The right to be happy

In conversation recently, a friend was talking about how her two married friends have separated and are now going through a divorce. She said that they are seeing social workers to try to minimize the affect on their two small children. You could see as she talked that she was really struggling to make sense of why these two people, who seem to care about each other and their kids, would choose divorce, particularly when there was no evidence of infidelity. The only comment she could make was, “I guess they have the right to be happy.”

Do we live in a world that is so cautious of judging the actions of others that all we can say is that they have to right to be happy? What is this right and why do we think we have it? Do we have the right to be happy if exercising this right makes others unhappy? And how do we know what will lead to lasting happiness or what is just happiness for the moment?

Researchers are increasingly aware that happiness is seen in contemporary society as the goal of life. Savage et al discovered this in their study of young people in the UK, which they write about in Making Sense of Gen Y. I also discovered this longing and almost idolization of happiness in my research among young people in former Soviet countries, which I wrote about in my book, Visualising Hope.

But there is a difference between happiness as the goal of life and happiness as an inherent right. It has progressed from something to aim for to something that is owed us, here and now.

Most of us would think twice about making a choice to be happy that by direct consequence made someone else unhappy. As Benjamin Franklin said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” But I think we live in a naive world of believing that we can all have the right to be happy.

Who bestows this right to happiness on us? Is it a matter of just reaching out and taking it for ourselves? And what about people who are not happy? Is it their fault for not trying hard enough?

Belief in Salmon Fishing in Yemen

Yesterday I finished reading Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday. I enjoyed the humorous narrative and the tongue in cheek portrayal of government officials.

The sheikh, whose idea it is to introduce salmon to the wadis of the Yemen, is characterised as a wise, spiritual man.  He tells the main character, Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist, that he needs to have ‘belief’. He says:

“Faith comes before hope, and hope before love. . . You are beginning to believe it could happen. You are beginning to learn to have faith.”

 This belief in belief is a shock to Dr Jones, whose childhood associations of church were of a boring ritual that he was forced to attend in uncomfortable clothes. He has ‘moved on from religion’ and going to church on Sunday mornings has been replaced by going to Tesco with his wife. He says:

“I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual.”

When he goes to the Yemen, he sees a world where ‘faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb’.

 In the end Dr Jones discovers in himself the ability to believe in the impossible. Thus, the central message of the book seems to be that it is truly human to be able to believe in something, anything.

But is belief, on its own and for its own sake, of any value?

The trite, ‘Christian’ answer is that belief doesn’t matter unless it is belief in the right thing. But I would disagree. I think moving from a state of unbelief to a place of recognising the need to believe in something is a huge step towards finding belief in God. It is just one step, but it is a giant step and an important one.

The future comes to us

Bizarrely, this crazy Japanese human tetris game reminds about what Orthodox Archbiship Anthony Bloom writes about time:

“There is absolutely no need to run after time to catch it. It does not run away from us, it runs towards us. Whether you are intent on the next minute coming your way, or whether you are completely unaware of it, it will come your way. The future, whatever you do about it, will become the present, and so there is no need to try to jump out of the present into the future.”

 We are standing still and time comes toward us. Bloom tells us to stop and embrace the NOW and appreciate our present situation – this very second of time. This, he tells us, is where we will encounter God, and where we will be most able to meet with others.

Celebrity Sages

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of celebrity lately. I was watching a late night film which was interrupted with an ‘Entertainment Report’. I was informed of all the latest news/gossip about famous people.

It seems that as a society we just love to consume the images and lives of celebrities. Maybe these famous people attract us because they are living out our dream of what our lives could be. For many people, this may be the only transcendence they ever experience - imagining the life of a star.  

What disturbs me is that if someone is famous, they gain some sort of platform to give us advice on almost anything. For example, a person may be a well-known actor, and people will want to buy their book about parenthood. We look up to celebrities and make them role models. I guess subconsciously we think, ”If I go on the same diet as Jennifer Aniston, maybe I will be attractive and wealthy like her someday.”

 Today I read Proverbs chapter 16 in the Bible, and discovered a number of wise sayings, a few I’ll include here:

 Whoever gives heed to instruction prospers,
       and blessed is he who trusts in the LORD.

 The wise in heart are called discerning,
       and pleasant words promote instruction.

 A wise man’s heart guides his mouth,
       and his lips promote instruction.

 Pleasant words are a honeycomb,
       sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

 There is a way that seems right to a man,
       but in the end it leads to death.

Nothing to believe in

 As an American living in England I live between these two cultures. I don’t even notice whether people have an English or an American accent anymore. It all sounds ‘normal’ to me.

So, American TV seems normal to me too. I wonder whether British people are ever fed up of all the television programmes and films that are imported from America. I’ve been thinking about Razorlight’s song ‘America’ after I heard it on the radio today. 

 Here’s an excerpt of the lyrics of the song:

All my life
Watching America
All my life
There’s panic in America
Oh Oh Oh, Oh
There’s trouble in America

Yesterday was easy
Happiness came and went
I got the movie script
But I don’t know what it meant

I light a cigarette
‘Cause I can’t get no sleep
Theres nothing on the TV nothing on the radio
That means that much to me
Theres nothing on the TV nothing on the radio
That I can believe in

I know how they feel, in a way. We now have loads of digital channels with our new freeview box, but still it seems like there’s nothing worth watching sometimes.

It made me wonder what if feels like to look to pop culture for meaning. Do people find anything there that they want to put their faith in?

Here is Razorlight’s video of ‘America’:

If reality bites, why be bitten?

I love the cynical humour of Scott Adam’s comic strip ‘Dilbert’. In a recent strip on my daily calendar, Dilbert’s cat stands on a table facing Dilbert, who sits in a chair nearby. The cat says to him, ‘Dilbert, you’ve become too aware of reality. I’m sending you to “Cynics Anonymous.”‘ In the next frame, the cat continues, as Dilbert looks increasingly annoyed, ‘A higher power will help you regain the naïve optimism that once made you a perfect employee.’ Brows furled, Dilbert asks, ‘Why can’t the higher power change me while I’m sitting here?’ The cat answers, ‘Fluorescent lights block his power.’I wonder how typical these notions are about reality and God. Do most people believe that an awareness of reality makes us cynical, and thus is not to be desired? Is the role of the god-like power to help us to become naïve or avoid reality?

God is the author of all reality and can see and fathom all of reality. Humanity is at a disadvantage when it comes to comprehending reality, because our comprehension is limited by our context, experiences and preconceptions. However, I believe that a person who seeks to know God should have a firmer grasp on reality than those who do not.

David, King of Israel, sings that ‘The Lord is my light’ and asks the Lord, ‘Teach me your way, Oh Lord.’ His heart tells him to ‘Seek God’s face.’ (Psalm 27) Does David believe that knowing God’s ways will bring to light the reality of his situation? Does ‘seeking God’s face’ entail a desire to know what is real? At the end of his life, David prays before the assembly of Israel. In the midst of a prayer of dedication of the temple project and handing it over to his son, David says, ‘Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope.’ (1 Chronicles 29:15) This sounds cynical and not naïve in any sense. So, if a man who has sought to know God all his life perceives this harsh reality, is what is in store for all who want to know God?

The writer of Ecclesiastes observes, “As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind? All his days he eats in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger.” [5:16] And in 12:8, “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Everything is meaningless.’” In the end, all the writer can say to make sense of his glimpse of reality is, “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.” [12:13-14]

Is knowing what is real something that we should desire? It seems that perceiving reality could be depressing. In The Matrix, Neo had a longing for the Real, but he didn’t initially comprehend that reality was what he desired. And reality turned out to be a ‘desert’, to use Morpheus’s words. If reality is a desert-like, futile understanding of the world, then it is no wonder that people wish to avoid engaging with it.

But, do people actually want to avoid reality or do they deep down desire to experience reality? Zizek argues that most citizens of consumerist societies live separated from reality. Do they desire this separation? From a spiritual perspective, I do not believe that Christians should try to be separated from reality. In fact, I think that the role of the church in society be to wake people up to reality. But we must be careful of what reality do we wake people to – the church at times has been guilty of presenting people with another false idea of reality to replace their worldly idea of reality.

Jacques Ellul, a French Reformed theologian and sociologist, believed that the task of the believer is to seek reality and be a sign of the truth in the world. He argued that the Christian has been equipped by God to face up to the spiritual forces of the world (Ephesians 6:10-20) and thus is not bound by the fatalism of the world’s reality. But the Christian, living in the world but not of it, exists in tension. “On the one hand it is impossible for us to make this world less sinful, on the other hand it is impossible for us to accept it as it is.” (Ellul, J., The Presence of the Kingdom. 1951, London: SCM ) The believer should not attempt to operate on the same level as unbelievers who cannot see reality, because this would be futile. Instead, Christians should discover the real spiritual difficulties that every political or economic situation contains. And the solution may not be rational, but it will point to life and to the gospel, “which alone permits us to discover the true social situation; it alone helps us to respond to it by a human attitude which is not a lie, nor an illusion.”

Drawing close to God could make us more aware of reality. First, this awareness of the spiritual reality would help us understand some of the forces at work and in tension around us. This perspective can give us joy, knowing that God is at work here and now and throughout history. But, this insight can also be distressing because we will see how meaningless people’s lives really are. Second, this awareness could give us an eternal perspective on our current situation, which can help us deal with the futility of our present reality.