Who is really happy?

True happiness comes through positive experiences rooted in pain, struggle, self-denial and giving meaning and worth to others. Juan Arias in his strangely titled book "The God I don’t Believe In", in the Chapter entitled "Who is Really Happy" says.

In this context, he speaks of a mother, both blind and dumb who gives birth to a blind child who is taken away from her. After years of separation, when they are united, she presses him to her heart and smothers him with kisses and tears of joy. "The two of them seemed melted together into one body transformed with joy." Isn’t this a kind of foretaste of resurrection? Or the son who struggles for years to prove the innocence of his father condemned to life imprisonment for a murder and finally succeeds. He meets his father at the prison gates and says: "We forgive everybody for everything. This great happiness is enough for us." Or the man with a small salary struggling to make ends meet, but on a Sunday afternoon sits on the floor and plays with his small children, saying "If I wanted to, I could go looking for excitement, but making my children happy is worth more than anything else to me". Or the poor clerk whom a council man had framed on phoney charges and who had a chance to take revenge, forgives him and says to his children: "Only the man who forgives his enemies knows what it means to be happy!" Or the working girl whose dedicated boy friend died unexpectedly and who said: "I felt so much in love with my boy friend that so far as I am concerned, he is still alive ... With him at my side.. I shall dedicate my life to sharing with others the happiness of a great love stronger than death - the love that heaven allowed me to taste on earth and that I know is eternal." Or the man who had to pay for his education while working, who had to study at night by the light of a flashlight in order not to disturb his two brothers who slept in the same room and who had to be satisfied with buying only an ice-cream for his girlfriend every Sunday.

Who, asks Juan Arias, knows better than these people what real happiness is? Light amidst darkness, sparks of resurrection in the very midst of suffering. Arias is careful to add that all this is not meant to justify poverty or indifference to suffering. He reminds us that although Jesus said "Blessed are the poor and those that mourn", he also died and rose that we might experience unlimited happiness. What’s essential is that we shouldn’t let adverse experiences embitter us. Those whom we pity seem to have "the key to a new dimension in happiness" which will temper our pride and presumption. The old grandmother in a shanty, surrounded by her loving grandchildren could be happier than the rich old lady in a grand house - whose children and grandchildren are far away in another country and only send greetings and expensive gifts for Christmas and her birthday. Without idealizing poverty, we know where real happiness is.

Glimpses of Resurrection

Hints of the resurrection are given at Jesus’ transfiguration on Mt. Thabor, the raising of Lazarus from the dead and in several of Christ’s miracles which transformed despair to hope and rejection to rehabilitation. When Jesus rescued the adulterous woman from stoning, when he appreciated the love of the sinful woman in the pharisee’s house, when the old father, bubbling with happiness, embraced the repentant son, when the Samaritan gave his enemy, the Jew a new lease of life by stopping to bind his wounds, and the thief crucified beside Jesus asked to be remembered in paradise and Jesus promised it to him instantly, in all these instances, Jesus gave sparks of resurrection to those who had lost hope and confidence in life’s circumstances. Juan Arias calls the promise to the thief, the first canonization of a saint. From the wounded hands of Christ, he says, sprang the flower of the resurrection.

From the pains of existential sadness emerge the light of the resurrection. The mother or wife who waits with meals at the prison gates to comfort a criminal son or husband does so out of the victory of past memories over present resentment. A mother would never forget the primal innocence of her child even when he grows up to become a criminal nor a wife the first years of romance. Women, we are told, came early to the tomb on resurrection morning to anoint the entombed body of Jesus. Peter and John looked into the tomb and found the clothes lying wrapped up in a corner. Mary Magdalene had told them the tomb was empty. In her tearful sorrow she at first thought Jesus to be the gardener until Jesus lifted his disguise and said: "Mary". In her ecstatic joy she cried out "Rabboni" (Master) and tried to cling to him, perhaps to ensure he was real flesh and blood and not an apparition. It was in the same way that the two disciples journeying from Jerusalem to Emmaus encounter Jesus and are enlightened by him about his life, death and resurrection and made their hearts burn within them. They plead of him to stay with them because it is already twilight. They are startled into realization. When he reveals himself in the breaking of bread. The incident has been immortalized by Rembrandt in a painting where the seated Christ is luminous in a darkening background.

Anyone who gives hope to another, lights sparks of resurrection even while it is still life on earth. Again it is Juan Arias who refers to the inspiring incident where Roncalli, the future John XXIII while he was Patriarch of Venice, waits outside a place of dubious reputaton not to catch his priest red-handed but to meet him, accompany him to his parish house, kneel beside the straying priest to confess to him, receives absolution from him and tells him: "From now on, father, may you realize your dignity with power even to forgive the sins of your own archbishop". What extraordinary humility in authority!

Mandela, Obama and National Renewal. Resurrection does not mean only personal rehabilitation, but also social and national reconciliation. Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison, refused, on his release, to harbour bitterness and hatred for his white masters who imprisoned him. He angered his colleagues, but was able to build a new multi-racial South Africa precisely because he believed in forgiveness and redemption. South Africa’s new peace was possible because of the acceptance of pluralism and readiness to forget the past.

It was the same spirit that made Barak Obama speak words of reconciliation at the place where his father had been discriminated a gainst as a black. He acknowledged the value of pluralism and diversity when he said in his inaugural speech:

Our National Resurrection

Sri Lanka has suffered from remembering past hatreds. A bitterness between the two largest political parties and a refusal to forget past injustices on the part of an ethnic minority and to forge a new society of pluralism on the part of the majority, has enmeshed our island in a spiral of war, violence and revenge. Neville Jayaweera in his article "A Draft Manifesto for a Sri Lankan Obama" (published in the Sunday Island of February 1st 2009) says:

Ecclesial Humility and Resurrection

The Church is not exempt from creating the conditions for an universal resurrection. Vatican II asserted without doubt that the Church existed in and for the world. Its primary obligation is service in humility. Just as to establish the rule of law is the duty of any nation worth the name, the primary duty of the Church is to establish the rule of love. Chastened by the child abuse scandals of the Church in U.S.A., Canada, England, Ireland, Australia and several other countries, humbled by the exodus from the Church in Austria, Spain and other Catholic countries, the widespread loss of vocations to the priesthood and the fundamentalist gains in South America, will the contemporary Church see here the signs of the times and a warning call from God for repentance, humility and open-mindedness before a new springtime and another resurrection? Learning from the wise and humble outreach of Pope John XXIII, the humility and sensitivity, anguish and courage of Pope Paul VI, will the Church be faithful to the authentic vision of Vatican II? Has the humility of Paul VI in his stooping down to kiss the feet of the old Patriarch Athanagoras of Constantinople when they met for an ecumenical service decades ago, been forgotten? Will there be no more such powerful gestures to clarify the purpose and scope of Church authority as a witness to Christ’s own humility? Will openness to other religions, sceptics and unbelievers and the fraternity of other Christian denominations characterize another resurrections and Pentecost?

Exaggerated self-assurance, arrogance and any kind of clericalism goes against evangelical values of the gospel. Negation of service at the national, global or ecclesial level is always counter-productive. Especially in the sad and negative context of corrupt governments, humility and humble but fearless embrace of the world and all its anxieties will be the price of ecclesial renewal and resurrection.