Happiness Read online

  It is to this pursuit of happiness that the Islamic community gives tangible shape and support in the life of the individual Muslim. The Qur’an gives spiritual direction and purpose to life. Between them, these two prongs of Islamic life — community and Qur’an — form a people whose common mind embraces an Islamic society that needs to be both civil and theological, individual and communal at the same time in order to be whole.

  This single-minded conception of life is both social and individual, theological and civic. It is for the strengthening of this twin reality that the Five Pillars of Islam both urge the individual to look toward the life to come and fortify the common life here.

  The basis for happiness, both here and to come, lies in the individual’s commitment to the Five Pillars of Islam, the behaviors that reinforce the ideals of Islam for the individual herself and, at the same time, cement them in the community at large. It is conceivable to be a Hindu or a Jew or a Protestant, a Buddhist or a Catholic on a desert island simply by keeping the laws, but it takes a community to provide the ultimate Islamic life for the Muslim.

  The Five Pillars of Islam bind these two dimensions of life, law and community, into one seamless whole.

  1. The profession of faith: the shahada. The fundamental guide to life in Islam is the public witness to a monotheistic God. To become a Muslim, the aspirant must witness aloud to the fact that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” Though this witness needs to be done only once in life, Muslims more commonly say it at every major event in life, and in most cases daily. It is the ringing truth that maintains the Muslim on the Muslim path: Allah is God and Muhammad is the guide to a godly life.

  2. Prayer: the salat. The Muslim is required to recite formal prayers five times a day — at dawn, at noon, in the mid-afternoon, at dusk, and before bed, preferably with a group rather than alone. The muezzim who announces prayer times from the top of the minaret at dawn sings a haunting reminder of the center of the Islamic life. He prays the first line of the prayer four times and every other line twice until the final line, which is said only once. The prayer reads:

  God is greater.

  I bear witness that there is no God but God.

  I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

  Hurry to the salat.

  Hurry to salvation.

  God is greater.

  There is no God but God.

  In the morning call, the sentence “The salat is better than sleep” is usually added after “Hurry to salvation.”1

  With the salat, with formal prayer as a community of believers five times a day, the Islamic community is more and more tightly bound into one people on the way to God together.

  3. Almsgiving: zakat. Almsgiving in Islam is a kind of tax on wealth. The difference is that it is not paid to the state. It is meant to be given to the needy. It is a totally social or communal act. Even though Islam believes that the communal prayer is more powerful than the individual prayer, the salat can be said alone. Zakat, on the other hand, is designed to make the individual personally responsible for the welfare of the community.

  Zakat is only required of a person provided they have been employed for a minimum of one year and have made a profit. The word itself means “purity” — the notion that zakat, the giving of a portion of one’s profits to another, purifies wealth that might otherwise rob the community of what it needs. Just as ablutions purify the body before prayer and salat purifies the soul, so does zakat purify the accumulation of possessions and make the entire community richer because of it. It responds to the needs of the community and guarantees the development of the whole people together.

  4. Fasting: sawm. The yearly ritual fast denies the Muslim food, drink, and sex from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan. It is meant to do three things: to repent for sin, to acknowledge dependence on God, to foster nearness to Allah — to make the Muslim aware of the bounty of God in life.

  5. Pilgrimage: the haj. All Muslims are required, as far as they are able, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, where Muslims believe Abraham himself built the Kaaba with his son Ishmael over 2,000 years ago. According to tradition, the Kaaba is an ancient altar to the One God. Haji, or pilgrims, go to Mecca in order to refresh and deepen their relationship with Allah and to prepare for death. In past times, before modern transportation made the trip to Mecca a day’s journey, it often took months, and so it was done late in life as a final purification. Some haji simply went to Mecca and stayed out the rest of their lives there. Now, the commitment to spiritual renewal is just as intense but not necessarily so final. On the contrary. Haj is now more a renewal ceremony in midlife than a preparation for death.

  These acts — submission to Allah, daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and the haj — guide the Muslim through life to the point of spiritual fulfillment. Along with an ongoing commitment to Sharia law, which is the interpretation of the Qur’an for contemporary society, these Five Pillars, the Islamic community agrees, bring peace and happiness in this life and preparation for the next.

  chapter 45

  Religion and the

  Paths to Happiness

  Whatever God’s dream for humanity may be,” Stella Terrill Mann wrote, “it seems certain it cannot come true unless humanity cooperates.” It is an insight to be taken seriously. Nothing happens in us as a result of religion unless, of course, we absorb it, breathe it in, open ourselves to it, give it free rein to live in us till it grows and consumes us. And happiness is no exception.

  Religions — all of them — say, “Here is the way to happiness. Take it.” And all of them warn in one way or another what happens to the fabric, the warp of our lives, if we don’t take heed. But no religion can make it happen in our favor. No religion can do for us what our own hearts do not seek.

  Where the way to happiness — however each religion defines it — is concerned, the situation could not be more clear. And yet, each religion has something important to tell us about happiness that no other discipline can even begin to describe. The sociologist, for instance, says, choose carefully what you think will make you happy. The physician says, be happy so that you will be at your physical best your whole life and so be able to take advantage of the multiple dimensions of life. The neurologist says, see happiness as your birthright. The psychologist says, take responsibility for your own happiness. The philosopher says, realize that happiness is more than pleasure. But religion is the only one of the disciplines that says to us directly, “Happiness depends on this. . . .” Religion is the only one of life’s disciplines that brings with it what it says is the content of happiness.

  Each of these disciplines gives us something to hang onto, something to grow into, something to become that is bigger than any particular things we may choose along the way, any physical or social skills we might be able to develop. Religion goes to the development of the heart, the maturity of the soul. It connects us to the universe and stretches us far beyond the limited little worlds in which we live. It brings us questions that are, as Christopher Fry says in “A Sleep of Prisoners,” soul size. The poem brings us face-to- face with the search for life, for truth, for understanding, for happiness. Fry writes:

  The human heart can go the lengths of God.

  Dark and cold we may be, but this

  Is no winter now. The frozen misery

  Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

  The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

  The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

  Thank God our time is now when wrong

  Comes up to face us everywhere,

  Never to leave us till we take

  The longest stride of soul we ever took.

  Affairs are now soul size.

  The enterprise

  Is exploration into God.

  Where are you making for? It takes

  So many t
housand years to wake,

  But will you wake for pity’s sake!

  Christopher Fry, “A Sleep of Prisoners” (Epilogue)

  Going to the lengths of God, waking up to life is what religion is all about. It is also what happiness is all about.

  Life, Fry reminds us, is an excursion into the very meaning of happiness in the very face of all life’s struggles. Life itself is what leads us to understand the difference between its baubles and its beauty. It calls into play each of the elements of happiness to which each of the religions leads us. Life is not a winter, Fry writes. It is the flow of seasons from one spring to another — each of them, however raw, an excursion into another dimension of life, of soul, of God. All of life is of a piece, assonant; and it is what we make out of all of life which, in the end, is the measure of the happiness we both bring to it and get from it.

  Each of the religions shows us another facet of what real happiness must bring us.

  Hinduism calls us to see everything as One. It enables us, if we will, to realize that life is an integrated experience. We do not get bits and pieces of happiness any more than we get bits and pieces of life. Every moment of every life is meant to be life in its fullness. We get all of life at all times, one aspect more pronounced than another, perhaps, but out of this whole cloth we are meant to make a life of both joy and fulfillment. We learn, in Hinduism, that happiness and sadness are simply different views of the same thing. The happy marriage becomes a funeral; the funeral becomes a reminder of the happiness the marriage brought.

  The awareness that this moment is only part of a much greater one brings meaning to every iota of life, requires me to bring as much quality to this moment as to any other so that I am never found wanting in my appreciation of life. It is this sense of oneness in life that makes peace possible and harmony magnetic.

  Buddhism, on the other hand, focuses us on the elimination of suffering, not through hedonism, not through an engorgement of pleasures, good as they may be, but through the right understanding of what life is meant to be about. Excess in anything, Buddhism teaches, is suffering. There is no pleasure that does not turn into pain if taken to the extreme.

  The ability to let be, to let happen, to let come, to let grow, to let go is, Buddhism reminds us, the acme of the life well lived. Buddhism finds happiness by refusing to define it. Buddhism accepts; it does not cling. Buddhism relinquishes; it does not demand. Buddhism teaches the happiness of the present moment by refusing to demand more of the moment than the moment can give and, at the same time, by expecting more of it than it seems to promise. It is the paradox of life lived consciously. To pursue joy, Buddhism teaches, is to lose it. To understand suffering is to relieve it. To take to the self the whole suffering world is to breathe compassion.

  Just as Hinduism teaches us that we must realize that happiness is more than simply a series of happy moments but also an awareness that happiness has something to do with the way we see hard times as well as good, so Buddhism shows us that we create our own suffering or happiness, one small choice, one little moment at a time.

  Judaism calls us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time.

  Judaism calls us to be children of the law of the universe who live within its bounds for the sake of everyone else around us. We are made to understand in Judaism that no amount of lawlessness, of arbitrariness, of moral thuggery, of our aspirations to lordship can possibly lead to happiness if it destroys our own sense of creaturehood and puts us in the dubious position of pretending to be our own God. Judaism is a clear sign that without ethics and justice, there is no happiness for anyone, including the self that is willing to live life less fully than rationality would enable us to do.

  As Hinduism calls us to oneness, and Buddhism to acceptance, and Judaism to law, Christianity calls us to the love that exceeds our own egos in order to lead us to a life lived for something greater than the self. It calls us to give of ourselves for the sake of the development of the rest of the human race. It centers the purpose of life on doing good for the other, being a sign of the goodness of God, and becoming followers of the Jesus who is our model.

  Christianity makes love the be-all and end-all of the universe. It puts human relationships in the very crosshairs of the life well lived. The self, Christianity says, cannot go through life alone. There is no happiness possible in isolation. In Christianity, then, we are called to become keepers of the human family, and the purpose of my own life is made both immediate and global at the same time. Self-giving does not diminish the person, Christianity teaches; it develops us to the level of our most loving selves.

  Islam, finally, comes to model human community for us in an age when communal traditions as we have always known them are breaking down. The whole notion of what it means to be a good citizen of any nation, a good member of any church, a good team player or purveyor of any particular culture has become very private and personal. Islam, though, sets before us a reminder of the call to the entire human community to live with one heart despite our many traditions. It is the Sunnah that counts in Islam, the people, the model community, the common mind, the single soul at play in the world so that the world might, as Hinduism says, really become one.

  Islam is a call to bring people together, to develop one beating human heart in touch with, in concern for, and in concert with the Song of Creation. Human development in the context of communal development is Islam’s call to wholeness.

  Happiness, religion says, requires that we spend our lives seeking human unity and practicing compassion, being just and bringing order to creation, loving one another and building human community. It means that we are not enough for ourselves. It means that we must live with purpose as well as with pleasure. It means that we are in this world to be responsible for it, for one another, for happiness.

  Without these things, religion says, we doom ourselves to our own fragmentation. We waste our lives with the sensual delights of the moment and stand to ignore the flush of final well-being that comes with having lived above the level of the senses to the heights of the soul. We drown our lives in fits of self-centeredness that bring nothing but a lust for things that can never be satisfied. We turn ourselves into a kind of cosmic joke. An endless search for nothing worth finding. A groan of frustration rather than the kind of sigh that comes at the end of a life well lived.

  * * *

  Happiness, Aristotle says, is nothing more than “doing well and living well.” And religion, it seems, would agree. How, religion asks, can we live lawless, licentious, narcissistic lives and ever hope really to be the kind of happy that washes through every nerve in our body with a sense of having done well, through every beat of our hearts with a sense of being well loved, through every moment of every satisfying day, through every breath of soul, knowing that the world is a happier place to be because we are there?

  Indeed, as Willa Cather wrote, “That is happiness — to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

  epilogue

  Putting the Pieces Together

  I did not end this book where I started it — by bundling up a neat and clear definition of what I presumed would be a totally common concept. In fact, I wound up somewhere else altogether. As the old Irishman, when asked for directions on how to go from where he was to a village on the other side of the country, said to the traveler: “I wouldn’t be going there from here.” Nor would I. The excursion into happiness is a much more involved journey than the simplicity of a definition might imply.

  I began the book to see how people of c
onsequence had defined the notion of happiness across the ages, to see if it had changed along the way, and why. By the end of the excursion, however, I realized that the definition of happiness is a very personal thing. The nature of happiness is something that we must each explore for ourselves. It’s deciding for ourselves what happiness is that stands to change our lives completely.

  So, it has been a long, convoluted journey, this excursion into the meaning of happiness. Led by thinkers across history and in our own time, I found myself holding up my own life to the measures they each propose — pleased with what I had already discovered, intrigued by their many different conclusions, prodded to think more deeply about the subject than ever before. Happiness, I discovered, is something I had taken for granted for a good long time. And that may be the most dangerous possibility of them all.

  In the first place, I began this book by calling it Happiness Redefined. As if there were one definition of it out there somewhere just waiting for me to repeat it. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that there are simply too many definitions of happiness to even begin to assume that any one of them applies either to the whole or to the end of such a complex issue. This is not a one-size-fits-all project.

  More than that, the book is not about happiness “redefined” at all. It is, instead, about the process of “redefining happiness.” For ourselves. By ourselves. Alone. In the light of the centuries. With our own experience in mind. This is a very intimate, a very personal project. It is the process of discovering what we have missed along the way, of exposing to ourselves our mistakes, perhaps, of learning to think through life all over again.

  So what did I myself learn in the course of such a personal excursion? I learned the obvious that I had overlooked in my dash through life to pick its fruits and drain its juices. I also learned the not so obvious dimensions of it that I thought I knew, of course, but did not really know at the same time.