever they may be. My point in all this is that what joy or fulfillment there is to be found in the lives we have is found within the boundaries that we choose or find already in place. One of the things that keeps joy available is having the right degree of tension between one's need for boundaries and one's need for choices.
A second condition or perspective for keeping joy available and attainable is to have a sense of peace with one's personal past--with all that you chose or could not choose, but got anyway. This can be especially challenging at this time of year when family matters and memories--some very joyful and some much less than joyful--come to the fore. In his book The Wind in Both Ears a Universalist minister and one time Dean at St. Lawrence University, the late Angus MacLean, wrote, "I believe that in order to be truly free one must make peace with his (or her) personal history. This is a freedom made up of some appreciation, some understanding, and some forgiveness." That's good: appreciation, understanding, forgiveness. They do offer a means of closure on one's personal past. What is it that you can look back upon and value and appreciate; can say "yes" to? And then there are, no doubt some things that you cannot really value or appreciate, but can you understand how or why they happened and find some reconciliation through such understanding? But you can only go so far with that as well, and when neither appreciation nor understanding are possible or desirable, the can forgiveness come into play, on your part, instead? The freedom of which Dr. MacLean speaks here is not the freedom of forgetting or dismissing--which is not really freedom at all--but instead the freedom of reconciliation; of being reconciled to oneself and to all that has brought you to where you are; to the joys, the pains and all that's in between. This is a season when remembrances are especially pronounced; some of these remembrances bring us joy, and others make us aware of the unresolved and unhealed parts of ourselves. This is a season that reminds us of our need to be at peace with our personal selves, for having this peace--however much of a struggle it may be to get it--is another condition that keeps joy available.
A third perspective for keeping one predisposed to joy is to be aware of the need to nurture your diversions. By that I mean keep a sense of playfulness and inquiry alive within yourselves. A personal example here: As many of you are aware, my two main diversions are major league baseball and the writers and writings of the "beat generation." Well, baseball, so to speak, has struck out. Yesterday was for first Saturday in December that I didn't stand on Yawkey Way waiting to purchase Red Sox tickets because there were no to purchase since no season is yet scheduled for 1995. So, I left with the beats. Pursuing this personal diversion, I knew from some of his biographies that Jack Kerouac's parents spent most of their childhood here in Nashua, and that his paternal and maternal grandparents lived here in town somewhere. So a few weeks ago, I decided I would find out just where they lived. With the help of some very nice people at the St. Louis de Gonzague Church, who scanned some marriage records for me, and by going through old Nashua City Directories over at the library, I got the address of the house that Jack Kerouac's grandfather built sometime after he and his family moved to Nashua from Quebec in 1890. I drove over to this address and found that there is a house there. I can't tell if its the same one old Jean Baptiste de Kerouac built in 1893 or not (I will find out), but I stood in the middle of this narrow street happy as a pig in .. ah .. mud, practically jumping for joy that I'd found what I was looking for. [If good ol' Dr. Bentall could have seen me there he would have felt completely vindicated in his theory that happiness is indeed a psychiatric disorder.] And I'm not done yet--I'm still working on Jack's maternal grandparents. Nurture your diversions; nurture your irrelevancies; nurture your nuttiness; they can all bring you unexpected joy in some of the most unlikely places.
My fourth perspective for keeping joy available is to maintain a sense of hope, and even excitement, about the life that is still ahead of you. Hope is a tricky concept. It does not mean, as I see it, clinging to the idea that things will eventually turn out OK if I just hang in there long enough. Maybe they will and maybe they won't. I'm very wary of vesting hope or of finding joy in "what might happen" out there. To be sure there is a place in our lives for the unexpected blessing, the serendipitous occurrence, and for the joy that "surprises us in the midst of effort" as Rev. Taylor puts it. Life would lose much of its richness and meaning were it not for such things as these. But to live with the hope that can open us up to joy is to live with the assumption or conviction that one possesses the human capacity and resources to creatively respond to the challenges that come one's way. To live with hope is to have the ability to see positive possibilities in the midst of pain; it is to trust in one's encounter with all that is unknown.
It is this capacity for hope, I feel, that also pulls us out of and beyond ourselves. A strong "gospel of hope" is part of our Universalist legacy as it drew many of our Universalist forebears to the social reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. To live with hope is to not give up on the larger world, however bleak the picture may look out there at times. Again, the hope is not that things are just going to somehow get better. The hope instead is that human beings of conviction and compassion can still effect positive change. [I've been reminding myself of that a lot over the past few weeks.] Such a statement may sound terribly naive, and maybe it is. But the alternative to such hope as this is cynicism and insularity, and a turning of one's back on anything that does not concern the well being or the aggrandizement of the self. Finding joy is a very personal thing, but it is more likely to be found by getting outside of oneself and by being a bearer of hope, through whatever small but important ways are available to us, to a world that desperately needs it.
My fifth and final perspective for keeping joy available is to be able to believe in your "eternal spring." The expression "eternal spring" is from a line by Albert Camus that has become part of my personal scripture. Camus once wrote, "In the midst of winter I discovered that there was within me an eternal spring." Camus was an avowed atheist. But if religion can be defined as having a passion for life--which is one of my several definitions of that term--then Camus is one of the more religious atheists whose works I've ever encountered. I find the phrase "eternal spring" to be a wonderful metaphor for that which ultimately sustains and nurtures us. I'm also struck by Camus' saying that he found his eternal spring "in the midst of winter" rather than, say, the pleasantries of summer. The promise of life is found, he is saying, in the midst of death or diminishment. Camus' words also resonate well with those of John Taylor's about joy, "[Joy] is a product of time and sacrifice ... it is both sought after and waited for ... Joy is pried from the great stones of existence ... [it] often arrives at the end of a long exhaustive effort, [but] occasionally it surprises us in the midst of effort."
The surprise of joy in the midst of effort, the eternal spring in the midst of winter. For me, these are the essential messages of this season. These are the essential messages that are behind the stories and the myths of this season. Light fades and fires are lit. The cold comes and warmth is kindled. The earth dies and a birth is celebrated. In the midst of winter the eternal spring is found. This is what we are promised. The challenge to us is to believe and act on such promises, for that and only that is what makes them real since, in the end these are promises we have to make to ourselves and to one another. The challenge to us is to be a sustaining community where joy is found in the midst of effort and where we offer to one another "a rose in the winter time."
Copyright © 1994 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
