Don’t Worry, Be Happy
It has happened to me. I have this memory of Liz and I on her motorcycle when we were students in Spain riding slowly along in an early morning fog in the mountains south of Castilla on our way to Andalucia and Morocco when suddenly, without warning, we rode out of the fog into the brightest, clearest, blue-sky, sunshine morning since the creation. Wow! My memories of the details have faded, but my memory of the moment of clarity, when the fog was so gone it was as if it had never been, and the light was so brilliant it seemed to me to come from within my very soul to light the whole universe. Or, perhaps, it was the light of the whole universe that had entered my soul for that one moment in time or, perhaps it was a moment out of time, a glimpse of the reality that time is only a very crude attempt to make sense of. Who can say? But there it was. A clear day. A beautiful day in time. A wild, joyous sense of the presence of life and its possibilities or of something that there are no words to describe. Have you ever driven out of a fog into brilliant sunlight? That is what this word in Paul’s letter to the Philippians is like for me. Out of the dense fog of Paul’s heavy theology comes this bright and shining and simple word of light and joy: “Don’t worry, be happy.”
Don’t worry, be happy. Sounds like a good name for a song but how serious can it be for life in the world we have made for ourselves. And how is it that Paul who was in prison when he wrote these words could know anything about joy in the midst of his own very real suffering and after all that he had given up. He was a man you may know who enjoyed much prestige and privilege and power n his time before Jesus came into his life. He gave it all up for this joy he talks about . Rejoice. Rejoice in the Lord always. Don’t worry, be happy.
Don’t worry, be happy. He had seen it. He had seen what the woman without a name in the story by Patricia Hampl had, the thing, if she had the words, she would tell, but which she tells anyway with her eyes that look right at you and with her smile which is described in the story this way: It was such a complete smile, so entire, it startled me every time, as if I’d heard my name called out on the street of a foreign city. As if I had heard my name called out on the street of a foreign city. Think about that for a moment. Don’t let that word get away without hearing it. As if I heard my name called out on the street of a foreign city. Oh yes. What did Paul say? The Lord is near. Just when we thought we were all alone in the universe and there was no one who knows where we are, who knows our name, we catch a glimpse of the truth─that there is one from who we are never unknown or forgotten or overlooked, one who holds us through it all, one who could make us think if only for a moment that there really is nothing to worry about after all. This is serious stuff. It is not delusionary or escapism but something substantial that changes how we see things like the man in hospice care who also had it and while people all around him were afraid and even angry to see their bodies failing and death coming he had that smile and peace that you can see and when asked about it he said that for him it was not so much that he was losing his physical self but that as he was being emptied of his physical life he was being filled with the light of eternity. He had a glimpse of what was coming. This glimpse is the something that gave the woman in the story and Paul in prison the joy the overcomes anything and everything, that wells up inside of us until we cannot help but smile, rejoice, cry out at the beauty of it all as if we suddenly were to come out of the fog and see the light that we knew was there but were seeing it for the first time for what it most truly is.
Frederick Buechner who has spent a lifetime writing the truth so that we can all understand it wrote the truth about us when he said that asking someone to stop worrying was like telling a woman with a head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. In other words, it is not so easy. It almost feels like we couldn’t stop worrying even if we knew how. Is it really even possible to stop worrying? Lord knows there is enough to worry about. Bad things happen and often without any warning or anyway to predict or control, random and cruel. Those of us who have suffered such pain already know how bad it can be and assume that if it happened once it will happen again and those of us who have been relatively lucky so far think that our turn is coming as if there were an unspoken reality that says it is only a matter of time before the other shoe falls and suffering befalls us as well. We know too much. We re wired into the world that never stops telling us all the horrors that are happening every day relentlessly reminding us of all that could and probably will go wrong.. Why wouldn’t we worry?
It was no accident that Jesus’ suffering preceded his resurrection or that Buddhism posits the first of the four great truths that all life is suffering. Sorrow, loss, pain, death await us all and those we love. Paul knew this as well as anybody. As Buechner put it one time, Paul has good reason to be anxious about everything.” And yet it is he who says do not be anxious about anything. He does not promise that there will not be a reason to worry or that there will not be suffering or that the worst things that could happen will not happen to us. No, he has something else to say and that is that there is something else somehow more powerful than the worst that can happen and it is something called the peace of God which as far as words go is about all you can say for how can we speak the unspeakable. The best we can do is the woman in the story and Paul in prison and the man in hospice and what they had that they would tell, would sing if they had any words for the light in their eyes and heart.
Jesus called it the bread of life. Paul tried to tell us how to receive it. He tells us to stop thinking of the worst and start thinking of the best. And do these things: Live and speak the truth. Be just and fair. Be gentle and kind. Desire what is good. Celebrate what is excellent. Praise what is beautiful. Instead of lamenting what we do not have, give thanks for what we do have. Do we need to be told these things? Have we already forgotten what we could not yet have even known? Paul’s is a cry to steadfast courage. Yes, it requires courage to be happy and a radical faith in the promises of God. To be happy is an act of bravery in the real world. Had we considered that? To be happy is a radical resisting of the blows of the universe that wear us all down until we just give up but we will not give up because we believe (when they asked Jesus what they had to do he simply told them to believe the one God has sent to tell us and if we think that believing such a thing will be easy we will discover that with each passing day there is nothing easy about this) but we will not give up because we believe that God is present and where God is present there is joy. There is joy. It is real. It is the light of every new day. It is joy that Paul wishes for us. We let things get in the way but the joy is here for us too when we open our eyes and our hearts to see it, when we believe the one God sent to save us. Unlike the so-called Christianity that seems to draw its life from the fear that someone somewhere might be having a good time, Paul’s bright and shiny and surprising word is that a good time is exactly what life in Christ is to be and a good time is only a small approximation of what it is.
Do you remember when Pooh and Piglet went hunting woozles? It was a snowy day and Pooh was walking aimlessly around a group of trees and when he had gone full circle he noticed that there were tracks in the snow and he decided to follow them where Piglet found him and he explained to Piglet that he was hunting woozles and piglet went along of course and before you know it there were more tracks and some of them were different, possibly wizzles, and after awhile they both were getting more and more worried and eventually talked themselves into being scared that woozles and or wizzles may have Hostile Intent and who knows where this might have led if Christopher Robin had not come along and pointed out to them that they were following their own silly tracks around and around and around again.
This is great example of what gets in the way of the gifts of God to the people of God, the joy of being alive together, living faithfully in a challenging world. When we spend our time hunting woozles we are creating problems that don’t need to be at all and are distracting us from the real problems which are plenty enough but which are themselves no match for those who don’t shrink from the real suffering of life in this world and who also believe that Christ’s life redeems all suffering now and forever and that when we walk in his way we, like him, shall overcome the world and every woe. Don’t worry, be happy is a confession of faith and a reminder that we don’t have to let life get us down, we could in fact give thanks for every breath of life we have received because in the practice of gratefulness we may well be given a glimpse of that joy which is the truest expression of the reality that trumps every other reality, the love of God for this wonderful world and for this beautiful people that you truly are.
Remember that ancient word out of Deuteronomy that speaks not just of history but of the poetry of the human journey through God’s creation from the beginning unto this very day: The Lord brought us out of Egypt
