The Pursuit of Happiness

(An acquaintance pointed out that this was in the Declaration (I did have a "feeling"...🤔), not the constitution. I was taking a bit of a chance referring to the constitution when I wasn't quite clear in my memory whether it was the constitution or the Declaration. Should have looked it up, a quick glance at Google would have done. I'm so 20th-century, still relying on my memory and continually forgetting that we don't need memory anymore--we have Google! I'm not going to go through the whole post and change all the references to "Declaration" rather than "constitution;" the essential point, the linguistic speculation, remains the same 🙂). 

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 It is considered very insightful when a person points out that the American constitution enshrines not "happiness" as a right but rather the "pursuit of happiness." 

Well, I suppose it's an insight, and a useful one, though it's voiced so often as not really to be an insight anymore and a bit of a yawner. 

Still and all, yes, it's important: life comes with no guarantees of "happiness" (whatever that means, and that will, as it happens, be the point here). But as for life itself, and essential freedom, and the natural, instinctive human drive to attain something called "happiness," whether it pans out or not, they are indeed inalienably human, therefore essential human prerogatives and "rights."

Still, after we've made the useful distinction between a specious "right to happiness" and the more plausible right to pursue happiness, do we really know what we're talking about or, more to the point, what the constitution's writers had in mind? 

The right to pursue what? What did "happiness" mean to them? Could "feeling just swell" really have been such a core value, a sort of Prime Directive in the universe they knew, that they'd have placed it right up there with very life and freedom as life's sine qua non components? 

The three hills to fight and perhaps die for: life, freedom, and my retirement bungalow at the shore.

I've long felt that the "happiness" the popular (I'm being kind) culture understands, compared to the happiness denoted in the constitution, is a bit like a Disneyworld-souvenir-shop $3.00 Mickey Mouse watch compared to a $10,000 Longines. 

If you're very quick to catch such subtleties, you might have noticed how I've used "perhaps" and "as it happens" here. Yes, intentionally. "Happy, perhaps, happen, happenstance," it's all connected. The attached article discusses it. 

Those guys at the end of the 18th-century, they weren't devoting life and limb, with the very real prospect of finally being strung up as their reward, all for the sake of a mere seratonin surge, our right to get exactly the shade of mauve we insist on or else we'll drag the interior decorator's sorry backside to court. 

The "happiness" it is our inalienable right to pursue (though not our inalienable right to get) might indeed make us feel quite good at times, at other times not so swell. Sometimes it will feel dreadful. Yet if we believe in it we will pursue it, because it's as organic, instinctive, inalienable as breathing. So what sort of happiness is it? 

I suppose some modern rough equivalents would be words and phrases like "purpose, meaning, fulfillment, convictions, achievement, self-actualization, realization of potential." 

It's a potpourri (or cornucopia?) of notions that, taken together, convey what I understand as the broad happiness-concept the constitution envisions. 

Now the bundle doesn't of course forbid any seratonin-rush, your Piňa Colada on the hammock, your third semi-guilty cup of tea in the morning, or even your freedom to demand a "safe space" at work (or the company's freedom to say no). But these tangential outcomes are thoroughly divorcable (a word?) from the happiness the founding fathers meant. Cull them out, give them up, and essential "constitutional" happiness is undiminished. 

In their language, at their time, in their sociocultural-historical context, laying their very lives on the line for their convictions, the idea that "the right to always feel nirvana-wonderful and unbothered by anything" was something the Fathers hallowed in the nation's founding charter is ridiculous beyond all expresssion. 

The word "happy," along with its "-ness" and words like "happen, perhaps, happenstance, hapless, mishap, haphazard," comes to us after a long etymological history in which it arose as broadly indicating something like "the way things pan out," luck, fortune, occurrence. 

We still hear it in usages like "I happened to see him yesterday," and "Perhaps [i.e., 'as per the possibilities, perchance'] it will rain." 

A hapless person is a person nothing has worked out for, no matter his efforts. A mishap is an unfortunate occurrence. 

Another intrinsic connotation of this word, from way back, has to do with what "fits," what really "works." The hapless person is a misfit, perhaps very unjustly and cruelly, but misfit status is what the poor hapless person is experiencing. Life just isn't working for him. 

At a certain point this English "happy/happiness" notion (the cousins of which in other Germanic languages still mean "luck") took on an affective nuance--not just what happens to you or what you achieve but how you feel about it. The personal impression of contentment, gladness, the subjectively satisfying interpretation of one's circumstances as good, even perfect. 

Never mind that the interpretation could be catastrophically wrong, in which case we can rightfully call the happiness itself a catastrophic delusion. Consider Brave New World, a book about very happy people.... 

America's Founding Fathers put their necks on the line, not in the service of our seratonin levels, but in the service of our inalienable right to strive after the realization and fulfillment of our God-given potential, our contribution (what today we call an "investment") to the world's best hopes and prospects. 

Just an inalienable right? Or a duty?

https://www.dictionary.com/e/happiness/?fbclid=IwAR2gomVfPj4rNRb8ysKbo2aupYxWoMnXk8lOQwj2OSCtDtVEzzPqo3mcd0Q_aem_AXv-6jzE-puG2DqzaBc0IH55Q0SdkMOUg12lFMcmOo_Cw0_mvAwtPkswLwJReKgazdA

What Did Adam and Eve Pass On to Us?

 A friend wrote me yesterday: 

Here's an interesting question for you...what exactly did Adam and Eve (and by extension parents) pass on to Cain, Abel et al?

Some of you might enjoy my ramblings in response (if not, scroll by, nothing to see here...😏). 

Good morning! I'm assuming of course that you have something more spiritual in mind than genes (or for that matter jeans!). So you're getting at the notion of "Original Sin," i.e., inherited guilt, what makes us all sinners by nature, not deed. As to what "exactly" they passed on to us the simplest answer is of course the predictable fallback one, but it's predictable for a reason. It's "I don't know."  It's predictable precisely because there's tons that, speaking purely for myself, I don't know. I think it's a safe bet, however, that I'm not alone in that regard. What mostly differentiates people is the degree to which they're willing to admit that there's tons they don't know. 

So starting from the default "I don't know," I think I can safely add the "phenomenal" (meaning not "amazing" but "observable") aspect to my answer and try somehow to correlate it to the (let's admit it) very little that Scripture makes explicit on it. (If Scripture were perfectly explicit on this matter, along with an assortment of other questions the Church has been wrangling and warring over for hundreds of years, we wouldn't even have these questions, would we!) 

The inescapable in life is that we all do  sin. We all do do those things that are unworthy, cruel, manipulative, etc., in varying degrees, yes, but we all do them. At least once. Even if a little bit. Nobody has a clean slate ("All have sinned...."). And that's in keeping, appallingly, with what Adam and Eve did (all it took was once for them to be sunk). 

In Romans it talks about how we all died in Adam. Something died there in the Fall, some kind of pristine unfettered access and interplay between the Holiness (capital H) of God and the holiness (small h) of Man. 

I recently mentioned that word, or that phrase more precisely, "holiness of Man," at a Bible study and noticed that some instinctively recoiled as if I'd uttered heresy. Which betrays a disastrously stunted concept of holiness. I get that they unreflectively took me to be positing Man as some sort of holy-in-self being, a source or independent possessor of holiness, which is nonsense of course. God is holy and what He creates is holy in both reflection and expression of His holiness. Which isn't in the least startling considering how often God refers to the holiness of those things He has set apart, even in the midst of a fallen world, for His designs and purposes. 

So our First Parents were created holy as the entire creation was, and exceptionally holy in their unique nature as the Imago Dei. 

That holiness was forfeited in the Fall. And once forfeited it was well and truly gone. If their pristine avenue and interplay, for lack of a better word, with God was lost, it was lost to humanity and to the creation of which Man was appointed a lord and master. There's no detour around Man to God. Not for Nature, not even for the children of Man (Adam). 

It's a perception that does seem very Pauline, doesn't it. We all "died" in Adam, we were all cut off from the highway, as it were. The route to God was cut off, the bridge was out. 

What I'll say next is probably stretching the notion in a way that has holes in it (even if the holes are very tiny, any concept with holes in it is bound to fail as you inflate the concept, together with its holes, to cosmic proportions)--as I was saying, I'm sure the idea I'm going to express has holes in it, but Swiss cheese has holes in it too and still the parts that aren't holes taste pretty good. 

So my hole-ridden concept is that, if the unutterably holy God created Man, the unholy Man "created" (procreated) his descendants. The holiness you might say Adam "got" from God, Adam's children could never get from fallen Adam. There's no detour, the highway has to be straight or it simply isn't. 

We have all fallen in Adam our procreator, just as once all mankind (even if at the moment it consisted of only two) was holy in God its Creator. 

This is only occurring to me just as I type it, this angle of creation and procreation combined with the notion of connection, avenue, access, even koinonia. Holy Adam's koinonia was with holy God. Fallen Adam's children's koinonia is with the fallen, and there's no way out unless a new Holy Adam is somehow able to make fallen Adam's children HIS children and the highway is restored.

So perhaps the question is not "What did Adam and Eve pass on to us?" as much as "What did Adam and Eve not  pass on to us?"

A part of this that I observe as woefully, I'll even say catastrophically, unattended to in Christian "talk" is how Christ fulfilled (consummated) the holiness of Man. He was not only "perfectly righteous" as Man. Nor was He holy only as Son of God or God incarnate. Jesus was holy as Man, He was the Holy Man, consummately embodying the holiness innate to Man at the Creation. In Christ the holiness of Man is one with the holiness of God in perfect union, restored communion.

Jesus didn't only bring God back to Man. Jesus brought Man back to God, he became and lived what God wanted and appointed in Man. Jesus blazed, in his very life, soul and body, the trail of return to the Father: he became it. Not insignificant that the Hebrew concept of "repentance" is "return." We don't like to talk about Jesus "repenting" because of our somewhat shallow, narrow free-association of the word with sin, and of course Jesus never sinned (even though he openly and unabashedly submitted himself to John's repentance-baptism, and make no mistake, the baptism itself was intrinsically, not incidentally, a profession of repentance). In the deepest sense "repentance" is return. So while Jesus could never say "Sorry" for sins he'd never committed, he most certainly could, and did, blaze the trail of return to the Father (a return the Lord repeatedly spoke of with passionate longing) not only for himself but with him all who would finally be "in him" (the whole tenor and fabric of John 13-17).