Happiness

I'm teaching a seminar on the short story this semester, and one of my students recently asked "Aren't we ever going to read any happy stories?" That led us to a discussion of the fact that happy material doesn't usually make for great fiction; to paraphrase the writer Janet Burroway, fiction is about trouble. No trouble, no story to tell.

Not long after this, in my poetry workshop, we talked about the techniques that allow positive emotions to be expressed in ways that are interesting and complex rather than simple and cliche. One of my students asked "Do professional poets even think about positive emotions?" So I referred him to the poem "Happiness," by Jane Kenyon, which begins with these lines:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

The fact that Kenyon wrote about the inevitability of happiness while she was dying of leukemia adds a whole layer of meaning to the poem. Even if you don't know that, though, the connection between happiness and the story of the prodigal son is a beautiful surprise. Who would turn away happiness simply because it disappeared awhile? Who would turn away their child, no matter how long he'd been gone?

As I think I've mentioned before, I always hated the story of the prodigal son when I was a kid--I spent a lot of my energy trying to be good, to do the right thing and not get in trouble. It seemed egregiously unfair to me that the irresponsible kid would end up as the guest of honor at a welcome-home party thrown by his father, and his more responsible brother was also expected to celebrate the return. Of course, all this was before I became a parent myself. Before I knew that it's impossible not to love your child, or to feel relief that they're safe at home, especially after they've been gone for awhile.

As an adult, I understand that this is the way the world works. People make mistakes--or perhaps they just do things we don't agree with, things that disappoint us--and we either forgive them and move on with them in our lives, or we hold a grudge and push them away. Those are our options. Sometimes we try to play the middle ground, keeping them in our lives under specific conditions, but that never leads to anything like a real relationship. We're just pushing them away without exactly saying so.

There's a student at my university, a beautiful, smart, eternally optimistic young woman who's deeply involved with our Campus Ministry group. I think she may be the best example of Christianity I've ever known. She's also gay. This past week, she gave an oral presentation about her Senior Thesis project, which will focus on the ELCA's recent vote to allow people in same-sex relationships to serve as clergy. She'll be exploring the opinions of people on both sides of the issue, and I encouraged her to explore the middle territory as well--"the crap position" as I called it. Those people who say "I won't vote to exclude you from the church because, as a Christian, I'm supposed to love everybody. But I think you're a sinner, so I'll love you the same way I love people who cheat on their spouses or beat their children." In short, people who view love as an absence of action, rather than action itself.

"You mean people like my mom," she said.

She laughed when she said this, and her classmates laughed with her. But I couldn't imagine how painful it must be to know that your mother loves you in spite of who you are, not because of it.
There are so many things to love about this girl. She's exactly the kind of person I hope my kids will grow up to be.

All anybody wants in the world is to know there's a place where they're loved completely, for all their gifts and limitations--to know the joy of unconditional acceptance. I have to believe the prodigal would never have come back home if he hadn't been fairly certain that he could count on his father's forgiveness. He knew he was loved; he knew he'd be welcomed when he returned, just as we welcome happiness into our lives whenever (and wherever) it appears. To do otherwise makes no sense.