The eCrozier

“If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.” – Yogi Berra

“If we are to make our lives meaningful, we must live for values beyond happiness, values that may conflict with happiness. Sometimes suffering can be beneficial, not because it may make us capable of greater pleasures, but because it may deepen the soul.” – Gary Saul Morson, in The Athenaeum Review (Summer 2019)

For much of my life I tried to make my life meaningful, as Professor Morson implies we should (and presumably thinks we can). Making my life meaningful hasn’t worked out so well. When I worked hard at it, I failed to remember that we humans have a propensity to mess things up when trying to “make” things happen. Sometimes we get it right, but just as often we don’t. So, I’m more inclined to follow the wisdom of that great metaphysical philosopher, Yogi Berra. Professor Morson, however, does make an important point. Life, if it’s to be meaningful, has to be more than chasing happiness, which is like being on a hamster-wheel to nowhere and leads us to always ask: “How much is enough?”

In the film, Tender Mercies, Mac Sledge is a washed-up, alcoholic country singer who finds recovery, redemption, and grace through sobriety, marriage to Rosa Lee, and his adopted son. At the film’s end, Mac is silently working in the family garden. Much has occurred since his sobriety and marriage, specifically the tragic car-accident death of his 18-year old daughter from a previous marriage. As he’s working in the garden trying to fathom his grief, Rosa Lee comes out to see how he’s doing. He tells her he doesn’t understand why this has happened. By all rights, he should’ve been dead due to his reckless, self-centered life, yet he’s alive and his daughter is dead. He can’t understand why his life is now redeemed and whole. He ends by saying to her, “You see, I don’t trust happiness. I never did. I never will.” Even in his profound grief, he has a soul wellness more vital than happiness. He has received love and grace from his wife, his adopted son, and the new friends he has made. The film’s epilogue shows Mac tossing a football with his adopted son. The look on Mac’s face says it all. His grief isn’t gone. His past isn’t forgotten. His suffering isn’t over. But, his soul is well.

None of us will have soul wellness by chasing happiness. The happiness chase is a lie of American mythology. It ignores the truth of our human condition. Such a chase becomes a “law” we must follow; a categorical imperative that, ironically enough, condemns us to unhappiness. But when we accept that the world isn’t perfect and we aren’t as well, then we can let go of our self-imposed pressure (with our culture’s help) to make ourselves happy. We then can begin to accept that what has been done for us is far more crucial than what we can try to make ourselves do. That’s the grace given us in Jesus. You see, we need not try to find meaning (or even happiness) in the world. Meaning has found us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And that meaning is incarnated for us in the forgiving love found in the people and circumstances of our lives; the kind Mac Sledge found from his wife and new son. Such are the tender mercies of grace.

+Scott