Monday, August 10, 2009

The Chapel is Some Trees

And that's how it should be. I managed to get a hold of some photos from my wedding, and I present them now to you, completely out of order and with very little context:

I got Married!

It was a double ceremony. I married Jessica, and Carrie married Jessica. Stephen presided. Liv was our Ringbearer, Liesl the Flower Child. It was beautiful, as you can see.

I miss my dear wife, who lives very far away in Florida, and is going to the far away Pacific Northwest (for the best job ever) come October. But I am glad we shared the time we did, in that park in Pennsylvania, declaring our love to the world. One day we shall be reunited.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

On Happiness

It's rare that I read or hear something and think immediately "I disagree completely with your entire premise." This column, however, did that to me, and reminded me of this talk at Hampshire a few months ago, when some guy was saying that we should all be secular humanists because it is impossible to understand God and no religion has given us a good way to get close to him.

"We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it. And our attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method — with drinking or drugs or sexual seduction, buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers — never quite recapture the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a sure-fire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars."
The talk at Hampshire (it was Dr. Philip Kitcher and you can watch it here if you really want) had an almost identical point somewhere in there- Kitcher made some literary reference about how some kid found God and felt all at one with the universe but then a few days later the feeling passed and his life sucked again. Kitcher used this to prove that these moments happen to us randomly and there's nothing we can do to make them more likely so we might as well give up and feel happy when they show up.

I disagree. I can't possibly agree because everything I've ever experienced tells me otherwise. I've felt deep incredible joy, and union with the very fabric of our being, and however else we wnat to try to describe that indescribable point- we all know it, and there are no words. Furthermore, those moments aren't random. I can make myself more open to them. I can attract them. There is a divine force that I am fully capable of tapping into, and while I don't get to that place every single day because sometimes life is really hard or I'm tired or I just get distracted, I'm getting a little better at getting there every time I try.

And it's not just prayer and meditation and the things conventional religion tells you to like. I've felt really and truly joyful and happy dancing, whether at a wedding or late at night in the Barn or in the middle of my room- that moment when my body and the music get exactly in synch and nothing else matters any more and I'm satisfied. Or that moment when I'm sitting around with my friends and we're laughing, just laughing. Or riding my bike and there aren't any cars on the road and I'm just watching the white line in front of me, going so fast and so easy.

The way Kreider writes about noticing happiness sounds exactly like meditation to me. You have to reach this point where there's no thought, and then when you notice the lack of thought, you're thinking again, and you have to start over. But you can get better at it. Monks have come up with all sorts of ways to help you, and I can't help but wonder if all these guys who say we can't get any closer than random blessed moments have just never met a monk. I've never met a currently practicing monk, either, but I read about them a lot, and I've met their students, and I'm pretty sure people are completely capable of learning to recognize our own fullness and our own happiness and the way we are all part of the divine.

It makes me sad when people don't know that.