Saints' Guide To Happiness Practical Lessons In The Life Of The Spirit

One LEARNING TO BE ALIVE We beg you, make us truly alive. --Serapion of Thmuis Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. --Gerard Manley Hopkins The sorrows of life are many. But sorrow is not the opposite of happiness. At least in sorrow we are aware of being alive. So often the problem is not really sorrow but the deadness that attends our daily existence. The pace and pressures of the world, the struggle to "make a living," the disquiet driven by constant advertising, the distracting drone of consumer culture--all these contribute to fatigue, numbness, an inability to feel anything at all. Our bodies may thrive--no generation has ever enjoyed such long life or good health--yet there is a sickness that eats away at our souls. We can see it in the faces of commuters on a train or shoppers in the mall; too often it is in the face we encounter in the mirror. But we may also see it in the faces in church. Religion in itself offers no special immunity against deadness, especially when religious practice becomes simply another task to perform, a set of rules to obey. William Blake wrote scornfully of "priests in black gowns, walking their rounds, binding with briars my joys & desires." Doubtless it often feels that way. But that is not the way it needs to be. Of the flock in his care, Jesus said: "I came that they might have life and have it in abundance." Such life in abundance is one way of describing the meaning of happiness. It is an antidote to the kind of existence--dry and hollow--that dulls even the memory of our "joys & desires." Yet over the centuries too many Christians have transposed Christ's promise to the other side of death, thereby spurning the challenge to seek life and happiness in the present. Against this tendency St. Theophanis the Monk, one of the early desert fathers, warned, "Do not deceive yourself with idle hopes that in the world to come you will find life if you have not tried to find it in the present world." St. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop and theologian, put it this way: "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." Irenaeus wrote these words to oppose a kind of spirituality that scorns material existence in the world. But his words pose a challenge for anyone who settles for a truncated life, whether reduced to work, entertainment, or an otherworldly spiritualism. To be fully alive--it was for this that we were created; it was toward this goal, as the saints remind us, that Christ pointed the way. But we have lost our way. ZEST FOR LIVING What might it mean to be "fully alive"? Obviously it is not the same as simply eating and breathing. Nor is it expressed in a flurry of manic activity. To be fully alive is a matter of living out of the deepest part of oneself. Call it the heart or the soul; these are words that describe the central and intimate core of our being, the place where we are most truly ourselves. Given the noise and distractions that surround us, it is often hard to imagine that such places exist. We glide along the surface, taking our cues from the newspapers, or our neighbors, or the commercials on TV. They tell us what to desire, what to fear, and what will bring us joy. Yet the more we listen to such voices, the less we know ourselves. No wonder happiness is so elusive. The men and women called saints have walked a different path, a path to God that was at the same time the path to their own true selves. There is much that they might teach us. Yet their authority as guides and teachers often fades in the shadow of an apparent "otherness" that renders them at once inaccessible and unappealing. To begin with, saints are supposed to be perfect people--"not like us." Traditional stories about theirEllsberg, Robert is the author of 'Saints' Guide To Happiness Practical Lessons In The Life Of The Spirit', published 2005 under ISBN 9780385515665 and ISBN 0385515669.