Choose Sorrow over Happiness

Just toiled through this article–the world’s happiest man, dug up by someone desperate for happiness, willing to go to the ends of the earth, even Nepal, to learn the secret. Turns out the happiest man ever is a French Buddhist monk. And he has out a couple of books, so it will be easy for you to buy some of them and learn how to be happy.

Sensibly, the Buddhist Monks enjoying the pure Himalayan air have discovered that outward focused altruism is included in the recipe for human happiness. You have to do good for others, and you have to let stuff roll off you–you detach from everything and that gives you a shot at joy. The monk wishes he could sit meditating in his hut, but he goes to the world to help others. And he laughs. He is full of good humor no matter the provocation.

The writer of the article is sure that if we could all leave ego behind, and ideology, we could become truly happy, and then many of the very evil things that have beset our culture would gradually be put away. He gets back on his plane and flies home to America, and there we are.

And this is why the quest for happiness, even the pursuit of the joy filled life, leaves me cold. How can I be happy? should be replaced for most all of us with What is True? The trouble is, we can’t discover the Truth, because we know that if we once found it, we would not be happy, at least not right away.

No one seeks God, says God in the scriptures. No one wants to know. Human happiness depends on keeping God afar off, and the human person squarely fixed at the center. If you disappear up into the mountains of Nepal to rid yourself of ego and reach enlightenment, that act itself entrenches your ego as the center of the cosmos. You are trying to do the very thing that God has promised cannot be done–ascend to the heights without him.

Anyway, I can’t read anything about Buddhism without hearing the lamenting agony of Jeremiah put into the mouth of Jesus in Holy Week–Is there any suffering like my suffering? Is there any sorrow like my sorrow?

The path to happiness could be said to be up a mountain. But not in cool, crisp Himalayan air. First you have to walk through crowded angry streets, and then you trudge through the inflamed garbage pit on the outskirts of town. You know, where the fire is always burning, and the worm never dies. Once you ascend to the height you will find a naked man strung up, humiliated, cursed, bleeding and dying. If you have your wits about you you will stop to wonder who he is and why he is there.

When you realize that it is because of you, because you couldn’t do it, any of it, and only heaped up more grief and suffering for yourself and others, you probably won’t immediately feel happy. When they put electrodes all over your head to measure your brain, they won’t find that you are experiencing the deep settled emotion of joy. They might find you overcome by sorrow, might wonder why you seem rattled to your core.

It will be because you beheld the Truth, and that his life was given in place of yours. Not you getting it together and saving the world one happy egoless minute at a time, but Jesus saving you, from yourself, from sin, from the ultimate suffering and sorrow of being separated from him forever.

And now I must go to church.