Happiness Rises
Happiness Rises
Saturday of the Third Week of Lent – March 21, 2020
I don’t want to undersell the difficulty and challenge in de Mello’s words this week. The work he describes with attachments is some of the most rigorous interior work we can undertake.
At the same time, we experience a growing sense of interior freedom when we engage this spiritual work. There is a lightness of being that comes from not being weighed down by those people and things we cling to. And we have the experience, Fr Anthony describes, of “happiness rising.”
Happiness arises between persons who are meeting without the desire to control, manipulate, or impress one another . . . happiness arises when we hear a beautiful piece of music . . . happiness arises when we participate in an act of kindness that makes a difference in the world . . . happiness arises when we see an object of beauty and stand still just to take the moment into ourselves.
I love de Mello’s phrase. Happiness rising does not suggest a spontaneous manifestation of good feelings. There is nothing random about it. Happiness rises as a gift of God as we engage in this challenging inner work.
The day that happens and your attachment to the drum drops, you will no longer say to your friend, “How happy you have made me.” For in so saying you flatter his ego and manipulate him into wanting to please you again. And you give yourself the illusion that your happiness depends on your friend. Rather you will say, “When you and I met, happiness arose.” That leaves the happiness uncontaminated by his ego and yours. Neither of you can take the credit for it. And that makes it possible for the two of you to part with no attachment to each other, or to the experience which your meeting generated, for you have enjoyed, not each other, but the symphony that arose in your meeting. And when you move on to the next situation, or person, or work, you do so without any emotional carryover. And then you make the joyful discovery that the symphony arises there too, playing a different melody in the next situation, and the next, and the next.
Now you will move through life living from one moment to the other, wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. You will be attached to no person or thing, for you will have developed a taste for the symphony of life. And you will love life alone with the passionate attachment of your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and all your strength. You will find yourself traveling unencumbered and free as a bird in the sky, always living in the Eternal Now. And you will have found in your heart the answer to the question, “Master, what is it that I must do to get eternal life?”
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o What is your first reaction to “happiness rises”? How do you hear it? How do you respond to the phrase?
o I call to mind a moment when “happiness arose” for me. I consider that moment, however fleeting it was. Where was I? What was I doing? How did I experience the moment?
o I consider that the most important moments of “happiness” for me happen apart from my manipulating them or making them happen. I cannot control “happiness,” but I can receive it as a gift of God.
Saturday of the Third Week of Lent – March 21, 2020
I don’t want to undersell the difficulty and challenge in de Mello’s words this week. The work he describes with attachments is some of the most rigorous interior work we can undertake.
At the same time, we experience a growing sense of interior freedom when we engage this spiritual work. There is a lightness of being that comes from not being weighed down by those people and things we cling to. And we have the experience, Fr Anthony describes, of “happiness rising.”
Happiness arises between persons who are meeting without the desire to control, manipulate, or impress one another . . . happiness arises when we hear a beautiful piece of music . . . happiness arises when we participate in an act of kindness that makes a difference in the world . . . happiness arises when we see an object of beauty and stand still just to take the moment into ourselves.
I love de Mello’s phrase. Happiness rising does not suggest a spontaneous manifestation of good feelings. There is nothing random about it. Happiness rises as a gift of God as we engage in this challenging inner work.
The day that happens and your attachment to the drum drops, you will no longer say to your friend, “How happy you have made me.” For in so saying you flatter his ego and manipulate him into wanting to please you again. And you give yourself the illusion that your happiness depends on your friend. Rather you will say, “When you and I met, happiness arose.” That leaves the happiness uncontaminated by his ego and yours. Neither of you can take the credit for it. And that makes it possible for the two of you to part with no attachment to each other, or to the experience which your meeting generated, for you have enjoyed, not each other, but the symphony that arose in your meeting. And when you move on to the next situation, or person, or work, you do so without any emotional carryover. And then you make the joyful discovery that the symphony arises there too, playing a different melody in the next situation, and the next, and the next.
Now you will move through life living from one moment to the other, wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. You will be attached to no person or thing, for you will have developed a taste for the symphony of life. And you will love life alone with the passionate attachment of your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and all your strength. You will find yourself traveling unencumbered and free as a bird in the sky, always living in the Eternal Now. And you will have found in your heart the answer to the question, “Master, what is it that I must do to get eternal life?”
[Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello, (New York: Doubleday, 1992).]
For Reflection:
o What is your first reaction to “happiness rises”? How do you hear it? How do you respond to the phrase?
o I call to mind a moment when “happiness arose” for me. I consider that moment, however fleeting it was. Where was I? What was I doing? How did I experience the moment?
o I consider that the most important moments of “happiness” for me happen apart from my manipulating them or making them happen. I cannot control “happiness,” but I can receive it as a gift of God.
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