‘I do believe our prayers are heard and answered’, says Michael Mayne, the late Dean of Westminster, in the book I’m reading at the moment, The Enduring Melody, dealing with his experience of terminal cancer. ‘But we have to be clear about what we really want’. Prayer is, we might add, a way of discovering what it is we really want, too. It’s a question that’s worth asking ourselves when we sit with the Lord wondering what, if anything, to say.
Want I really want is, I think, something I am slightly ashamed of. I want everyone to be happy. That desire applies most strongly to the people I interact with most closely, but it’s a general one that I’ve realised conditions a lot of what I do. It seems so superficial, somehow, when you state it so baldly.
Of course
that desire comes with caveats. I don’t believe you can be properly happy if
you are committed to falsehoods, as eventually they will find you out: creation
is a unity, and ultimately falsehood corrupts even if you don’t know you are
enmeshed in it. I don’t believe you can be properly happy without God: God is
the final truth of all things, and we are, as the saint says, restless till we
find our rest in him. Rest and peace lie nowhere else. ‘We seek Christ where he
is not to be found, amidst graves and sepulchres’, says the 17th-century
bishop Mark Frank, whose sermons I must look up one day. And it is true that what
one person requires for what they think of as their happiness, may bring sorrow
to another; they are seeking Christ in the sepulchres, in that case, but it’s what
they think, and in such cases I can’t take their self-definitions of happiness as
read.
Yet nevertheless,
all that taken into account, I still want everyone to be happy. It hurts me
when they can’t be, or when people I love seem to be seeking happiness in
places they won’t find it (perhaps I am, too. I still have a lot to learn). I
fear contributing to their unhappiness.
I’m not
sure many Christians have this as their governing desire. They want to tell the truth regardless of consequences, to rescue souls from
hell, to please God. So do I, I suppose, but I think of it in terms of bringing
them happiness, which I believe would bring happiness to God as well.
Am I happy? Can I say that coming to Christ will bring happiness to those I meet? For decades I thought of faith in terms of truth, and never demanded that it would bring me any kind of joy. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it would bring me the opposite by making demands of me I might not be inclined to meet. That’s a criticism of my own failings, to be sure, but I’m being no more than honest. Yet now, nearly 30 years after my conversion, I can sit in front of God, as I conceive it, and feel – joy at simply being there. The vicissitudes of my life (such as they are!) all occur in the context of God’s presence. They remain challenging, painful perhaps, but they are still held within something bigger than they are, and the bigger thing they are held in is the deep conviction that the centre of creation is love. It is, perhaps we might say, a deeper life. I am grateful for it. I am, maybe, happy. At least now and again.
This is lovely, and profoundly Christian. When we love our neighbour, are we not called to bring to them joy, happiness, and peace of God which passes all understanding? Well said!
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