Whilst some read the Bible based on its literal or historical meanings, I concentrate on its allegorical interpretations. The story of the flood and Noah’s ark is feasibly a myth to instruct us about destroying the old in order to start afresh and build something new. To quote Karen Armstrong, “the Bible is an inexhaustible text capable of yielding endlessly new meanings. However, it only comes to life when it is lived. It becomes sacred, endowed with significance independent of the original intent of its authors.”
Similarly, we have our own interpretations, validated by our experiences, lived in our own time and place. It is our responsibility to look for and find our own spiritual and moral compass when studying the Bible, hopefully with the guidance of the institutional Church, but even without it. If this sounds too much like something that came out of the mouth of Martin Luther, the reason is that I found some of his words resonating within me.
My earlier mistake was in searching for a “messenger from God”— a priest, perhaps, who from the pulpit would tell me what the story of Noah’s ark really means. Now I see that I have to discover its significance for myself, and reflect on how it can help me to live a good life. Christ simplifies the Church’s teachings for us: to love both God and our neighbour. We lead a good life through compassion and kindness; the true test of Christianity is charity.
For me, the Christian spirit is not easy to practise. I need constant reminders lest I forget, because promises and commitments wane over time. I need to renew them regularly through rituals. Rituals and ceremonies remind me of the commitments I had made to God. They are the way I make concrete my thoughts, which are abstract and without form. External objects such as icons, ceremonies, and practices are often helpful because they focus my mind. However, the à la carte Catholic that I am, I find some of these rituals and ceremonies more helpful than others.
Of all the rituals of the Church, the one that stands out for me, and which also gives me a great sense of community, is the ritual of the Holy Mass. I go to Mass as often as I can, every day if possible, first thing in the morning. Before I start my mundane tasks for the day, I like to take time out to reflect. Attending Mass gives me a constant assurance of divine love, the peace He promises me, and the reminders from the Gospel on how to lead a good life. It evokes in me a sense of gratitude for my many blessings. I like the singing of the hymns and other exercises of participation that I share with the other attendees. By the time the priest says, “The Mass is ended, go in peace,” I feel that my day has been blessed and I am now ready to start it with a sense of peace and purpose.
Currently, I feel less comfortable with some other rituals. For instance, I don’t want to practice the Sacrament of Confession. It reminds me of the horrific anxieties I went through in my childhood. Likewise, I get lost saying the meditative prayer of the Holy Rosary. I am still searching for my mantra. Catholics are great devotees of Mary, but, hard as I try, I feel rather alienated from her. The Bible says very little about her, aside from the fact that she was the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. I ask myself about the dogmas related to the Virgin Mary, and it seems to me that the Church is obsessed with the perpetual virginity of Mary, so much so that “Virgin Mary” or “Blessed Virgin” has become one of the most popular epithets for the mother of God. (It is interesting to note that “virgin” in Greek or Hebrew may simply mean “young girl”.) To me this emphasis is lacking in substance, is even superficial. Living in the 21st century, with all of contemporary society’s moral ambiguities, I think there is a need for guidance towards more universal, more timeless and deeper virtues. Why, I ask myself, is the Church so particular about virginity when procreation through the sexual act is factually a law of nature? Does it mean that people who engage in lawful sex are then impure? What if the Church instead emphasised the role of Mary as, say, the protector of the sanctity of motherhood and the ideals of the family? Perhaps I could then be reminded of her every time I am concerned about my role as wife or mother.
Even if the Bible says very little about Mary,16 I can surmise her humanity: a teen-aged girl surrenders to the will of her God without understanding too much what was happening. It was through her faith and constancy that Mary’s understanding would grow over the years. To further quote Augustine, “I thought I needed to understand in order to believe (have faith). Now I know I need to believe in order to understand.” What is essential, Augustine implies, is acceptance through self-surrender. Indeed, we can aspire for this by following Mary’s example.
Another practice I cannot seem to adopt is reciting “novenas” to particular saints. The Church encourages us to make these devotional prayers to certain saints and, although I am sure this works for some, it unfortunately doesn’t for me. It is true that most saints lead exemplary lives and are great role models. Still, instead of imploring their assistance in order to reach God, taking a detour in order to reach Him, so to speak, I want to find a way to develop a hot line directly to Him. This is not to say that there are no saints whose lives I want to emulate. I admire my patron saint, Therese of Lisieux, because of her simplicity. She was a “little” person just like so many of us, serving God in little ways, yet she showed us it is not necessary to do “great” things. As the English poet John Milton writes, “They also serve who only sit and wait.” As a “little” person myself, St. Therese is my role model and I ask her to show me the way.
The third practice that I question is the efficacy for myself of pilgrimages to holy places, especially as they involve a great investment of time and money beyond the affordability of many people. Places are declared “holy” by the Vatican because of supposedly bona fide miracles which happened there. But miracles are only events that contemporary science cannot explain. What to do, therefore, with the so-called apparitions in Lourdes and Fatima?
My mother, for instance, promised that if her prayers were answered, she would go to Lourdes on a regular basis. Thus, she would fly from Manila all the way to France to keep that vow year after year. It worked for her, but tried as I might whilst accompanying her on some of her visits to Lourdes, I could not find the same sense of spiritual fulfillment.
On the other hand, for me, it is possibly all about process. I had written earlier about my recent trek of some 175 kilometres as a pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela—St. James’ resting place in northern Spain. In such an exercise, I don’t think much about miracles. Instead, I think about taking time out from my routine schedules for silent meditation—and in my case, to emerge myself in the ritual of walking. The rhythm of my steps helps quiet the mind and connects me to my spiritual self.
Whilst I have now resolved some of the inconsistencies that bothered me when I first started writing this chapter back in 2010, I am still wondering why I was so concerned about these issues, even as my husband was content in leading an almost completely secular life. Could I be one of those hard-wired to be spiritual? Dean Hamer, a prominent geneticist, identified what was later called the “God gene”, apparently found in many people who consider themselves spiritual, if not religious. Through experiments with identical twins raised separately, Hammer found this tendency to spirituality in those with the variant of the gene. This “God gene” has survived the millennia because it has evolutionary advantages. It resolves our existential anxieties. Being human, we are deeply aware of the cruelty of the cycle of life and our helplessness on its face, yet we yearn for immortality. We find deliverance only in our belief in a personal God, and in life after death. If I do indeed need the spiritual crutch provided by this “God gene”, I consider myself highly blessed.
I replied to my atheist friend who had described religion as mere superstition: I look around me, I said, and I see this beauty, this great order in all things. It seems to me this transcendent beauty science alone cannot explain. I do not even know how much evolutionary advantage beauty has. Perhaps it is, like life itself, or so the evolutionists say, only a product of natural phenomena, millions of years of r
andom mutations with their innumerable permutations, and with each permutation, the process of natural selection, this in order to achieve ever greater beauty and order. However, whilst I believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, I don’t find it sufficiently satisfactory. Yes, I reason out, we are part of nature, but we also transcend nature. To paraphrase the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy: to be human is to be endowed with a soul, our passport out of the natural order of simply being composed of atoms and cells.
In my life, there are simply too many coincidences. Why is it that amongst all the random possibilities, what happens more often than not, is the specific one I pray for? Is it perhaps that an omniscient, benevolent, and ineffable Being we call God does exist and that, yes, we can discover more of Him and His works through the tools of science? Science and religion need not be opposed to each other. I believe in both God and science. Even Albert Einstein, who called himself an agnostic, believed in the transcendent as he contemplated the great order in the universe.
My God is not just the God of creation, but a personal God, a God who loves me and who takes care of me. I believe in Him, not because I can reason out His existence, not because I necessarily believe, or not, in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, the Church of my birth, but because I experience Him. I feel His presence within me, and when I need Him, He is always there. I think the practice of religion makes me more spiritually aware of the transcendence of life, not only in the world to come, but in the here and now. That in turn makes me more generous in spirit, and gives me the motivation to lead a more compassionate life.
Seven
Happiness Is Not Just
A Feeling
Happy is the moment when the heart says,
“I have not yet planted my garden,”
and you reply, “Whatever you plant shall grow.”
Rumi’s Little Book of Life
The novelist Graham Greene wrote in his autobiography A Sort of Life about a little experiment he did when he was a boy. He placed a bee and a fly inside a glass jar, and put the bottom of the jar against the windowpane in bright sunshine. He then covered the open mouth of the jar facing a darkened room with a black cloth. The bee, not knowing anything about glass and believing that by following the light it would surely find the way out, kept banging itself against the glass pane until it died of exhaustion. The fly, flying willy-nilly here and there and everywhere soon found the exit and flew out free.
From my experiences, I sometimes see that it is the thinking beings who suffer the most. I spent a great deal of my life being a bee, believing that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. A high control person, I didn’t like ambiguities. When I told a like-minded friend about this experiment, she commented she was a bee as well. “My ambition is to become a fly,” she said. “Flies go to heaven, but bees are damned in hell, including hell on earth.”
What about Socrates, who stated, as mentioned in the introduction of this book, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” implying that unless we are conscious of each step we take, we are not leading fully human lives? The Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, another bee, said in answer, “But the examined life may make you wish you were dead.” Indeed, our brains can often simply be a source of a lot of noise. I had heard that in Zimbabwe, the local word for depression is kufungisisa, which means “thinking too much”. Even if it were true—that examining your life can lead to much anxiety—I still think it makes for a much richer life.
In my younger days, I admired Eleanor Roosevelt, who, however, was reputed to have said, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” Now when I think back, it just sounds rather snobbish and somewhat arrogant, blindsiding the value of “small minds”. I see both sides now—both bees and flies have a role in our lives. There is a time and place for them, and one is not necessarily superior to the other. Instead, daily life is all about balance and moderation. There is no all-encompassing way to lead a good life. Even virtues need to be calibrated against each other, as situations can mandate that we choose one at the cost of the other, such as when two virtues are in conflict: how and when do we decide on freedom over order? Or fairness over generosity? Affiliation over achievement? The list of these competing virtues can go on and on and we have to learn how to manage our trade-offs.
What follow are the musings of a bee. My purpose is not really to discuss abstractions, but simply to supply names to the things we already do. I think labelling our experiences is important, for once we have labels for them, we are already halfway to awareness, and we become conscious of where we are and where we want to go.
*
I now bring the question of happiness. Why are Filipinos generally regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a “happy” people? I go to my friendly psychologists to see if I can glean some ideas on the ingredients of happiness, and what elements of these the Philippine culture might possess. In particular, I go to the new field of positive psychology to get a fresh look at literature on happiness. Many of the ideas I will be presenting below come from Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness, a book that attempts to systemically look at the nature of happiness. It is both enlightening and accessible, with numerous suggestions including a pencil-and-paper questionnaire, which can be downloaded from the internet. This can be used to identify our strengths and weaknesses, but especially our strengths and virtues, so we can use them to build a good life.
I pick one of many definitions of happiness: it is an enduring state of mind, an attitude that enables us to choose how to live. I have selected this particular definition because nowhere is the word “feeling” mentioned. It is not because we do not feel happiness but because feeling per se is temporary, and true happiness is enduring. What makes us “happy” over a new pleasurable experience makes us jaded when constantly repeated. At the same time it denies us the opportunity to grow. Feelings of elation do not last long. In fact, it is said that one source of happiness is to be so absorbed in what we do—as in activities in pursuit of our passion—that we no longer feel. Psychologists call this “flow”.
Seligman comes up with a little formula to measure our happiness quotient. He equates happiness to the sum of our genes for potential happiness, acted upon by our environment, and the choices we make as we respond to these. According to him, we are all born with a potential for happiness—some, however, having greater potential than others. I would hazard a guess that my siblings probably have genes for greater happiness potential than I do. They have a more positive attitude towards life and don’t seem to have as anxious a temperament as I have, catastrophising every negative experience. This potential, however, will remain as potential unless it is acted upon and developed. Thus, in theory, I can still live a happier life than them because of the different choices I might make.
Aside from our genetic potential, another given is our environment. However , we must all respond to this environment . We must all play the hand we are dealt with. We must make choices .Some claim happiness is all about choices. The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus called life itself the sum total of our choices. That puts the responsibility for happiness squarely where it belongs—on our shoulders.
When I came back to the country in 2004, I was full of anxieties including being frightened about being alone at night as I was in the UK. I remember confiding my need for company to a therapist. “These are the cards in the hand life deals you,” she told me. “You have to learn to accept these cards and play them the best way you know how.” Now, I live alone, travel alone, play golf alone. I do wish I had more friends, especially people with whom I can share my thoughts and experiences. However, by temperament as well as habit, unlike most Filipinos, I am neither warm nor friendly. My situation is not ideal but I have learned to embrace moments of loneliness and to enjoy my own company. All in all, I am quite content.
Can we then choose to be happy? It is the wr
ong question to ask. If the purpose of our lives is to seek happiness, we are barking up the wrong tree. If we approach it directly, we won’t find it, because happiness is not an objective. Instead, it is a reward. If you are in the business of making cars, you cannot say your objective is to make a profit. It is the wrong focus. Your objective is to make good cars, and if you meet your objective, you will be rewarded with profit. The same is true with happiness—those who seek it for itself will often fail but those who seek their purpose and do it well will be rewarded with a happy life.
Authentic happiness therefore focuses on volition: attitudes and values we consciously develop—including those towards our past such as a sense of gratitude for what we have, forgiveness for those who have wronged us, and being satisfied with what we have accomplished. Also included are our attitudes as we look into the future, such as a sense of optimism, together with a trust, and unfailing hope in what the future holds.
I have a little stick cartoon I asked my son Paul to draw, which is now in our bathroom. It’s called Paul the Pessimist. It’s about the time both of us were playing golf when he was about twelve and I was just starting to play on the course:
Paul:
When Turtles Come Home Page 20
