Happiness Read online

  HAPPINESS

  Joan Chittister

  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

  Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

  © 2011 Joan Chittister

  All rights reserved

  Hardcover edition 2011

  Paperback edition 2012

  Published 2011 by

  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

  2140 Oak Industrial Drive n.e., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

  p.o. Box 163, Cambridge cb3 9pu U.K.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chittister, Joan.

  Happiness / Joan Chittister.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN 978-0-8028-6929-6 (pbk: alk. paper)

  eISBN 978-1-4674-3419-5 (ePub)

  eISBN 978-1-4674-1707-5 (Kindle)

  1. Happiness. 2. Happiness — Religious aspects. I. Title.

  BF575.H27C49 2011

  152.4¢2 — dc23

  2011020581

  www.eerdmans.com

  This book is dedicated to

  Susan Doubet, OSB,

  in gratitude for the kind of

  support and service

  that makes for a happy life —

  mine, for sure; hers, too, I hope.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  introduction

  1. Happiness Is a Process

  2. The Meaning of Happiness in a Global Age

  Happiness: The Universal Quest

  3. What Social Data Tells Us and What It Does Not

  4. What Makes People around the Globe Happy

  5. Group, Self, or Something Else

  6. What Makes a Person Happy

  7. Personal Health and Happiness

  8. Happiness Is a Cultural Expectation

  Happiness: The Gift of Nature

  9. Happiness and the Brain

  10. Hardwired for Happiness

  11. Happiness Is a Goal

  12. Happiness Is a Value

  Happiness: A Commitment to Choose

  13. Psychology and Happiness

  14. The Foundations of Happiness

  15. The Essence of Happiness: What It Is Not

  16. Happiness: The Way to More of It

  17. The Qualities of Happiness

  Happiness: Putting the Pieces Together

  18. Positivity

  19. Extroversion

  20. Relatedness

  21. Competence

  22. Autonomy

  23. Meaning

  24. When Unhappiness Washes over Us, What Then?

  Happiness: The Human Dilemma

  25. Philosophy: The Search for Meaning

  26. Happiness from There to Here

  27. Happiness and Pleasure

  28. Happiness Is Pursued, Not Achieved

  29. Happiness Is Possible but Not Guaranteed

  30. Happiness and Choice

  31. Happiness and Human Rights

  32. Pleasure and Happiness: The Difference between Them

  Happiness: The Eternal Goal

  33. The Good Life: The Happiness That Lasts

  34. Religion: A Finger Pointing at the Moon

  35. Hinduism: The One Thing Necessary

  36. Hinduism: The Measure of the Happy Life

  37. Buddhism: The Call to End Suffering

  38. Buddhism: The Path to Freedom

  39. Judaism: Chosen to Be Happy

  40. Judaism: The People of the Law

  41. Christianity: The Happy Life Is Elsewhere

  42. Christianity: Happy Are They Who . . .

  43. Islam: Submission and Community

  44. Islam: Living the Good Life

  45. Religion and the Paths to Happiness

  Epilogue: Putting the Pieces Together

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  Happiness is very serious business. It is not to be taken for granted. It is not to be assumed that simply being alive assures that we can become the epitome of our own aspirations. Nor is it a guarantee that our own aspirations, our own definition of happiness, is itself the true end of the rainbow.

  Society, culture, advertising all do their part in defining the happiness we seek. We see it on television: It is a brand new car with a tall, sinuous woman draped over it. It is a college degree with the promise of an exotic life. It is a life without work, without worry, without the need for money.

  But that is not all it is. If any of that at all, in fact.

  The truth is that there is as much a substance to happiness as there is a hope that someday, somehow, we will find ourselves in a place of. . . . Of what? Of pleasure. Of satisfaction. Of status. Of security. Of fame. Of what? It is the “discovering ‘of what’ ” that has been the purpose of this book.

  The serious search for happiness is an excursion into many levels and facets of life. It is the honest appraisal of whether what we’ve been told to achieve in life has itself been the substance of our happiness. It is a reflective assessment of how we’re told we can get it.

  Happiness has many experts: sociologists, scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and purveyors of great spiritual traditions. What does each of them have to tell us about the very essence of happiness? This book has been a pilgrimage through all of those coordinates of life. What each of them tells us deserves great thought, astute comparison, gentle prodding, and, in the end, some kind of synthesis designed to balance the separate equations.

  Rather than my simply offering one more personal formula for happiness, I felt strongly that this book could be valuable only if it looked at these many dimensions of what the world calls “happiness” so that readers might be better able to find themselves in it and so be able to chart their own course to it for the rest of life’s journey.

  The task has been a deeply revealing one. I’m personally very happy that I wrote this book. If no one else but me ever reads it, it will have integrated a great deal of life for me, given me a measure by which to assess the various ambits of my own life, to determine what was too much in one place, too little in another.

  I hope for you the same experience as we hold up kernels from each discipline and examine the impact they have had on our own search for happiness, our own slippages into excess.

  But a task of this scope requires a great deal of support. I have had more of that than is anyone’s right.

  I am most grateful to my editor, Sandra De Groot, for her continuing patience with me as I moved from one perspective to another. Most of all, I will look back on her encouragement and her trust as one of the great gifts of my writing life.

  I am grateful in another way to those around me who have always carried part of the load that comes with writing, the part that, first, makes the writing possible and then, second, makes the space for doing it real. I am grateful in a special way to Maureen Tobin, OSB, longtime co-worker, assistant, and friend. I owe the fact that I have been able to take the time from daily schedules to do the research and writing that such work entails to her. She keeps the world at the door while I hide from it.

  I am grateful to Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, whose editor’s eye and poet’s heart keep me singing when I am inclined more to teach. I am grateful, too, to Susan Doubet, OSB, for the numberless patient hours of copy reading and manuscript preparation such a work requires. The time they each gave to this work of editorial refinement has made it better than I could have ever done alone.

  I am most grateful to the body of readers who
tested the text against their own lives, made recommendations, gave life, and provided the confirmation of ideas that brought the text to the bar of reality. Linda Romey, OSB, Anne McCarthy, OSB, and Marlene Bertke, OSB, brought generous measures of keen insight and crisp direction to the shaping of the work. Gail Freyne, Jerry Trambley, Barbara Roseborough, Lyta and Bob Seddig all offered, from their own disciplines, expertise, and personal experience, a vantage point for looking both at the material and at the expectations of the readers. The time this work took for all of them to reply with such acuity is a gift too great to begin to repay.

  All of that reflection and criticism and support gave new life and depth to both the work and the text. What remains of the unsaid or the poorly said belongs to me alone.

  Finally, I am grateful to my community at large, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, for the lifelong support they have given to my very strange penchant for writing as a bona fide vocation within my vocation.

  One thing I learned from this book is that happiness is surely possible but may not be what we think it is when we begin the search.

  introduction

  In folktales of the East written thousands of years ago, there is a story which, in the annals of contemporary happiness research, is still as fresh as yesterday.

  Once upon a time, an angel appeared to a seeker hard at work in the field of life and said, “I have been instructed by the gods to inform you that you will have 10,000 more lives.”

  The wanderer, who had been pursuing the dream of eternal life for years, slumped to the ground in despair. “Oh, no,” the seeker cried. “Ten thousand more lives; ten thousand more lives!” and the seeker wailed and rolled in the dust.

  Then the angel moved on to another seeker bent over in the heat of the day and repeated the same message. “I have been told to tell you,” the angel said, “that you will have 10,000 more lives.”

  “Really?” the seeker exclaimed. “Ten thousand more lives?” Then the seeker straightened up, arms flung toward heaven, head up, face beaming, and began to dance and prance and shout with joy. “Only 10,000 more lives!” the seeker cried ecstatically. “Only 10,000 more lives!”

  The story leaves us totally disarmed — if not completely dumbfounded.

  It’s winsome. But it can also be confusing. Which seeker really understands best the nature of life? Or, better yet, does either of them?

  There is, I’ve come to understand as the years go by, a bit of both those seekers in all of us. Certainly in me.

  One part of me, like the seeker promised 10,000 more lives, goes in and out of phases at the very thought of it, moaning with the Hebrew psalmist as I go, “O woe is me that my journey is prolonged.” With the poet, I “all alone beweep my outcaste state” when life takes one of its erratic swings and turns on me, deprives me, I think, or rejects me, or, most of all, denies me what I want. I mourn the lack of some thing, someone, some time, somewhere, which, I’m certain, must surely make me happy again.

  It’s so easy to concentrate on what we do not have, to the point that we lose consciousness of everything we do have in life.

  That, it seems, is a rather fair account of the struggle for happiness in most societies whose economic foundation depends on making people want more than they need. So, deluged by a sense of disadvantage, we compare ourselves to those we’re sure are happier than we.

  Most of all, like the seeker in our tale who crumbles in despair at the very thought of having to keep up the struggle longer than seems possible, we view life with a wry eye, want no more of its struggles, lose heart, and forget — even deny — its joys.

  There is another part of us, though, that has a thirst for life that simply cannot be slaked. The more of its surprises, the greater its challenges, the broader its scope, the faster our hearts beat, the more deeply our soul breathes in the very thought of tomorrow. We get up every morning ready for whatever life brings and intent on shaping it to our own ends. We are alive with life.

  The question is, which of the two seekers is right? Is life itself, of its very essence, a burden barely to be borne, hardly to be tolerated, surely to be dreaded for its demands and dejections along the way? Or is life the most commonplace workshop of happiness, the atelier in which we are meant to craft and shape, design and sculpt for ourselves the contours of a life so stable, so happy, that no single thing, no simple or single event can crush its spirit?

  Are we victims caught in this web called life simply to endure it, to pass its tests, to finally escape its caprice? Or are we meant to be the inner artisans of our lives but have no idea out of what clay to shape them? If we know instinctively that we are the only possible inventors of the fullness of our own happiness, there has to be conscious consideration of what that demands or life will simply pass us by while we’re thinking of living it.

  The implications of thinking like that are overwhelming: it is possible that we are meant to be bearers of happiness as well as recipients of it, in which case we need to stop waiting around for someone else to make us happy. Then, happiness is not a random accident of existence. It is a personal quality to be mastered, to be wielded, to be trusted.

  If we are alive simply to pass a series of anonymous cosmic tests in order to win a game we have never really been taught to play, there is surely something unfair about it all. It becomes a matter of going through life like a butterfly on a pin, nothing but a research specimen who not only never knew the rules but never found out the score here either.

  But that has not been my experience.

  I have loved life. Like the second seeker I have loved every moment of it, however deep the difficulty of living in a family that was never really a family. I lusted after every breath of it. I always thought of it as getting better, getting fuller, even while I lived a life that by nature limited the things others used to mark their security or their success or their lifetime records of happiness. I got older and loved it even more. There wasn’t much left of its memorabilia in my drawers and cupboards, but I found a great deal of what it meant to me inside. Whatever the struggles of it — the deaths, the life changes, the polio, the wrenching attempts to make better the parts of it crushed under the weight of inertia — I would take more of it if I could. And I am convinced that I am not alone.

  At the same time, however, contemporary society has long been at the mercy of the first seeker. Sure that there is such a thing as happiness, we have learned — at least in our society — to want it now. In fact, to expect it now. To be able to buy it now. Indeed, people in a culture such as this expect to buy happiness just as we buy everything else. We feel better after our shopping sprees. We eat comfort food. We check the stocks daily. As a last resort, we buy up and, too often, beyond what we can really afford. We buy the car, the house, the vacation above our budget, just to prove to ourselves that we are getting closer to the Shangri-la of capitalism. And then, too often, we discover that we feel no better about life than we did before we went into debt to get it.

  But if money does not guarantee happiness, what does? Maybe happiness lies simply in a whim of nature. A “stroke of luck,” we call it. Some people have it all, it seems. Somehow or other, they get the better jobs, the ones we passed over or that passed over us. They can afford to be happy. But some people, most people — I, for sure — are not of that kind.

  Happiness, we decide, is out of our hands. It is, at best, an elusive, arbitrary thing that comes to some by virtue of their birthright or by some game of cosmic chance that overleaps the rest of us. For you and me, the average ones, there is nothing left but to put our hope in other worlds or none at all.

  The problem, of course, lies in identifying just what happiness is, let alone how to get it, before we have either the right to demand it or the hope to achieve it.

  This book sets out to develop an archeology of happiness. It is a great happiness “dig.” It will sort through the rubble of the ages, the archives o
f life’s major fields of study — sociology, biology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, and religion — to determine how happiness has been defined from discipline to discipline, from age to age.

  We will grasp shards of ideas from great minds before us, think about the wisdom of them, wonder at their audacity.

  We will sort through, too, some of the scraps of ideas afloat in our own times that have been caught in social surveys or discovered by modern researchers.

  We will consider the conclusions coming out of the new science of happiness.

  We will probe the philosophers of the ages to find out how happiness has been defined in ages past.

  We will compare ideas on happiness as they are handed down from generation to generation by the great spiritual traditions.

  We will compare all those answers to the remnants of our own experience and wonder what of these other ideas we have missed and what of our own we have failed to trust.

  Most of all, we will look at the pieces of wisdom each of those ideas and definitions and experiments suggests with the hope of cutting for ourselves out of the underbrush of it all our own new path through life called “happiness.”

  As I begin this book, I look back on a life that has, it seems, had its share of what the world could call unhappiness: early deaths that changed the course of my life but which I cannot claim destroyed it; debilitating illnesses that never really managed to debilitate me; sharp shifts in the hopes and plans of a lifetime that leave me a bit wistful yet but not at all defeated; and the continuing struggles to be fully human in a man’s world and fully adult in a religious culture whose history has belied its theology, whose practice has been to be more comfortable with martinets and minions, “help mates” and male overlords, than with its thinking women. But real as all those things are, they are the stuff of challenge, not of unhappiness. Unless, of course, I fail to make the distinction between what it is to be challenged by life and what it is to be fulfilled by it.