People seek happiness

It is obvious that people seek happiness. We do so instinctively.

Religions claim to provide happiness and many seek it through religion.

Many others are skeptical of religion and believe that science is the surest path to repeatable, public knowledge.

There are scientific happiness studies that reveal interesting things about humanity and happiness. Much of what we learn is that happiness is complex.

Expressions of Gratitude foment Happiness

There is an interesting body of scientific material that effectively link happiness with expressions of gratitude. There is also plenty of anecdotal and traditional evidence that suggests the same thing.

We’ve got websites and youtube  telling us how to be happy. Why don’t we do it? Why do you suppose it is so hard to generate expressions of gratitude simply for the goal of making yourself more happy?

While I’m sure there are a number of disciplined, dedicated people who through sheer force of will develop a practice of expressing gratitude, and they profit from it, for many of us expressing gratitude is something that we want to be spontaneous, emerging from the heart.

If we ask how our life should be, I imagine we want both a disciplined approach to gratitude and a spontaneous experience of it. Gratitude, like belief, is something that is often best pursued indirectly. It is a function of out we see ourselves in the world.

Seeing the World

How we see the world is of course something we don’t have full control over, and neither should we. We recognize some competing truths about world-seeing.

1. Our thoughts and desires bias what we see and how we see it. If we want to see the world more clearly, more truthfully, we have to allow the world to come to us.
2. We are highly susceptible to all sorts of other distortions in how we view the world. If we watch a lot of TV that edited world will change our assumptions about the world in general.  We need to both allow the world to come in AND maintain filters on how we view the world if we want to clarify our picture.

These two dynamics seem contradictory and present a difficult challenge. If you want gratitude to provide you with happiness and you want truth you need to manage all of this.

Psalm 33

Psalm 33 is not an unusual psalm. It’s filled with many of the things you’ll find in other psalms.

The Psalm begins with an invitation to participate in communal gratitude. To sing, to rejoice, to play music. We are invited into happiness and gratitude.

The Psalm then moves on to invite us to see the world through the stories and assertions of the people of Israel, and afterwards, of the church. Verses 4 through 17 are all world-shaping assertions about God’s goodness and God’s power. We are invited to live within this world.

Dissonance

Some may find Psalm 33 offensive. These are raw assertions that you may or may not agree with. These are religious assertions, large global claims that should not be made lightly.

Christians too may feel this Psalm overreaches. Why aren’t we happy? Because the world is hard. Bad things happen. If Psalm is so true, and the Psalmist so right, why all the suffering, evil, and pain both for the wicked and the moral? Isn’t talking this way in a world of pain offensive? Why should we open our filters to let in something like this? Is the Psalmist blind?

If we carry our thoughts down this road, however, we begin to discover despair, ingratitude, taking over our hearts and our worlds.

Is the world full of pain? Yes. Is life hard and unfair? Yes. In our pain do we wish to shake our fists at heaven and follow the advice of Job’s wife to curse God and die? Sometimes. Is gratitude and happiness then a fool’s errand?

Faith

With verses 18 and 19 the Psalmist begins bringing in his hope for us and the world. God does see. God does know. The Psalmist asserts that God will come through. These are statements of faith, believing that God is good, powerful and will bring justice.

A Prayer of Gratitude and Faith

The psalmist then concludes with an implicit invitation like how he began.

He invites us to wait for the LORD. The waiting assumes that God has not showed up yet for our deliverance. We are still in pain. We are still in suffering, but in the midst of it the psalmist asserts we can find relief, happiness, blessing and hope.

The happiness students all know the world can be an unhappy place. Many of them major in pure mechanics. The psalmist takes it further. He invites the unhappy to enter into hope, that his God will come through and set the world right and bring peace and happiness on a level we have not experienced.

A Call to God

The psalmist finally concludes with a call to God. All of our management of how we view this world, either with a disciplined approach to expressing gratitude in hopes of finding happiness or a disciplined approach to manage our seeing of the world in hopes of finding truth won’t finally yield a world set right, it will only yield a world we wish to see. The Psalmist isn’t satisfied with this choice. He wants it all. He wants gratitude, happiness and the world set right. Nothing else will finally satisfy him.

A Determined Gratitude

Christians of course believe that the psalmist calls for the coming of Jesus. That in Jesus in fact we find hope in the midst of suffering, and in the resurrection we see the beginnings of the world set right. He is our unfailing love. We put our hope in him.

Christians pursue a determined gratitude. It is one that both realizes that justice has not yet come. The world is still a place of pain. The weak are still oppressed and the poor still die in their poverty, but one has come who was poor, and weak and suffered and knows our plight. He was crushed for our sin and died at our hand. He was also raised. 

We practice a determined gratitude, not one of denial but one of faith, hope and love. One that looks at the pain of the world and says “I can be grateful even in my misery because I know that the deliverer has come and the deliverance has begun.” 

Though the world continues to crush, a day is coming when it will crush no more and the age of decay will die. I believe that day because of the resurrected flesh of Jesus.