The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

 

To this house we come bringing our boldest dreams -- seeking here the inspiration and strength to make them be! To this house we come hoping to bury broken dreams, to be sustained through their pain and to discover new ones amidst their tears. We come here lonely, isolated from meaningful human contact, searching for warmth and closeness and care. Needing to grow beyond plateaus of the commonplace, we seek here challenges and commitments productive of greater wholeness and deeper meanings.

 

We come intense and constructed, hoping for encouragement to shed our pretences and to be ourselves. Filled with despair and self-doubt, we seek affirmations prodding us to say "yes" to ourselves and to life. Somehow, always putting happiness ahead of ourselves, we enter this place trusting that what happens here will enable us to make and to accept a little bit of it now -- today!

 

Strange place, this house -- here we cry, sing, laugh, hurt, dance, touch, survive, celebrate, grow, search, doubt, hope, rejoice, pray, trust, care, learn, think, wonder, be, become! Yes, this morning, to this house we come.

 

Tells the story of a new bridge being built for a town on a river. Tradition says that the happiest person must cross it first to avoid a curse on the town. Who is the happiest person?

 

The Buddha contrasted 2 different “types” of happiness.

Pamoja is worldly happiness and arises from our experiences in the world. 

 

Pamoja could arise from an experience in nature, appreciation of a work of art, the satisfaction of a job well done, or appreciation of another person. These experiences are wholesome and satisfying, but they are tied to external conditions; they depend our arranging to have the experiences that give rise to the happiness.

 

Sukkha, the other state of happiness or contentment, arises from natural presence rather than external conditions. It is a “being state” and is cultivated by accepting things as they are, by letting go of one’s ideas about needing things to be a certain way. We can cultivate sukkha by finding a sense of contentment that is unconditioned, i.e. not dependent on conditions, or external circumstance.

 

The more we are involved in Pamoja, or worldly happiness, the more we tend to get fixated on needing things to be a certain way. Our focus narrows and we can get obsessive in desiring the conditions we feel we need. We can get swept up into “if only” thinking. “If only I had more money…or a better job…a different body, a partner, a better partner, (you fill in the blank)…then I’d be happy.” 

 

Here’s a slightly perverse little story about desire and how it can distort our perception and judgment. A woman is walking through a public park when she sees a disheveled and dejected looking man sitting on a park bench. She sits down next to him and inquires how he is doing. He says “…not very well, I was just released from prison.” “What were you in for?” she inquires. “Killing my wife,” he replies. Her response: “So…you’re single!”

 

These ideas have made a difference for me personally in how I respond to events moment to moment, especially in how I respond to difficult circumstances. When difficulties arise I try to remind myself that my contentment lies mainly in how I handle the situation rather than in how successful I am at controlling events outside myself. I try to focus on my own relationship to the event, specifically on my ability to be patient with difficult emotions as they arise. It’s an ongoing struggle, and one that requires tolerance of failure and the willingness to try again over and over.

 

 

Are you happy, or at least sort of happy? What is your ‘happiness quotient’ today?   20%? 45%? 78%? Are you satisfied with your life? 

 

I ask you these questions because I want to make this as personal a message as possible…I would like you to go inside yourself and open that one box, or window or doorway, in your heart and soul that is labelled: happiness. I want what I have to say today to enter you in that one special place. Are you happy? 

 

It is said of preaching that some of the best sermons are the ones we preach to ourselves. I’ll leave you to decide if this is one of the best sermons, but I can say without equivocation that I am preaching to myself today, to that place inside that is sometimes a very tiny box, a latched window, a locked door. 

 

Like you, I have much to be grateful for, more blessings than are possible to count, many examples of good fortune in my life. And, like you, I have multiple challenges. I have been touched by loss and grief. I do not have everything I could ever want. Or rather, I don’t only want what I have. When asked if I am happy, I am prone to hesitate, to hem and haw a little bit, feeling like I SHOULD be happy, but I’m not as happy as I’d like to be. I always seem to be able to find a reason NOT to be happy. 

 

I have to wonder why any of us would go looking for reasons NOT to be happy. Personally, I have sometimes blamed this predisposition on my Scandinavian heritage; I can readily identify with Garrison Kiellor’s characterizations of us Minnesotans… in response to the perennial question of “how are you?” we are prone to answer, “could be worse” or “not bad”.   I think I’ve told you before about conversations with my good friend Tom. He plays a great Norwegian to my Swede, and we’ve been known to find ourselves in a verbal battle to be the one who is worse off. I finally came to see the wisdom in saying, “Okay, Tom, you win!”

 

There is, to be sure, value in negative emotions. Sometimes they are the most reasonable response to the situation. They can protect us and help us to survive. Positive emotions, on the other hand, can put us at risk by creating anxiety that our needs and expectations will not be met. Positive emotions expose us to possible rejection and heartbreak.[1] 

 

In Notes on an Unhurried Journey, author John A. Taylor writes:

“But the cycle of fun is short" There is a sadness in the air when the game is over, and our friends have gone home. It really doesn’t take long for the new car to become ‘only transportation’ or the clothes to become unfashionable.  Fun arrives, contributes its brief sensation, and leaves.”

So, better to have no fun at all? 

 

Or, maybe those of us who are so privileged sometimes suffer a kind of “survivor guilt…”   When we look around us and see so much suffering, so much pain, so much despair, how dare we focus on our own happiness? 

 

Like the townspeople in our story today[2], in any given moment, it is pretty easy to find something that overshadows our happiness. Looking through the lens of ‘any given moment’, looking through the lens of material possessions, looking through the lens of fun or pleasure, doesn’t serve the spirit of happiness because it takes too short a view. The lens of ‘any given moment’ is like the lens of pamoja, that Arthur spoke of earlier. Pamoja is tied to external conditions…money, fun, pleasure. Alternatively, sukkha, a deeper happiness, is about an overall sense of well-being, a long-view and a contented picture of our lives. 

 

You may remember a few weeks ago when I talked about grace, I told you that finding resources about grace that fit into the Unitarian context was challenging. However, resources about happiness are abundant…I realized at about four o’clock yesterday that I was culling through resources about happiness in a way that resembled the search for actual happiness. I felt like I had to keep looking for the perfect thing, the quintessential wording or insight that would mean that I had found it…kismet…that I had arrived. But then the moment arrived when I had to be satisfied with what I had in order to move on and put together what I would say today. Otherwise, this would have been a very unhappy morning. 

 

In life, in our search for happiness, we don’t have this kind of a deadline. I mean, imagine if such a deadline existed. Imagine knowing that how you felt, your state of mind and soul, the resources you had on, say January 3, 2010, at precisely _____ EST, would determine your happiness for the rest of your life. We don’t have this kind of deadline…or do we?

 

Barry Schwartz, Professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, said in an interview on Minnesota Public Radio about the essence of happiness, that about 50% of our propensity to happiness is genetic. There is something in our very physiology that determines if we’ll be happy. From a glass half-empty perspective, that’s rather depressing. Just as the resources available to us at this moment are a given, our genetics have pre-determined our happiness potential. What we have is what we got.

 

But look at this from another angle. From a glass half-full perspective, this is good news. Our experiences and what we do with them also make up one half of our potential to be happy. All of our collected experience, along with what lies ahead of us, and what we learn from all of it, has an equal, or greater, potential to bring happiness. 

 

So what of our ability to learn from and use our experiences? How can we ‘make’ happiness in our lives? There’s a ton of advice out there about this, and frankly, much of it comes from the pop-culture of self-help, which wrongly, I believe, puts happiness in the same category with money, or success, or fame… that is, something outside of ourselves to be attained or achieved. True happiness, or satisfaction, or contentment, is something that’s already within us and just needs to be acknowledged and embraced. 

 

And yet, for most of us, this is not so simple. How do we move from living in a place of pamoja to existing in a state of sukkha? Let me give you (and myself) some suggestions, while recognizing that this is not a complete, definitive, or universally useful list. 

 

First, stop pursuing happiness. Eric Hoffer has been quoted as saying that “the search for happiness if one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” Paradoxically, focusing on achieving happiness creates a desire that brings unhappiness. Happiness is the overall outcome of many pleasant and positive moments, moments that are always interwoven with less positive experiences. You can nurture and promote the positive, working to increase its occurrence in your life. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson says that the tipping point toward happiness is a achieving a ratio of 3 positive moments for every negative one.[3] There will always be suffering and unhappiness, so you can’t wait until you’re done with your suffering to be happy. But, focus on increasing positive emotions… gratitude, love, trust, confidence, silliness, curiosity, pride, serenity…you know the ones.

 

Then, cultivate solid and loving relationships. Deepen your understanding of our mutual dependence on one another. Improve your communication skills, so that you can both speak authentically and listen to understand. The presence of good relationships is high on the happiness-indicator scale. Another strong indicator of happiness is religiosity, and I imagine this is, in part, because religious people are part of a community. This is something we can do here; together we can strengthen community. We can continue to improve our ability to build vital and life-sustaining relationships, and in this way, increase happiness everywhere.

 

Speaking of religion, it is also thought that the presence of hope factors into a person’s happiness. A student who spent a year visiting eleven different religious traditions concluded that fundamentalist religions are markedly more optimistic than Unitarians, who are more depressive on average.[4] I would argue with these findings, since I believe we, who place our faith in our human capacity to love, and to act, and to heal, have great reason to be hopeful. We know that we can change and improve. So practice hope. 

 

And practice gratitude. Count your blessings. This old hymn was one of my mother’s favorites…it brought her lots of comfort. “When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, count your many blessings, every doubt will fly, and you will keep singing as the days go by.” Make it a practice to name what you are happy about, and what you already have. A few weeks ago, I told you of Rev. Forrest Church’s mantra… “Be who you are, do what you can, want what you have.” Well, practicing gratitude is the best way to want what you have. Like the Talmud says, the one who is wealthy is the one who is happy with his portion. This takes practice. Just like you can’t learn to play the piano by practicing for 20 seconds every two weeks, wishing doesn’t make us grateful. We have to practice our gratitude. Be happy with what you have. It is a lot. It is enough. 

 

Another way to improve your happiness quotient is to practice mindfulness, that is, to be in the present moment, to see what is right in front of you, and to make peace with what is and what has been. See what is, and accept it for what it is. Much of our unhappiness and negative emotions come from regret, desire for what we don’t have, and wishing for things to be different. It is pointless to want to change what has already happened…a waste of precious time and energy.

 

This brings to mind an oft-heard adage… about how the epitome of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different outcome. When we live in the past, we play the same thing over and over again, as if doing so could change what happened. Matthieu Ricard, dubbed the happiest man in the world after undergoing brain wave studies while meditating, defined happiness as that which gives us the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life that pervade all emotional states, including sadness. In other words, happiness is not about what happens to us, but rather how we deal with it. 

 

Are any of you familiar with the Grant Study? It hopes to learn the secret of the good life through an ongoing longitudinal study of 268 ‘well adjusted’ male Harvard students. George Valliant, the director of that study, maintains that when we encounter a challenge, our defences maintain homeostasis, rather like how our blood clots when we’re cut. However, there are a range of defences we might choose from, and the most healthy of them employ a kind of alchemy that turns dross into gold…that turns human crises, pain and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment and creativity.[5]

 

These healthy defences, or adaptations, include such things as humour, altruism, planning ahead, and finding outlets for feelings. Again, it is not what happens to us, but how we deal with it that can cultivate happiness as a state of being. This is the main premise of Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. 

 

So happiness can also result from altruism. To ‘be’ happiness in the world, we need to look for ways to bless and serve the world. We are happiest when we are serving others, which was palpably evident in the atmosphere at the Stone School House on Friday night when we served a meal to others. Pay attention to where you can insert compassion into the world, and also pay attention to when human kindness is gifted to you. The more we share happiness and love, the more there will be for all. 

 

Also, do what you can to bring the fullness of your unique person into the world. Know yourself by assembling all the pieces of your life into a whole, understood and respected ‘you.’ Follow the diversions that call to you, act out your personal nuttiness, do everything you can, to be and to love who you are. Kate KF gave me a card that expressed “Be yourself because everybody else is already taken.” I believe that global happiness rests on an embrace of our great and beautiful human diversity, and that diversity is dependent on each of us expressing who we are. Don’t be afraid to be you. Take some risks to live into your dreams. And also live with integrity by living your values with zeal. 

 

Now, just having said that you need to be your authentic self, the last piece of advice I have is to fake it until you make it. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said that "sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."  Smiling is not just the cause of happiness, it can cause happiness. Haaya Yoga[6], also known as laughter yoga, uses group laughing sessions as an exercise to increase mindfulness. And, that’s how I’m going to close today…with a bit of laughter yoga, so that we might throw those windows and doors to happiness open wide. All you need to do is look at one another…make eye contact…and laugh along…Ready….Laugh! 

 

Are you happy now? May all beings be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit. May you be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.

Amen. 

 

And now we take our leave.

Before we gather here again--

And may we remain together in spirit ‘til the hour we meet again.   

Amen.

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