+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
One always needs to be careful when talking about “happiness” and what makes for it, because we have so many definitions of that term. I’m sure I’ve said before that whatever the world defines as happiness, Christians have to remember that Jesus’ promise is for what he calls makarios, which is alternately translated as blessed, and which we may know best from the beatitudes. When Jesus says “happy are the poor”, he doesn’t necessarily mean they are “jolly and cheerful.” It is a deeper sort of joy. One might say that we are not promised, but serenity.
Even setting aside the complex interactions between our competing definitions, it has become almost commonplace to say that money cannot make a person happy. However, at the risk of smashing a sacred cow of well-meaning, popular spirituality, absolute penury (unless one is gifted with a saintly disposition) is probably the recipe for unhappiness. You’ll sometimes hear folks say that they know or have known people suffering from crushing poverty who were nevertheless happy. Sometimes this happens, sometimes not, though I worry that this sort of statement can both fetishize poverty and serve as an easy excuse not to do anything practical to help alleviate its effects on people.
All that said, even granting that having enough money so as not to starve or live on the streets or go without medication is likely to make for a happier life in at least the most basic sense of the word “happy” I think it’s undeniable that beyond a certain level of wealth, well-being (spiritual and emotional) plateaus and then, eventually begins to fall. There have been studies along these lines. They’re not perfect. They’re all about self-reported happiness, so (again) there are probably as many definitions of happiness there as there are survey respondents, but they give us an insight, I think.
I quoted one of these studies a few years ago at a Rotary Club meeting in a question I asked a school psychologist, who seemed to me to be suggesting that the job of education was to prepare students to have good careers making good money “so they could be happy.” I don’t agree that that’s the point of education to begin with, but I recognize I’m saying that from a rather privileged vantage point. Anyway, I referred to a study that found that self-reported happiness “peaked” for people when their salaries hit somewhere between $60,000 and $70,000 per year. As soon as those words left my mouth, there was and audible laugh across the room whose meaning was undeniable. This person could not fathom how somebody could be happy making “only” that much. I thought about going up to him at the next meeting with a big grin on my face and my W-2 in my hand, but I decided that would not be very kind.
“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher. Granted, I don’t hate my toil, as apparently the writer of Ecclesiastes hated his; in fact, most of the time I rather enjoy my work. Even so, the Preacher makes a point which we could all stand to hear- viz., a life whose chief goal is the accumulation of wealth is a life wasted. It’s vanity, a puff of wind, nothingness.
Likewise, in this morning’s Gospel Jesus tells a parable of a man who had done well for himself and secured enough wealth to live comfortably indefinitely. Just as the man sits back to enjoy the fruit of his labors he has a bit of bad luck. Not to put to fine a point on it, he kicks the bucket then and there. All work and no play doesn’t just make Jack a dull boy. In this instance, it made Jack a rather dumb boy.
Back to wealth and happiness, it’s easy to make assumptions that may not be fair, so take this with a grain of salt–there is a public figure who owns literal rocket ships, whose wedding shut down the city of Venice for three days straight, and whose super-yacht has its own secondary yacht for its helicopter. Yes, a man with a yacht with a yacht with a helicopter. Is he happy? I worry my bad habit of getting whatever I think I need with 48-hour free shipping is harming rather than helping this poor man.
How do we define ourselves? How does society define each of us? Well, what’s the first question we ask upon meeting a stranger? Usually it’s “what do you do?” and the implicit predicate to that question is “for money.” It’s not a bad question to ask, necessarily, but it’s symptomatic of what our culture values above all else, namely work and compensation. It’s how we define ourselves because it’s what we spend the vast majority of our time doing.
But endless striving to the end of wealth accumulation is not the key to happiness. I hope this is not a surprise to anybody. We just heard the preacher of Ecclesiastes and Jesus himself say as much.
So how do we address this as individuals and as a community? At the end of this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” But what does it mean to be rich toward God?
I don’t think that it just means giving of our wealth to charity and to the church, though that is certainly part of it. I think it’s also about spending our time in pursuits which are godly. It’s about not being so caught up in work that we fail to support our families with our loving presence. It’s taking time out of our day to pray. It might even be recognizing when that lucrative career is getting in the way of our other obligations so much that we’ve got to make a change, and maybe make a little less money.
I don’t mean to be grim or trite, but I can’t imagine many people on their deathbed thinking back and saying “thank God I spent all that extra time in the office and made a bundle.” When we get to that point, we’re more likely to be grateful for the relationships we nurtured and the difference, however small, we might have made in the lives of our fellow pilgrims. In other words, we’ll never regret the time we spent being rich toward God, because while everything else is vanity, a puff of wind, a passing thing, it is our love and generosity which will endure into the ages of ages.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.