The Season of Hope

There was a report in the newspaper this past week about a study that seems to show that people in the US who live where there is more sunshine are happier than those who live where there is less. That was the headline, yet if you read the article, you found that climate wasn’t the only factor that affected whether or not folks reported that they were happy. Being “happy” or satisfied with their life also had to do with low crime rates, short commutes, low taxes, good air quality, good schools, etc. It wasn’t just about climate. There was a long list of external factors that people say cause them to feel happy.


Along with the article was a chart called a “snapshot of national cheer”, listing where all the 50 states and DC ranked in terms of people reporting that they were happy. New York was at the bottom of the list, while Hawaii and Florida were at the top, along with Louisiana. (The authors admitted that some of the data had been collected before Katrina!)

North Carolina was in the top third of the list, number 13 out of the 51.

So, how would you rate your happiness living in Eastern Carolina compared to other states you may have lived in? How much difference does warm, sunny weather make to your 'state' of happiness?

How important is it to you to be happy?

Another study on happiness that was in the papers last December showed that happiness is contagious. The authors of that study 'mapped' the effect of one person’s happiness on other person’s in that person’s social network. They were able to show that happiness for one person causes a measurable chain reaction of at least 3 degrees of increased good feelings among friends and friends’ of friends. The ripple effects of one person’s happiness on other’s, no matter how remotely connected to the one happy person they are, is far greater in degree than any ripple effects caused by one person’s sadness.

Sadness is apparently not as contagious as happiness, (unless you live in New York!)

So, if you look at these studies, or if you are reading any of the many popular books on what makes for happiness, you might conclude that a sunny climate, along with other favorable external factors, including a social network that contains at least some happy friends, will increase your feelings of satisfaction with life.

I suggested two Sunday’s ago, that living the good life might also mean learning to be patient (meaning calm and centered) while waiting through what you cannot control, like bad weather, or a long winter, or whatever is a tough time for you...until change comes... in its own time.

Last week, I talked about how one way to understand the celebration of Hanukkah is to hear that its message is about seeing the light of hope that keeps burning on, no matter how impossible one’s circumstances seem to be. There is always a miracle happening if we would just open our eyes and see it.

This is the season of hope, of seeing and hearing the stories about those miracles that are born in winter. It is the season for celebrating the gift of new life that is birthed in the most unlikely of circumstances, when lights shine brightly during the darkest of nights leading the way to the fulfillment of the good life we hope for.

It is the season of hope.

Yet, I assure you there are unhappy people in the midst of this season, even where the sun is shining (and there are likely some happy people in New York!)

Religion, philosophy, great literature have been offering wisdom about what brings happiness for centuries.

In our time, happiness has been fascinating the social scientists.

There is another report that I want to tell you about. It started at Harvard in the late 1930’s. Social scientists there began what would become a 70+ year study following the lives of 268 male sophomores. Their hope was that they could use this study to investigate, measure, analyze and finally determine with scientific accuracy what factors make for the happy life. Called the Grant Study, it is perhaps the most comprehensive, longitudinal study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted.

A man named George Vaillant has been the director of that study for the last 42 years. He dedicated his career to keeping up with and studying the lives of those men. What he found was that there are seven basics factors that predict healthy aging. What he called 'mature adaptations' was number one, then there’s education, stable marriages, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise and healthy weight.

In explaining what he meant by the number one determiner of a good life, he said that the study found that the “central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble.”

All of us are born into families and periods of history not of our choosing. Over the long term, our lives are all going to be full of differing seasons and periods. What he found by looking at the whole picture of each of these lives, instead of just one slice in one period, was that even though how one responds to circumstances can seem to be pre-determined by our personal histories, by our addictions, by where we happen to be caught in history, there is always the possibility for creative response to circumstance. We have at least some degree of control over how we adapt to what happens to us.

We can move from place to place. Many of us have and will. Yet, happiness/living a “good life” doesn’t necessarily mean living in a state where the sun burns brightest, nor is it directly correlated to how many happy friends we might have at a given time. And, most importantly perhaps, living what one might term a “good life” is not necessarily about living a life of ease.

More money, past what it takes to meet one’s basic needs, more privilege, more education, more health, does not necessarily mean that one will be happy.

Vaillant is a psychoanalyst, so a lot of his interpretive work was focused on what defensive psychological mechanisms these 268 individuals used to cope with their particular circumstances. He found that their responses ranged not only one from another, but within each of their lives over the long view. From the psychotic through all the common varieties of neurosis, to what he called the more mature adaptations, their responses ranged from those that brought about extreme isolation from others to profound interconnectivity. For many of the men, who called their lives good the “mature adaptations” didn’t occur until they were older in age.

These adaptations were altruism, humor, anticipation (the ability to look ahead and plan for future discomfort), suppression (the conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, which one plans to address at some future time) and sublimation (which means finding appropriate outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport). The presence of these ways of responding made the most difference in whether or not these men reported and or appeared to the researchers to have led a “good life”.

When Vaillant was asked what he had most learned from the study he said; “that the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

In other words, being “happy” has to do with what psychologists call social aptitude, how we love and how we allow ourselves to be loved.

It was the ability to express the positive emotions related to relationships (those of awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope and trust) with and for oneself, with or for someone else or something beyond the self... that caused the subjects of the study to define their lives as having been “good”.

Valliant is reported to have frequently told this Christmas tale:

On Christmas Eve a father puts in one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can find it!”

What the Grant study most taught Vaillant was that how happy we are has to do with how we respond to circumstances, not the circumstances themselves. This study “proved” that it is “loving and being loved” that brings us joy.

Yet, Vaillant always managed to add the caution, the caveat, that the findings of the Grant study, like religion and all great storytelling remains in the realm of paradox, mystery and miracle. He reminds his readers and his audiences whenever he speaks that the expression of positive emotions always makes us more vulnerable to rejection and heartbreak.

Living full, meaningful “good” lives doesn’t mean we are going to be “happy” 24 hours a day, throughout our lives. The sun is not always going to shine outside, or even inside.

Although expressing gratitude and joy will over time yield better health and deeper connections, in the short term expressing positive emotions exposes us to more risk (those who risk what it takes to feel the positive emotions are going to feel really unhappy sometimes), yet they will define themselves as having lived good lives over the long term.

Those who primarily express negative emotions over the course of their lives will be protected from both the highs and the lows of emotions, and they will be isolated from others.

Long term happiness is all about how willing we are to risk loving one another despite the risk of heartbreak and pain.

I’d like to suggest to you this Sunday, that one way to hear the story of Christmas, the birth of Jesus, is to see it as a metaphor, a reminder that hope and joy and good cheer are born when we are the most vulnerable.

Christmas is the story of a god who becomes a baby.

James Luther Adams, the great Unitarian theologian, said that one of the hallmarks that most defines liberal religion is that it holds ultimate optimism. We trust that in the end everything will be good. We believe that we have to and we can do the work needed to make the world a better place. We trust that the light will ultimately shine on, showing the way to the good life.

We are realistic about day to day human life. We don’t necessarily view every present circumstance with optimism, even as we believe that love will triumph in the end.

So many times we think of our task as the liberal religious community as one of ending suffering in this world. We are called to do that, yet we are also called to create joy. Perhaps we need to see that the place where gods make themselves as vulnerable as babies might be just the place we need to move to; the place where hope and good cheer lives.

May you be blessed this holiday season with light and love!