May
4, 2024 ~ Saturday, Week 5
It is the very pursuit of happiness
that thwarts
happiness.
~
Viktor E. Frankl*
So, God,
Where did some of us get the idea that happiness is our
birthright? We spend so much of our lives chasing after it and
even worrying about how to get it, and then how to keep it. How many of us
have said: If I can just have that car, if we can live in that
neighborhood, if that promotion comes through, if I win the
big lottery, then I'll be happy.
We waste whole days of living looking back crying or regretting about
"if only _X_ had been different" and looking ahead
thinking "if only I can have _Y_" that we completely
miss today. I want to stop missing now by
spending my time wishing to change the past while dreaming about having all the
things I think I want to have in the future. Please, Lord, while I know it's
useful and responsible to make plans and work toward fulfilling current and
future goals, at the same time help me see that this moment is the place to fully be and live with
whatever is happening.
Oh, while you're at it, push me to see and understand the luxury and advantage of the life I have with all its ups, downs, and sideways moments with the sheer privilege of choice to just think about how to attain certain "things" that may fill me with happiness. As I muse about me, uncountable millions of Your children are hungry, desperate, in fear for their lives, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, reviled for the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their nationality, ethnicity, and so much more, and much of it in the name of You in some misguided and dangerous religious fervor and the damaging primacy of nationalism.
As a child finds joy in blowing the seeds of a
dandelion into the breeze, let me seek and experience the joy in the present as
the fruit of the past, with lessons learned as the seeds of the future. Endow
me with the grace to accept wherever and however the seeds of today fall, fail,
and blossom. Remind me each waking hour to keep myself grounded in You in
heart, mind, and spirit, rather than the constant pursuit of that mostly indefinable something I could call Happiness. Guide, or even shove me, into being far less selfish in order to bloom into being more selfless, in this Your Ground with the gift of living in it. I'm beginning right now. amen.
*Viktor
Frankl, [1905-1997] an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, focused
some of his early studies on depression and suicide and set up a youth
counseling center in Vienna that successfully reduced teen suicide. Later he
set up a suicide prevention program in a psychiatric hospital for women from
1933 to 1937. Being Jewish, he was required to close his practice as the
Germans annexed Austria and he was interned in the Nazi Holocaust
of concentration camps for three years losing his wife, his mother, and
his brother. His seminal work, Man's Search for Meaning,
chronicles his imprisonment. It was through this unimaginable time
he realized the importance of finding meaning in all forms
of existence even under the most difficult and nearly indescribably horrible experiences and yet finding reasons to continue to live. As he said,
crisis offers new opportunities to live as if for the second time. He
authored many other books including Yes to Life In Spite of
Everything, published 11 months after his liberation from Auschwitz.
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