Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist

In Pursuit of Happiness

Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris

October 8, 2006

Meditation

Our meditation this morning is informed by the Buddhist teaching known as the Metta Sutra. Sharon Salzberg, author of several books based around this concept, offers this definition: “Thje Pali word, metta, has two meanings. One is the word for ‘gentle.’ Metta is likened to a gentle rain that falls upon the earth…simply and without discrimination. The other root for metta is “friend.” To understand the power or the force of metta is to understand true friendship….the practice of metta, uncovering the force of love that can uproot fear, anger and guilt begins with befriending ourselves. The foundation of metta practice is to know how to be our own friend.”

Sit comfortably. Let go of thoughts and expectations. Begin with remembering the good in you. Don’t analyze this, don’t get impatient or annoyed, don’t get scared if you have trouble recognizing the good. Send good intention toward yourself, saying

May I be free from danger.

May I have mental happiness.

May I have physical happiness.

May I be at peace.

Repeat them again, again without analysis and releasing any feelings of unworthiness.

May I be free from danger.

May I have mental happiness.

May I have physical happiness.

May I be at peace.

Think of someone you love, someone you consider a friend. Call their name, their face to your mind. Send toward them the same wishes:

May this person be free from danger.

May this person have mental happiness.

May this person have physical happiness.

May this person be at peace.

Think of someone you do not know well, someone you do not associate with strong emotions either good or ill. Summon their face, summon their name, summon your wishes.

May this person be free from danger.

May this person have mental happiness.

May this person have physical happiness.

May this person be at peace.

Now think of someone who has done you harm, or caused pain. Recall the idea that those who cause pain also cause pain for themselves. To the extent that you can, let go of feelings of righteousness and anger. To the extent that you can, express your intention.

May this person be free from danger.

May this person have mental happiness.

May this person have physical happiness.

May this person be at peace.

Now let us take a moment to be grateful for a time of reflection, for the gift of being creatures capable of intention, grateful for those whose practice is deep and sure enough to embrace all life in these wishes, who can glimpse a world where all might be free from danger, all forms of life might have mental and physical happiness, all might be at peace. Though this may defy our imagination, we are grateful that others possess the imagination to envision it. So may it be.

Sermon:

How much have you ever thought about happiness? Though I have certainly considered before whether I am happy or not, happiness as focus seemed the domain of shallow, yellow-smiley face sorts of ideas. Yet when Sharon Salzberg, a practitioner of Buddhist insight meditation spoke to the Unitarian Universalist ministers at General Assembly this summer, she got me thinking: Am I happy? Are you happy? What makes us happy? What makes us unhappy?

In this day and age, we should not be surprised that someone has tried to find out the answers to these philosophical questions. In fact, the Pew Research Center released a major study on happiness in February 2006. It found that only about a third of the adults in this country considered themselves to be “very happy,” about half consider themselves to be fairly happy and about 15 percent consider themselves to be unhappy.

With numbers like these, perhaps happiness does warrant thought. Buddhist author and practitioner Sharon Salzberg believes that happiness can be cultivated through the practice of loving-kindness, a concept found in Buddhist and also Jewish and Christian teachings. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn, who has explored this amorphous concept in several religious traditions, noted that in Christianity the concepts are more tied to the ideas of charity and love, while in Buddhism, they are more tied to the idea of freedom from suffering and attachment.

The wise from each tradition teach that loving-kindness is more than loving and more than kindness, and that, in any tradition, it eludes easy definition. It has overtones of a commitment that occurs without a hope of a direct reward, and also of responsibility to a higher law. And it is tied to intentional choices made about how to treat ourselves and one another.

Happiness as freedom from attachment runs a bit counter to our culture. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence about our rights to “preservation of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he was altering the words of philosopher John Locke who wrote of the need for “life, liberty and property.” So Jefferson’s idea has been interpreted to mean happiness came from more than just property and yet it is still rooted in acquisition and attachment. No surprise then that in our culture shaped by these ideas, the Pew Research found that those with more material wealth, even with other variables controlled, were more likely to say they were happy.

I started thinking about how many formulas and keys to happiness I have been taught in my life. Study hard. Listen to your teachers. Be independent. Seek love. Be a maverick and follow your own heart. Get this. Buy that. Be this. Magazines at the grocery store reveal that our culture believes that ten quick steps exist to almost everything. Yet the Pew study showed it wasn’t as simple as it seemed: while married people were more happy than unmarried (which speaks again to why all should have the full rights to marriage); and those who attend worship regularly were more happy than those who did not (a finding that us preachers will slip into sermons); and those who lived in the Sunbelt were happier than those who did not (which may explain trends in real estate prices), other factors we take for granted did not play out. Retired people were no happier than those still working; people with children were not more happy than those without and the most startling finding-- that people with pets were not happier than others!

One of the barriers to happiness is the pace of our life which spins us so fast we cannot always find that time to connect at the deep level of meaning. In that spirit, I want to invite you into meditation again. By the way, those of you who find the whole idea of meditation, prayer and reflection a bit soft and mushy might be comforted to know that the root of the word, meditation means to apply oneself, to study. I think of it as embodied intention. At any rate, I invite you to get comfortable and take a moment and think of a time when you were truly happy, when you were truly filled with a sense of connection and tie to life as a nurturing and real presence. In that situation, what did you need to be happy?

….

Our Unitarian Universalist living religious tradition seeks wisdom in the teachings of the world’s religions. Buddhist practitioners offer a perspective very contrary to our culture’s underlying values and so it can be hard to for our minds to grasp—conditioned as they are to equate the freedom that money and status and position afford in our society with happiness. Intention seems kin to our “free and responsible search for truth and Sharon Salzberg points to the relationship between intention and happiness and she sees several areas where we must be intentional. First to stop being afraid of intimacy by which she means our deep and primal connection with others, with all forms of life. Erecting barriers between ourselves and other people and other creatures cuts us off from the sources of happiness and contentment. If I am envious of you, I will not connect. If I see myself as better than you, I will be distanced. If I see myself as less worthy than you, I will also remain apart.

As you delve into those memories, one quality I suspect many will recall is a sense of connectedness. It might be connectedness to yourself, to a person or people or creatures you love, to the earth in her beauty and splendor. Somewhere, there is that intimacy, that connection, that knowledge of being accompanied through life at some larger level despite the disconnections that arise and the loneliness that is also such a part of human existence. Salzberg names what she calls hindrances to loving-kindness: attachment to outcomes we cannot control, desire for things we cannot possess, anger and envy which turn us away from those whose connections deepen our lives.

Another quality you may have detected is a freedom from care. Not freedom from caring—in fact deep caring is often part of our happiest moments. Freedom from worry and anxiety, from our need to control the outcomes—one of my bugaboos. Intention reconnects us with the world we desire even if we cannot always predict the outcomes and even if human nature does sometimes disappoint us. “Our potential to love is very real and somehow not destroyed, no matter what we experience,” writes Salzberg, who like many practitioners has seen transformation even in people who have suffered horrendous abuse. I think this is very similar to the ideas of Unitarian Universalist process theologians who began writing in the last century about the good we seek as being tied to wholeness, an extension of the unity that our religious ancestors sought when they extended the hope of fellowship and salvation to a broader and broader spectrum of humanity.

We have this morning only skimmed a rich tradition. Some of you who have participated in the Insight Meditation Center here in Charlottesville know that serious practitioners spend many hours on just one of the four concepts we touched on in our longer meditation this morning. This is a deep rich tradition that we can only barely understand the way we can only touch the rich tradition of atonement woven throughout the Jewish year. Some of these concepts are alien to us as people who like clean, crisp explanations. Others of us are comfortable around the idea of mystery and yet impatient with the idea that the unknown could call us into any kind of disciplined relationship such as that which spiritual practices such as meditation require.

All of these ideas are meant to help us seek happiness in a world that often offers us other paths. Sharon Salzberg writes;

Life is just as it is, despite our protests. For all of us there is a constant succession of pleasurable and painful experiences. Once I was hiking with friends in Northern California. We had decided beforehand to follow a certain trail for first three days, and then to retrace our steps for the next three. On the third day of this arduous hike, we found ourselves on a long, steady downward slope. After several hours of his, one of my friends, who suddenly realized what all this walking downhill implied for the next day when we would be retracing our steps, turned to me and said glumly, “In a dualistic universe, downhill can mean only one thing.”

Our capacity for happiness and love is, in fact, one of the great unexplored mysteries of human life and should not be dismissed simply because it, like the idea of loving-kindness defies easy definitions. To some, to be intentional about our own care and happiness may seem artificial or anti-rational. For others it may seem like a welcome oasis. What is not rational about taking the time to recall times when we felt connected and peaceful? What is not rational about creating a space to be reflective, to delve our own intentions before we make life choices?

This religious community is about making those choices—for example, our own Ethics or studying those people take to be “other,” both of which we will examine with intention in an Adult Religious Education class this fall, or whether it is creating space for discernment.

In our imperfect universe, we crave happiness and that is good, and yet we can abandon the search for the magic and formulaic solution. We know that life brings pain and life brings suffering. We also know that life has the potential for great happiness. We cannot, as we are so clearly reminded by the events of the world this week, protect ourselves against random, tragic acts.

Let us give ourselves permission to pursue happiness, knowing our capacity to spread it begins in the sanctuary of our own hearts. Let us give ourselves permission to hope against reason that our own intention and self-healing can be linked to a larger promise for our beloved humanity and for the miraculous spectrum of life on this earth. Let us explore the gifts of happiness with intention.

So may it be.

Closing Words:

I want to end today with the idea that key to our happiness and our ability to bring happiness to others, is our ability to accept and love ourselves. Words of the Buddha:

“You can search throughout the universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anyone in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

Let us extinguish the light in this chalice

But not the light in our lives which we shine as a beacon

Out into a world too often cloaked in darkness. Let us go in peace.