How to Be Happy (Part II)
by Joan Shiels
for Hope Church/ May 6, 2007
[Longer Version – For Email and Website]
The Readings:
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back. Luke 6:36 -38
He who treads the Path in earnest
Sees not the mistakes of the world.
If we find fault with others
We ourselves are also in the wrong.
When other people are in the wrong, we should ignore it,
For it is wrong for us to find fault.
By getting rid of this habit of fault-finding
We cut off a source of defilement. Buddhist Sutra of Hui Neng 2
The Message:
In 1902 William James published a book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James was not a theologian. He was a psychologist and philosopher who made a study of all the world’s religious traditions to discover what, if anything, they all had in common. The Varieties of Religious Experience is a dense but dazzling academic study which has yet to be surpassed in reporting and analyzing the religious experience of human beings. It is recognized as being as influential and as significant in our time as it was when it was first published. It has never been out of print. The board of the Modern Library voted this book as the second best nonfiction book of the twentieth century.[1] So what did Mr. James conclude? What, in fact, do all the world’s religious traditions have in common? It can be stated quite simply: All religions say that (1) There is something wrong with this world and (2) There’s something that can done to make it better. That’s the academic way of putting it. I prefer the poetry in the Chinese proverb: You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
I began religious studies for one reason –to encounter the world’s accumulated wisdom. To learn the answer to the big questions? Who am I? Who are we? How can we live together? What brings sorrow? What brings peace? What makes a peaceful heart?
So if the agreed-upon premise is that the world is a damned mess, then what do the traditions say about being making things better? One part of the solution is that we simply choose to be happy. A popular idea, to be sure, but we seem to have a very hard time figuring out how to do that ---as we slog through the world’s gunk.
In my sermon last week [How to Be Happy: Part I] I talked about three major ingredients in the recipe for happiness: Those were (1) Letting go of fear. (2) Holding on to hope and (3) Not being attached to results ---otherwise known as non-attachment. I offered the wisdom from the various religious traditions that show they all suggest these are major factors in the building of a peaceful heart.
This week, I’m going to go a little further with that third part ---that to be happy it is necessary to lessen our attachments. Let’s start with Jesus. He was always going around saying things like, “To gain your life, you must give it up.” That’s SO hard to understand! What does it mean to give up one’s life, exactly?
Well, it means giving up our attachments ----and not just to THINGS (like our bank account or our Buick Regal ) but to ideas. Ideas about who we are and what we ought to do, be, and have. And ideas about other people and what they ought to do, be, and have.
In order to be content, we have to stop JUDGING. We are told to give up making judgments, especially about other people. We have to give up thinking we know best, for ourselves and everybody else.
Yah. We all know that one. Being judgmental is bad. It used to be called a “sin” –and a lot of us grew up being told that the wages of sin is hell. But ya know, somewhere in the 1960’s, hell kind of disappeared.
But there are some darned good reasons not to judge ANYWAY.
I’m going to give you two of them here: Number One, its difficult and Number Two, it’s self destructive [Hmmm….is that just another way of saying it sends you to hell?]
Let me break those down a little.
Number One: It’s difficult. This one’s easy to understand. We all know the old Indian proverb, “Before you judge a man, you must walk a mile in his moccasins?” That’s stops us in our tracks, doesn’t it?
And then there’s Jesus, asking us that irritating rhetorical question, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” [2] Yah, that gets us right where we live. We know we’re not perfect. Far from it. And we know, too that there are no perfect people. At least I haven’t met any. I don’t think I even want to. Abraham Lincoln hit the nail on the head when he said, “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” So it’s not just difficult for us to judge another, it’s really impossible. It would be best if we took the attitude of Mahatma Gandhi. When asked why he refused to judge people, he said, “I find we are all such sinners, I leave such things to God.”
But, of course, we do it anyway. (I don’t mean anyone here, personally, I mean
people in general. Not you, specifically.)
Now, on to Good Reason Number Two to stop being judgmental. It’s self-destructive. This one is harder for us to get our heads around. But this innformation has been around forever. It’s part of our folk wisdom. “What goes around, comes around.” Have you ever heard that? Have you ever SAID that? We just assume it’s true. If a person does something good, something good will happen to them. If a person does something bad, something bad will happen to them. That’s called karma in a large part of the world.
Personally, I embrace the concept of karma. I believe it is an impartial principle of cause and effect under which actions in your past may have an effect on your present. I do not believe that karma is a cosmic system of reward and punishment dispensed through a divine entity. No one decided to put it there, it simply IS THERE. It’s like gravity ---we can describe it, but we can’t control it. Karma takes no sides and is not filtered through any intelligence. The universe has physical laws –like gravity. In much the same way, the universe has spiritual laws. Karma is one of them.
Does this sound odd to you? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of vocabulary. The term karma is by used Hindus and Buddhists. Christians say “That which you sow, also shall you reap,”[3] because that’s how Paul said it in his letter to the Galatians. It’s the same thing. Jesus said it another way in today’s first reading. Look at it again. We remember that part about do not judge and you will not be judged but the paragraph ends with this statement, “For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” [4] That’s karma. This wisdom comes from all over the world which reinforces the suggestion that it is, indeed, a universal law. We find it in the Muslim Koran. There, it is written “Whatever affliction may visit you is what your own hands have earned,” and in the Nigerian proverb, “As you plan for somebody so God plans for you.”
Perhaps you, yourself, have noticed that your own soul is nourished when you are kind and it is destroyed when you are cruel. The ancient Hebrews noticed that, centuries before the appearance of Jesus. It’s from the book of Proverbs.[5] Benjamin Franklin put this same little piece of wisdom in his usual pithy way. He said, “He who spits against the wind spits in his own face.” The admonition is stated in The Course in Miracles very succinctly: “All attack is self attack.”
But hey, it isn’t just the BAD stuff that comes back to us. The good we do comes back to us as well. I have a special fondness for the way John Lennon puts it, at the end of the Abbey Road album. It’s just quirky little musical tag. He says, “And In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
OK. I think I’ve made my point about condemning anyone being a self-destructive act. Whatever you put out is coming to come back to you. So, assuming you don’t want to be judged, it’s just dumb to judge other people. It’s self destructive.
Now, it’s an important aside to say that neither Jesus nor the world’s other great wisdom teachers wished to abolish law courts. These maxims concerns daily life. Our unhappiness comes from our spontaneous reaction to judge those who, through their negligence, weakness or oversight, do things we don’t like. Paul recommends great restraint in judging. At the same time, he appeals to us to take care of one another: “Admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, assist the weak; but be patient with everybody.”[6]
But I’m not through expanding this point about not judging. ----because the injunction to stop judging is means more than not judging other people . It means not making judgments about events and situations and your fate. It’s not judging the path you are given to walk in life. This, my friends is even harder than refraining from judging other people.
Many things happen in your life over which you have no control. You decide to accept them ---not to judge them. Your child is born blind? OK. Your spouse becomes paralyzed? OK. You win the lottery? OK. Accept what happens. Don’t judge it. It’s not good; it’s not bad. It just IS. Your cancer goes into remission? OK. You are dragged through an ugly divorce? OK. You have to go through a painful medical procedure? OK. Let go of your expectations. Let go of your judgments about how it SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be. All those “shoulds” we are so attached to mostly make for a lot of unhappiness. This is when Jesus shows up and says, “You must lose your life to gain it.” That’s so cryptic! Joseph Campbell is a little easier to understand. He said, “You must be willing to let go of the life you’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for you.”
Oh, we’re pretty good at accepting the things we think are good ----a sudden windfall of money, receiving a prestigious honor or having a child who makes good in the world. But oftentimes, it is the thing we think are bad that give us the greatest gifts. Over and over, people have told me about the most emotionally-wrenching, painful times of their lives only to end the story by saying, “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Weird how that works, isn’t it?
Of course there’s the old story about the Chinese man China who had a horse and a son…
One day his horse broke out of the corral and ran away.
“Your horse got out? What bad luck!” said his neighbor.
“Well” the old man responded. “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”
Sure enough, the next night the horse came back to the barn, leading 12 wild stallions with him! The neighbor heard the good news and came chattering to the farmer. “Oh, you have 13 horses,” the neighbor said. “What good luck!”
The old man answered, “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”
Some days later his strong, young son was trying to break one of the wild stallions. The horse threw him off and the son broke his leg. The neighbor came back that night saying, “Your son broke his leg. What bad luck!”
The wise father answered again “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”
A few days later a Chinese warlord came through and conscripted every able-bodied young man, taking them off to war. But the young man was saved because of his broken leg.
So what is good fortune? What is misfortune? We don’t know. We just don’t know.
The Bhagavad-Gita is the most widely read and most beloved of the Hindu Scriptures. In much the way that Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” is the sum total of Christian teachings, the Gita is the sum total of Hindu teaching about how to live your life. It’s not a book, it’s more like a short story. And the whole thing has one point: Don’t judge. Don’t judge yourself, or other people or any of the things in life over which you have no control. You can want what you want, but you get what you get. The great secret is wanting what you have. Accept it and rejoice in it. It will make you happy. And that will make all the difference.
But we do it. We do. We think it’s because external events change, but it’s not that. We change our attitudes when we have a new understanding and we realize we can choose our attitude. Imagine this scenario, if you will.
You’ve been working hard and not had a day off for a long time. But finally your day comes. It’s your day to rest, relax and rejuvenate. You determine that this will be a Perfect Day. You take your ipod and your eyeshade out to pool and stretch a towel out on a nice, comfy chaise right next to the water. It’s a beautiful summer day and it’s your day. You are not going to let anybody take this day away from you. So you lie back on the chaise and you put your favorite music on the ipod, with earbuds in both ears and you cover your eyes and lie back to soak up the sun and the perfection of it all. You are content. But soon, you feel a little water being splashed up on you. You ignore it. Quickly, there’s some more water being splashed up on you and you can’t ignore it. It’s bothering you. You decide not to pay any attention. After all, this is your perfect day. But then it’s a LOT of water being splashed up on you and you are now MAD about this! Some idiot in the pool has decided to ruin your perfect day. Your anger rises and you throw off the eye shade and rip out the earbuds, ready to rain abuse down on whoever is messing with you and your plans. But when you look, you see there’s a child in the pool, and she’s drowning. You immediately change your attitude. Instantly. You see that this person is not trying to ruin your day. She is trying to save her life.
Now, what you’ve got to remember, when you think somebody is ruining your day, or messing with your life, is that, very likely, they are drowning. You can’t be mad at them. You can’t judge them at all. They are doing whatever they can, however it may affect you, to save their life. Do you judge them? Or do you do whatever you can to help them?
Be kinder than is necessary because everyone is engaged in some great battle.
Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.
He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?” The young man paused, looked up and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”
“I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man.
To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die.”
Upon hearing this, the man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!”
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “Well, it made a difference for that one!”