The Pursuit of Happiness and Letting Go

Happy are the people who know the festal shout,
    who walk, O LORD, in the light of your countenance;
they exult in your name all day long,
    and extol your righteousness.
For you are the glory of their strength;
    by your favor our horn is exalted.
For our shield belongs to the LORD,
    our king to the Holy One of Israel.      Psalm 89:15-18

Happy are... Most of us would dearly like to know with certainty how best to finish this sentence. We long to be happy. We have our own versions of "If only..." that would insure happiness. Many are dedicated to the "pursuit of happiness," but not nearly so many seem to have caught it.

In his devotion for today on contemplation, Richard Rohr says we are caught in old patterns that we do not even recognize. (I think the Apostle Paul's writings on being slaves to sin speak of something similar.) And so rarely do our pursuits lead us where we hope to go.

I find most people operate not out of “consciousness,” but out of their level of practiced brain function, which relies on early-life conditioning and has little to do with God encounter or grace or mercy or freedom or love. We primarily operate from habituated patterns based on what Mom told me, what went wrong when I was young, and the defense mechanisms I learned that helped me to be right and good, to be first and famous, or whatever I may want to be. These are not all bad but they are not all good either.

All of that old and practiced thinking has to be recognized and accounted for, which is the work of contemplation. Without contemplation, you don’t see clearly. Everything is all about you, and you just keep seeing everything through your own agenda, anger, and wounds. Isn’t that most people you know?  Few ever achieve much inner freedom. Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That’s why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it’s not very glorious. It’s a continual humiliation, realizing, “Oh my God, I did it again. I still don’t know how to love!”

We need some form of contemplative practice that touches our unconscious conditioning, where all our wounds lie, where all our defense mechanisms are operative secretly. Once these are not taken so seriously, there is finally room for the inrushing of God and grace!

The psalmist, the Bible, and Jesus, all speak of being happy or fortunate or blessed in terms that rarely make sense according to our typical patterns of pursuit. Yet even we who seek to follow Jesus rarely seem to break out of these patterns and embrace those of Jesus. We just can't quite trust that organizing our entire lives around loving God and loving others (whether they "deserve" it or not) is a very good plan. We are indeed captive and trapped by our old patterns, with little of the "inner freedom" Rohr says can come to us through contemplative practices that let us see more clearly who we really are.

Some of Richard Rohr's language seems very odd to Mainline, American Protestants. Coming out of a Western, philosophical worldview - to which was later added an Enlightenment, scientific perspective - we are part of a long heritage of domesticating Jesus and faith into a series of beliefs and doctrines we can agree to. But Jesus himself sounds much more like Rohr, speaking of self-denial, losing oneself in order to find true life, of dying in order to become something new.

In our pursuit of happiness, most of us tend to be graspers and grabbers. Our consumer culture is founded on the notion that acquiring more will finally make one happy. (This mostly leads to an insatiable addiction to more.) But Jesus calls us to a life of releasing and letting go. In loving as Christ loved, in forgiving as he did, in serving others as he did, we unclench our grasping hands and begin to discover what it truly means to say, "Happy, fortunate, blessed are..."

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