Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Getting Over the Pursuit of Happiness
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
November, 2004A couple of years ago I lost the core of what had been my happiness, and it is not coming back in any future I can see. On a daily basis I was experiencing it as a hole in my interior, a persistent aching lack. For the first time in my life I felt utterly bereft.
In struggling to get that happiness back I resorted to every avenue you would expect: prayer, counseling, new activities, novel strategies, etc. Nada. Then, when a young person asked a question about “the meaning of life,” I remembered what I once used to know. The pursuit of happiness is in itself always a mistake. When happiness is pursued, like a dog or a small child, it runs away.
The student’s question reminded me of the book that was very popular when I was a student, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. There Frankl reflected on his concentration camp years and discovered something about those prisoners who did not just sicken and die as many did: they retained meaning in their lives.
How could those who were stripped of everything and brutalized on a daily basis ever claim that their lives retained meaning? Frankl insisted that it is each person’s vocation to assign meaning to their life, whatever its circumstances. From my point of view, how one assigns meaning to one’s life is one’s essential spirituality.
Death camp inmates, Frankl found, survived when they assigned meaning to their lives by remaining compassionate, helpful, and caring in an environment that extinguished those qualities in most people. Even when the moment came that others took one’s life away, he says, one could still choose to reflect human dignity.
Remembering Frankl enabled me once again to throw off the chief delusion of my generation, that happiness is the goal of living. In refocusing my mental energy on the meaning and purpose I assign to my life, there came a new sense of centeredness and calm. Having a focus on purpose has enabled me to speak somewhat boldly about things that could be costly in the long the run: what matters is the mission.
A kind of haze is lifting as I consider this chain of events. Somewhere in the last 20 years my idealism was supplanted in my deepest self by the yuppie illusion that happiness can be pursued, captured, held on to—and even measured. When it departed, I encountered what I thought was emotional poverty.
This surprises me. As a believer and a member of the clergy, I have said the right words and, in fact, believed them about the purpose of existence. I certainly have pursued important goals, but never had to do that without the training wheels provided by the measure of happiness I’ve recently lost. I have, in fact, been getting along with both meaning and happiness all these years.
The training wheels are gone now and to my surprise I find I can ride: without a ghost of a chance of controlling happiness, I know the importance of meaning, and it is more than enough. It makes one in some sense fearless.
I can never claim to have had a death camp experience: that would debase the memory of the millions who died around young Victor Frankl. I have, very late in life, had an experience of deprivation sufficient to drive me to find where my heart really lies. I am driven to admit that I wish I had suffered more, and sooner, but with Saint Paul I suspect that we are not given more than we can handle.
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