What makes you happy?
Happiness surveys come along every few years tracking what makes for a happy life. The latest survey I’ve seen is from the UK, it suggests that we are at our happiest in our mid-teens and mid-sixties.
So, that happiness is either about looking forward with excitement or looking back with contentment.
It doesn’t tell us much about happiness or how we can find happiness.
It would be sad to think that but for these few brief years of our life happiness was beyond our reach!
A Swedish survey on the other hand is more helpful as it gives us clues as to how we might open ourselves up to be happy each day.
It recommends 6 ways to live well:
Start the day with a fresh dip in the pool or if you don’t have a pool a cold shower!
Find time to go out into the wilderness to be alone
De-clutter your wardrobe and live with a few versatile garments.
Take breaks during your working day to re-energise yourself.
Learn to listen to others as they speak.
Perform random acts of kindness.
We might want to call this the Swedish beatitudes!
Makarios – Happy or Blessed?
The word often translated as ‘Happy’ in new translations and ‘Blessed’ in older translations is Makarios. Together these two words capture something of the sense of the Greek word.
Makarios was not just a feeling like happiness but the fact of God’s blessing, and as a result of the knowledge of God’s blessing, flows the feeling of happiness, joy, peace, and contentment.
It was a word used by the ancients to describe the life of the gods, and it remained in most people’s minds a dream beyond reach, an unattainable ideal, and yet an ideal we all reach for.
The Beatitudes of love
Throughout history, humanity has attempted to achieve happiness in two different ways, either through grasping happiness or by going in the opposite direction and turning their backs on earthly pleasure. The painter Stanley Spencer in his attempt to find happiness tried both!
From 1937 through to 1938 Spencer charted his sad attempt to find love and happiness. In a series of eight paintings, he records his difficult relationships with women, ironically naming the series ‘The Beatitudes’. In truth, they represent the very opposite, not happiness but misery. Having divorced his wife Hilda he sought out a new partner, Patricia Preece, showering her with gifts of perfume and jewelry, almost ruining himself financially.
In this painting, we see two figures of Spencer one kneeling at Patricia Preece's feet in worship and the other facing his former wife, pleading, I think for forgiveness. Despite all his pleading and worship both relationships failed and Spencer was left bereft and alone. From now on he decided to live the life of a monk!
Love and happiness could not be bought but are as Spencer discovered a gift we give to each other, a gift that comes with the blessing of God.
The Beatitudes of Jesus
When we look at how Luke presents Jesus’ teaching we are confronted with an apparent contradiction. Those who are poor or hungry, weeping or persecuted are blessed and those who are rich or successful in life are condemned to hunger weeping, and woe!
Strangely Jesus’ mission depended, according to Luke, on the generosity of a group of rich women. In contrast to Spencer, Jesus and his disciples lived entirely by gifts rather than by grasping, thanks to the hospitality of wealthy disciples.
So behind this apparent contradiction, Luke is speaking about our attitudes to happiness: We can be both rich and unhappy or poor and happy depending on the way we live, as Matthew makes clear in his account of Jesus’ teaching by adding the words ‘In Spirit’.
A person can be ‘rich’ because ‘blessed’ by God or ‘poor in spirit’ as we recognise our dependence on God’s goodness. Richness and poverty are judged not by what we have, but by what we give to each other. It is our attitude of heart and not our bank account that God looks at!
Life in all its fullness
Jesus embraced life he said that he had come to bring life in all its fullness. Happiness for Jesus was not cold showers every morning or even isolation from the world. Jesus made friendship, fun, and laughter as well as generosity, faithfulness, and prayerfulness, a priority in the community he created. He neither taught us that we could find happiness through renouncing the ‘Good life’ nor that we could find it by pursuing the ‘Good life’.
Jesus's approaches to wealth and poverty in the beatitudes, then, go beyond our understanding of happiness as the outcome of what life brings us, or indeed what we achieve in life whether it is wealth or poverty, persecution or prosperity. Happiness is not something we can find for or achieve for ourselves, happiness is a gift of God. We must read Luke’s account of the Beatitudes in this light:
‘Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God’ Luke 6:20
We find happiness, Jesus says, when we approach life’s ups and downs in a spirit of humility, knowing that we are nothing in ourselves but rich in God’s goodness to us.
Acknowledging God’s mercy and love in poverty and wealth, ‘in sickness and in health’, as the wedding vows express it. Every other road to happiness makes big claims for ourselves. The words used in many Self-help books that talk about self-realisation or self-fulfillment, assume we can achieve happiness through our efforts or indeed be denied happiness because of our needs. Happiness flows from the fact of God’s love for us and not from what life throws at us whether good or bad.
‘Happy are you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied’ Luke 6: 21
Now that we no longer demand happiness as our right but as a gift from God, our desires are redirected to Him. The whole focus of our desires has changed, instead of focusing on ourselves and our needs, we are now God oriented as we seek to honour Him and give him thanks for the life he gives us. This person will be satisfied, Jesus says because the God to whom we turn is faithful and true and desires only what is good for us. This is true whether we find ourselves overcome by adversity as many of God’s servants have been through history or blessed with prosperity as we are.
‘Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh’ Luke 6: 21
Adversity and pain, bereavement, and sorrow can bring us to our knees and, as Wesly commented, this is often the best place to start our journey back to God. When in our helplessness we turn to God for strength we find again that He is faithful, He can be trusted with our sighs and sorrows and will give us the strength to take us through.
C S Lewis wrote two books on Pain, one an academic study ‘The problem of Pain’ that looked at the theological problems of suffering and a God of Love, and the other after the death of his wife Joy ‘A grief observed’ a cry for the heart as he agonised with his doubts about the God of love.
Through his struggle to understand what God was saying to him he spoke of pain as a megaphone. Sometimes God in His love needs to break through our complacency or self-confidence, our pride or boastfulness in a way that helps us to our knees to seek His strength rather than our own. In my mind, the C S Lewis who wrote after the death of his wife, was a more humane and compassionate man who truly understood the problem of Pain.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you when they exclude you and revile you …on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy for behold your reward is great in heaven’ Luke 6: 22-23
Happiness then is not something that can be found by grasping or lost through misfortune or poverty, happiness is a gift from God to those who ‘Seek first the kingdom of God’.
However, Jesus tells us we can also expect to be hated and reviled on account of our faith in God. The truth of these words can be seen down the ages as faithful Christians have faced persecution and death.
As Jesus himself knew, a loyalty that seeks first the kingdom of God will confront powers and authorities, of regimes that set themselves up, over and above the Kingdom of God. Powers and authorities, like the Roman Empire, demand our worship, or in the case of modern tyrannies, obeisance to rulers who seek their own glory.
We can be grateful that we do not live in such an age or under such a regime but we do confront a world that demands of us another loyalty, whether that be the power of money or the seduction of consumerism. These are gods that the Scripture calls idols, the gods of gold who do not see and cannot speak and who will, as we have seen throughout history, fail us.
The Swedish beatitudes!
The Beatitudes tell us that Happiness is for everyone at any age even in times of hardship. It points us to an approach to life that leaves space for the divine, for our neighbour, and space for ourselves.
Perhaps then we might take time to read again that list of Swedish beatitudes:
In the light of what Jesus says an early morning dip to freshen up might be a helpful discipline.
That time in the wilderness a chance to wonder at the beauty of nature.
That de-cluttering of the wardrobe is a useful exercise in saving the planet.
Those breaks in the day may be a time to reflect on your life.
Certainly learning to listen to others and practicing acts of kindness are at the heart of what Jesus meant when he spoke about ‘Seeking first the kingdom of God’
So then, Makarios, the blessing of happiness, comes when we make time for ourselves so that we might have time for God and others in our lives.
Rev Simon Brignall
We continue to uphold in our prayers the bereaved families of our parish.