KingdomCome
Don Follis
Searching for Happiness
... between Thanksgiving and Christmas
email Don at editor@urbana.org
Thursday was Thanksgiving and the day following is Christmas. Just look at your calendar. Thanksgiving is late this year and Christmas comes way too early. Frankly, I don't have much time - to shop, cut down a real tree, or to send the cards I purchased from the Chicago Art Institute. And of course I intend to have good friends over, proving once again that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Indeed friends, the three short weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be plenty of time for me to experience palpable stress, anxiety and guilt between my beady green eyes. What I really want to do is slow down. I want to try and just be reasonably happy. But is it reasonable to be reasonably happy during the holidays? Truth is, millions of Americans are most unhappy during the holidays.
And wouldn't you know it, just last week I encountered a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who asks if any of us has a right be happy at all. Dr. Armand Nicholi has just written "The
Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life," (Free Press, 2002).
In a fair and winsomely written book, Nicholi places the arguments of Freud and Lewis side by side. Freud, the noted psychiatrist, brilliant founder of psychoanalysis and perhaps the most influential atheist of the twentieth century, argues that happiness is fleeting at best. Freud pondered illness, aging, the destructive forces of nature, and most painful of all, broken relationships with other people. He wondered how people with such a lot in life could ever be happy. More significant, he thought that because we experience sexual pleasure only as "an episodic phenomenon," we experience happiness solely for brief periods of time.
Lewis, until he was about 30, also was an atheist. After the death of his mother when he was nine and his subsequent sad days in a boarding school, Lewis declared himself an atheist. He advanced academically and became a professor and rising star at Oxford. But after his conversion to Christianity, Lewis became the most influential Christian writer of the twentieth century.
Though Lewis believed the plan of creation did indeed provide for our happiness, something went wrong with the plan. He came to argue that, although we have a right to seek happiness - to pursue it, as we Americans say - we have no right to happiness itself. Nicholi quotes Lewis as saying,
This sounds to me as odd as a right to good luck … we depend for a very great deal of our happiness or misery on circumstances outside our control.
So what is it that will make me happy during the holidays? Good health, attractive looks, an ideal marriage, delighted children, a comfortable home, success, fame, financial independence - the list can go and on. Psychiatrist Nicholi says he sees people who have attained these goals and still are very unhappy. He asks his Harvard medical students if other medical students around them are happy. "Invariably they answer no," he says.
Expressing surprise, Nicholi then points out to them that compared with nearly everyone in the entire world they have it all. He presses his classes, "Why are you and others unhappy?" The students typically answer that they and those around them lack meaningful relationships. This unhappiness, in part, is what causes the more than 75 million Americans who will develop clinical depression during their lifetime, to seek treatment, according to Nicholi.
C.S. Lewis came to believe that although all forms of pleasure, fun, happiness and joy come from God, these earthly pleasures never completely satisfy us. Lewis thought that if we think of this world as our home rather than a place we are passing through, we are repeatedly disappointed. The search for happiness led Lewis to believe in a Creator who "refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant Inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for our home."
Nicholi shows that one's worldview has a profound impact on one's capacity to experience happiness. Pessimism and gloom can be changed to joy, freedom from the burden of a driving ambition and to many satisfying relationships.
Indeed, the three full weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas is plenty of time to realize that no pleasure on earth can substitute for or satisfy the profound need and desire that we have for a relationship with the Person who made us.
Don Follis is an Urbana pastor and is on the Urbana 03 operations team.
Copyright by the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.
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