Jesus Was Happy and So Can You
Then the little children were brought to Jesus for Him to place His hands on them and pray for them. And the disciples rebuked those who brought them. But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And after He had placed His hands on them, He went on from there.
I just finished meditating before writing this blog. For years, it has been the norm pre-blog. Along with my driving to the staple SE PDX coffeeshop, having a free Saturday (ooof, how I need more of those), and some ongoing existential grappling.
One of the frustrations, however, of the grad school 50+ hour weekly grind which, let’s face it, many non grad students experience as well, is too little of margin to afford meditation (let alone genuine rest).
Which, in another sense, seems silly. Meditating is, in many ways, like running.
But instead of a high, you get enlightened/have a spiritual encounter/receive supernatural peace/etc.
Essentially, meditation is what you put into it and requires a little bit of effort done with a lot of consistency.
And boy oh boy, does our world not produce any kind of consistency.
My soon to be wifey and I found a reasonably inexpensive apartment in a nice part of Portland. We also have invested in buying a lot of lottery tickets.
I was in between counseling sessions when my phone blew up with nine new text messages, an amount that means either a catastrophic emergency or a wildly exciting development. My glass half empty mind, even when I knew it was the timeframe where the apartment would respond to us probably in the positive, assumed the texts were of the negative quality.
But sure enough, we were approved.
It is tiny as all get out, but it’ll be our first home.
Meanwhile I just started a gig delivering groceries to your door. Here’s to me not wrecking your car while also not dropping your eggs. As such, I am now entering the workforce of semi inconsistent hours. Night shifts, morning shifts, and then some 8 hour afternoon-night days followed by an 8 hour morning-afternoon day. Followed by soon to be 8 counseling clients in a day.
This development I am far from ecstatic about.
I’m a hobbit. I love to stay in my hobbit hole, drink my hobbit beer, listen to my hobbit podcasts, and firmly believe in the hobbit adage “don’t stick your nose into trouble and no trouble’ll come to you.”
One of the realizations I’ve discovered, upon beginning this grad school go, go, go journey is just how much adaptation is expected of younger people, especially when they are in process of “establishing.”
Whether it’s school, apprenticeship, church, MeetUp groups, part-time, part full-time (30ish), we are juggling a lot. Add to this the grid of our digital landscape and not only are we distracted all the time, we are disregulated all the time.
This I also know well because for at least a decade I’ve walked alongside kiddos who, thanks to DNA, plasticity, trauma, and everything in between, regularly feel disregulated.
In schools, we know to attend to these kids. At least on paper. We understand that they need extra love, extra time, extra understanding. They’re different than the normal kids who get the assignments, do them, go to recess, not normally cause trouble, and make underpaid teachers happy because they don’t need more from them.
But what if, as adults, more of us are walking around “disregulated” than we realize? What if the majority of us are anxious or depressed and it’s actually mostly contingent on our crazy world? What if our very societal system is designed for us to feel disregulated, off-kilter, and most tragically, unhappy?
In the Christian world, we hate the word happy. Let’s be honest; we are too self serious and we pursue “joy.” Insert eye roll here. You know, that thing that basically means soldier on, grit your teeth, smile especially at church, and ‘rejoice', always’ even when your life is in shambles.
Hyperbolic though that notion might be, I do believe that the Christian world’s traditional offering of “joy” to a disregulated, insecure, antsy, fidgety, and overloaded population of younger people is part of what is making a lot of folks leave. Or at least, to reconsider.
And yet, we need only look to the iconography of our very savior, Jesus, then compared him to the other non-savior savior, Buddha, to recognize why many are attracted to the big belly over the wooden cross.
I might have lost many in my own tribe by that last assertion. Understand this well; I’m not Buddhist. I prefer a personal God experience and inching toward a non-attached existence over and above a cosmic, universal spiritual experience and arriving at an enlightened detachment. I see Jesus interacting with humanity in a way I simply don’t with the Buddha.
However.
Buddhism is better at doing spiritual-y things than Christanity. Yes, a sweeping and not entirely fair conjecture, but let’s be real: how many wars have started over Buddhism? How many Buddhists have stormed a capitol? How many Buddhist priests commit suicide due to the pressure of celebrity priest-dom?
Simply put, I think Buddhists simply do Buddhism better than many Christians do Christianity.
There’s many reasons I believe this is the case; Buddhism is rarely a dominant religion in economically or militarily dominant countries for starters. As such, half-assing Buddhism is far less common than half-assing Christianity. Furthermore, and adding from the previous point, Buddhism is all in the practice. What you believe about enlightenment, nirvana, the noble truths, etc. is important but irrelevant if you don’t actually practice the thing.
Last, and this is sort of subtle and a bit of a stretch but…
Buddha looks happy in icons. Whether he is the large cousin of Santa with the beer-iest of bellies or the skinny, more serious yet still peaceful meditating sort, he just looks pleasant.
It’s hard to be mad at him, if we are being honest.
In the west, what are our primary icons, symbols, and totems of Jesus? Well, for one, is the cross.
Again, this’ll ruffle feathers, but hear me out; we have over emphasized the “passion” of Christ at the expense of the person of Christ. One of the reasons I dislike the overwhelming emphasis on penal substitution or, for the non-theology nerds out there, the idea of us + sin = hell but inserting Jesus into the equation ie us + Jesus = heaven, is we live in far too much of a self-serious manner. We think about sinning less more than loving more. We are consumed by how we fall short over and above how we are already held by the divine.
Chief pharisee of this faulty form of Jesus following?
Me, 1,000%.
I love the cross. I love the suffering Jesus. I love the idea of martyrdom.
Working hard on myself, pushing myself to have more victory over vices, pleading with Jesus over needy prayers involved with self-aggrandizement and self-pity?
I love it, give me more, I’ll take a venti of that please.
Furthermore, the Bible and Gospel account is, in fact, chalk full of suffering, of responding to suffering, overcoming or asking for forgiveness regarding sin, etc.
But what if all of these swirling thoughts actually contribute to the disregulation I mentioned earlier? What if the 50+ hours of school/work/grind/etc, on top of the digital-social matrix, sprinkled with the political anarchy and topped off with the religious extremist voices seemingly always in our feeds, lead us to futility? Restlessness?
An inability to encounter Christ, let alone, ourselves?
What can we do to fix it?
Enter meditation.
“Hi there, welcome to today’s lectio divine meditation on such and such biblical passage.” Alexis and I know this well. It’s the sound of this nice sounding British guy I’d love to have a theology class with followed by a large pint of a fine brew.
It’s this app on my phone called Reflect. Aptly named, that’s for sure.
Within the app lies multiple means to meditate, Jesus style. Simply put, there are sections on the Bible, imaginative prayer, reflections specifically targeting anxiety and depression, etc.
As a mental health intern and Jesus follower, I love it. There’s nothing trite, Christianese, or phony. It’s straightforward, in a beautiful manner.
Because of the huge emphasis on the Bible, bolstered by the emphasis of teaching the Bible well, Christian imagination in the west traditionally sucks. We blabber about verses, blabber about translations, blabber about theology. Overall, we blabber too much and breathe too little.
In a counseling session with a 13 year old from a highly Christian household, I taught him about deep breathing and how it soothes a deeply anxious body.
Man, it was weird to feel his pushback even at that young of an age. The idea of breathing, emptying, embracing stillness, and overall renewal… we Jesus folks get freaked out. Sounds woo-y, New Age like, cultish.
And 100% mainline Christian expression of embodied Christianity for 1500 years pre Reformation.
While to be fair, many secular and irreligious people are just as trash in their imagination too. And, bizarrely, hesitant about breathing, reflecting, emptying, the whole nine.
The matrix I mentioned earlier, this context we are all in now, is designed to have us never meditate. Period.
Our alarm clocks on our phone, emails on our phone, social media feeds on our phones, our constant scanning of our phone, all designed to not shut our minds the hell up.
However.
Jesus was happy and so can you.
Sure, he had a hell of a fresh start because He didn’t have a smart phone but still, He gave us roadmaps to do this meditation thing.
Too busy of a schedule of emailing about preaching in this town, ZOOMing over healing the sick in another town, etc?
Retreat into the mountains. Get the heck away. Pray to your Father, your daddy, your Abba.
I believe where the workforce is at now, with many people my age outright refusing to work certain jobs, is not solely due to laziness (although, it’s partially that).
We are burnt out. Exhausted. Drained. Confused. Perplexed.
But I believe, most of all, lost. Disconnected not only from God and ourselves but even to each other.
Meditation, “quiet time,” yoga, silence, hell, just staring at lightly rushing water, for a simple 5 minute (or more or even less) duration, and we will get more in synch.
Remember who we are.
Life, to me, is a remembering of our own home. According to the enneagram, the holy idea per my type is “origin.” In layman’s terms, the best work I will ever do is reminding people who they belong to.
And ultimately, our family, with the first of us being a benevolent, not angry, kind, silly, not overly serious trinitarian God, and then followed by broken but beautiful vessels called humans, is where we fit in. This is where it all started.
Not in our work, our school, our feeds, our money, our fame, our thoughts.
Nothing external. Always internal which is always followed by the ethereal.
When we meditate, we simply recall what the world is designed to have us forget; we are the Beloved of God. We are His, and He is ours.
Jesus was happy. If he wasn’t, little ones wouldn’t have ran to him to be blessed. Instead, for some reason, they flocked to him. They knew he was a Good Shepherd who smiles at His sheep.
And He smiles at you too. Me, as well.
I sure know I need it.