Provocations

By pbobby

This little song always seemed to lift my spirits when I sang it at Sunbeams in the Baptist church, which my Daddy pastored in Lone Oak, Kentucky. We all seemed to enjoy being together after we sang that song. I didn't even know how to spell happiness, but I was experiencing it in community.

My personal definition of happiness is experiencing joyousness, contentment and a sense of well being in our relationships with God and others, concomitantly.

As life has becomes more complex with aging, learning to be happy seems most difficult. The elapsed time between belly laughs, mental peace and a truly relaxed body seems to get longer and longer.

Our culture presents us with many obstacles to finding happiness as I have defined it. One that hounds us daily is our exposure to TV news, which is primarily a report on the day's events of raw cruelty and natural disasters that colors our world evil, and certainly disturbs our sense of personal security.

Another is our practically unknowing yet whole-hearted participation in consumerism. It comes so natural to do so. All we have to do is remember and play harder at our early childhood games of "Mine;" "Mine's better than yours is;" I'm prettier that you are." These games can become hurtful and even vicious.

It all comes down to comparing people in a judgmental fashion, by the abundance and quality of their things. I will only mention three of these obstacles to our happiness. We probably are not really conscious of them as obstacles to our happiness. They are: the car(s) we drive; the home(s) we live in and the clothes we wear. This addictive process of buying and buying can also lead us into deep debt, even bankruptcy if our ADULT fails to monitor what our CHILD is doing.

The crowning achievement of consumerism, which I find most reprehensible, is the incredibly expensive and ornate spectacles many of us have helped to build for a place of worship. What has happened to our sense of stewardship with that portion of God's creation, which is under our control? What has happened to the Christian mission of helping the widows, the poor and the physically afflicted people in our community? I think our true mission has been captured, by "my church is more beautiful than your church is", and "we have an exclusive on what is truth!" What could be more divisive than this most plentiful of paradigms?

How much is enough to make us happy? My answer to my own question is, "There isn't enough stuff in the world to make us happy. That's because true happiness cannot be produced by one's possessions.

So how do we find the kind of happiness that my innocent soul experienced over sixty years ago in Sunbeams. I am not sure that there is a formula that gives us all a step-by- step way back to our childhood happiness before our society tamed our loving, spontaneous spirits.

I sincerely believe that a good starting place would be to heed the words of the psalmist in the 46th chapter, when he sang for God, "Be still and know that I am God."

Our lives are so cluttered and frenzied that we seldom make time to be still in order to meditate and find contact with God's spirit so that we can know He is God.

From that point on, I think we must choose a more compassionate attitude toward ourselves and others, which promotes community activities that can lead us into new fellowships and unselfish acts of kindness to even strangers. Thus out of all the interaction of love that we give and receive, we just might start to sing. That's why happiness is so elusive. It's a by-product of celebrating life with civility and compassion.