Happy Are They…

A sermon by

The Rev. Brad Mitchell

Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor, Maine

July 1, 2007

Inscribed on a plaque affixed to the base of our Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are these immortal words written by poet Emma Lazarus:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land:

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name’

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The poem has always spoken deeply to me, because it is the story of my ancestry, and unless you are a full-blooded Native American, or the descendant of African slaves brought to this country against their will, it is the story of your ancestry, too. It is the story of those thousands upon thousands of people who, over the last three hundred ninety years, have found their way from places around the globe to this country in search of a happier life.

Indeed, the freedom to procure a happy life has been a fundamental American ideal. Our nation’s founders, gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft the statement of principles which would serve as the bedrock values of the new American republic, included among those principles the establishment of the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

As a nation of immigrants and children of immigrants, then, we are a nation dedicated to the American Dream, the notion that each of us, regardless of ethnic background, wealth or religion, has the right to pursue and achieve whatever idea of fulfillment may be our bent, provided it is within the law. Accordingly, we organize our society to achieve the best outcome and the possibility of a happy life for the greatest number of us.

Some nations organize differently from our ideal of the fulfillment of the individual. The socialist ideal, for example, says that the fulfillment of the individual stems from the well-being of the whole community and that individual happiness is a derivative rather than a formative value of society.

But here in the United States of America, our patriotic values urge us to pursue individual happiness first, and that the effect of all of us individuals finding work that fulfills us, establishing happy homes and families, creating and joining voluntary organizations that extend our personal well-being, is to build what we call the free society. So we devote a great deal of our personal energies in the pursuit of happiness.

But this morning, I have a confession to make. Now, in all the years that I have been pursuing happiness, I haven’t yet caught up with it! That is to say, whatever I thought it was, it wasn’t.

You see, for much of my life I thought that happiness was a lot of things out there, around me, people and relationships and things external to me. There was a time in my life (I would peg it at about age fourteen to perhaps age fifty,) when I thought happiness was in finding just the right relationships with people, relationships which would fulfill me or complete me or something like that. There appeared to be a void in me, a place of need, a place of insecurity, a place of confused identity. This condition caused me pain, anxiety, alienation. If only the right person or people would come along, I wished, and would take up my life as their cause, would fill up my emptiness, then I would be happy. This was the theme of many popular songs in the fifties and sixties, so, of course, I thought it was true.

And people did come along. But the odd thing was, all who came into my life, whom I thought might be my saviors, were interested in building relationships and therefore wanted things of me, things like honesty and understanding and forbearance, things I was too self-absorbed to offer. So, I never got to experience the happiness that I thought they would bring.

Or we reach out for toys to make us happy. We men love toys, and toys do things for us. They confirm status, define us as individuals. All those toys we accumulate around us to play with remind us who it is we think we want to be. If we are able to fulfill the image we want to project by having the toys around us that create that image, we are happy.

Or, again, we reach out around us to procure the possessions that allow us to compare ourselves favorably with others. For many of us, it is in the making of favorable comparisons with others that leads to happiness. I call this “selective comparison.” A guiding principle of selective comparison is to take only the outstanding qualities or possessions of people around us and use these as a measure of our own worth as a person. In playing this game, we set ourselves up for the fall. We can’t win this game of happiness. For wherever we look there are others who are better looking, better off financially, have better things. And yet we struggle to keep up, because we are told that this is the road to happiness.

Another dead-end road I’ve traveled in my personal pursuit of happiness is the zigzag route of the avoidance of suffering. For many years I thought I could play it safe. By avoiding risk taking, I thought, I could avoid suffering. By sweeping death and aging and my own aggressiveness under the great rug of unconsciousness, by pretending they didn’t exist, I thought I could avoid suffering.

But we cannot finally escape suffering. We live, do we not, between blessings and tears, and although the blessings come first, we live a shallow life if there is little awareness that grows out of suffering, if there is little heart that grows out of the pain of life, if there is so little commitment that is given energy, oftentimes, by the suffering of our lives.

Primo Levi, the Italian chemist-author and survivor of the holocaust, put his life’s philosophy this way:

“Human beings suffer unjustly… but we are saved by understanding.”

So the great religions of the world try to bring understanding to our inevitable suffering. The first of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism is that life is suffering. The Passover commemoration in Jewish homes rehearses the suffering and promise in Jewish history. The central symbol of Christianity, the cross, bespeaks the suffering servant as the Savior.

We do suffer unjustly, but suffering hidden, suffering swept under the rug, suffering denied is not the road to happiness. Anyone who tries to sell us on the notion that if we only think positively, we will reap positive benefits is not telling us the whole truth. For suffering comes to the most innocent of us. It comes to little children; it comes even to those who do everything right in their lives; it comes to saints as well as sinners.

And anyone who preaches a religion of ecstasy with the goal of a final and enduring happiness, either in this world or the next, is selling us false goods. The depth in religion is found in Jacob’s struggle with the angel, the Buddha’s disillusionment with riches, the doubts of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Struggle, disillusionment, doubt and suffering are, along with joy and ecstasy and meaning, all handmaidens of truth.

Now given this understanding of the place of suffering in the scheme of things, given the understanding that death and loss are part of what it means to be alive, we, in our particular religious tradition, see happiness not as an end in itself, but as a gift that, when fully enjoyed as the gift that it is, can only be embraced in gratitude.

That is to say that the “law of compensation” does not fit into Unitarian Universalist theology even though it may fit our Yankee nature. You know what the “law of compensation” is. It is the notion that a little happiness must be paid for with a quantity of pain and suffering. I most recently heard the “law of compensation” expressed this way in a public place:

“Feel that sunshine; isn’t this a great day to be alive?”

“Just you wait; we’ll pay for it. Winter isn’t over yet.”

But the religious question is not “are we happy yet? “ It is, I believe, more along these lines: “am I giving something of myself back to life?” “Do I have commitments that allow me to give of my best nature?” I recently read a story about the great clarinetist, Artie Shaw who reached his pinnacle of performance in the days of the big band. He said the following to an interviewer:

“Maybe twice in my life I reached what I wanted to. Once

was in the piece of music “These Foolish Things.” At the end of

the piece the band stops and I play a little cadenza. That cadenza –

no one can do it better. Let’s say it is five bars. That’s a very good

thing to have done in a lifetime. An artist should be judged by his

best, just as an athlete is. Pick out one or two best things and say,

“That’s what he did. All the rest was rehearsal.”

And if, in the rehearsing of life, if in the making of our commitments, if, in the giving back of our best, we experience the joy and meaning that we call happiness, let us enjoy it as the gift that it is.

In the meantime, let us practice life, practice compassion, practice critical analysis, practice waging peace, practice making commitments, practice celebrating the blessings even if they come to us in the form of suffering. That’s what Zorba, the Greek did. Do you remember the movie? Toward the end of the movie Zorba, the Greek, there is a powerful moment. Zorba had all the boss’s money tied up in an investment scheme to build a runway which would bring timber down the mountain where it would be used to shore up an old mine which would restore economic well-being to the community. The whole village came out to watch the trial run. But the weight of the logs caused the whole runway to come crashing down, and everyone’s hopes were dashed. Slowly the people leave in disappointment. Remaining are Zorba and his boss. The boss begins to talk dejectedly about leaving the village, and then Zorba says:

“Boss, I’ve never loved a man as I love you, but there’s one thing you lack – the little madness to be free.”

And the boss who has admired Zorba’s ability to respond happily to life, looks at him uncomprehendingly. Then Zorba looks at the destroyed runway, breaks out in a deep belly laugh and says,

“Boss, have you ever seen a more stupendous crash?’

To which the boss, finally catching on to Zorba’s wisdom, responds, “Zorba, will you teach me to dance?”

And the story ends with the two men dancing and celebrating life at the site of their greatest failure. We cannot escape suffering in this world, but we can recognize happiness when it comes as a gift. It is the meaning that comes from practicing life that is happiness, after all, the meaning of giving back to life something of ourselves and learning to sing a song of praise for the gift.

Amen and Blessed Be!