8 – 18 – 17 Happiness, Joy, and Resilience (4 minutes)

I think love has been sanitized down to mere kindness. To love one’s neighbor as oneself does not mean to be fond of them. I am frequently disappointed, angry, and embarrassed at myself. But I feel these ways because my actions have violated the high image I hold of myself and neglected to fulfill a potential. So this love is not hospitality, kindness, or forgiveness, it is the desiring of that other being’s good, regardless of what that means for your relationship. If we are loving our neighbor as our self we aren’t seeking to make them like us, or even to make them happy, we are seeking to make them like Christ, we are seeking to make them joyful.

I want to explore the distinction between joy and happiness I make above. I don’t suppose that the words themselves are tied unbreakably to the meanings I use here, but only that a distinction is necessary, and these words seem appropriate. I may as well make up some words, but I’m not that creative and I’d cringe every time I read my franken-words.

My conception of happiness is that of animal contentment. It is the pleasure we feel when our microcosm of the universe is in order, or to our liking. Happiness is having all the laundry clean, all the dishes clean, and walking out the door ten minutes early to go to the cinema with your lover or friend. Happiness is tied very closely to the outside world, it rises with our pleasures and falls with our pains. Many times, people who lead pleasant lives will mistake this happiness for joy as it seems to last the way joy does, but what has really lasted is their good fortune.

In defining joy, I am reminded of a couple quotes. “Happiness is a state of mind” and “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” The latter is from Abraham Lincoln and I don’t know the origin of the former, but they touch on the crucial point about joy. Joy is an interior state, unaffected by how our life is going. It is ludicrous that someone could feel happiness in Auschwitz, except perhaps on extremely rare occasions, but it is perfectly feasible that they might have joy all the time bubbling in their heart. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how one might live in this condition without a great, resilient joy inside to cheer one back to living.

Resilience, good humor, correctability. These are the things which make one able to be taught, able to be corrected, able to be loved. Therefore, while sensitivity training may educate people as to what their language may mean to the recipient, they will still offend that person if they want to be offended.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to teach our children to be resilient, to have a good sense of humor? I’m not saying we should learn to tolerate hate speech or open threats, my thoughts occur in a fictional land where people are reasonable. But I don’t think I have very many interesting things to say about why people shouldn’t be prejudiced or how we can educate them out of it. What I’m referring to are those faux pas and sarcastic comments that we can choose to ignore, or laugh at, or be offended by.

In terms of effectiveness, aren’t the people who would make these slight insults and jeers less teachable than the average person? So wouldn’t we get better results by teaching the rest of the people out there to ignore these people? Well then you may say, “Why should we just let these people say whatever they want?”

I don’t think we should. They will pay the consequences in their relational and professional lives. But the focus on sensitivity without a complementary focus on resilience is an incomplete treatment. Secondly, sensitivity, in the way it is usually taught in my experience, is a restrictive lesson whereas resilience enables people. What I mean by this is that in most of the sensitivity training I’ve had that was labeled “sensitivity training” we were simply taught a list of words we couldn’t say. I’ve had some effective sensitivity training, but that was at church, in the classroom, and at home when I was taught empathy and encouraged to nourish my curiosity about other people’s lives.

And resilience won’t just help people deal with rude people. It will help them get through life transitions, deal with loss, and work harder than soft-skinned people. I am rambling again. I don’t think sensitivity training should be eliminated, but I think to have that without resilience training is quite silly.

People may say, “You can’t teach resilience in a classroom.” I might agree with them. But I’m also of the opinion that if you couldn’t teach resilience effectively in a classroom, which would most likely consist in constructive thought patterns and exercises that happen within oneself, you’d have a tougher time teaching sensitivity, which is intrinsically related to our relationships.