Buying Happiness

I love cartoons. They can say so much with a sketch and a brief caption. I have a desk calendar at home of New Yorker cartoons. A few weeks ago there was a cartoon of a man lying on his death bed. Sitting at his bedside was a woman, presumably his wife. The man was speaking. The caption read, “I wish I’d bought more crud.” Actually, “crud” was not the word he used, but some of you might think the actual word used (a four letter word beginning with cr) is not appropriate for a church service.

What makes this cartoon painfully funny, of course, is that no one says that at the end of his or her life. And yet we so often live our lives as if buying more crud was our purpose in life.

I have officiated at dozens of memorial services. I have had the special privilege of meeting with people in the months and weeks before they die. So often these days we know we are dying and we have time in the final weeks to look back on our lives. As people talk about what has been most precious and most meaningful in their lives, they never talk about the year they worked hundreds of hours of overtime. They don’t talk about the property they bought that went way up in value.

When I meet with the family of someone who has just died it is always a special and blessed time. It is healing to look back at what they loved in their spouse, or parent, or sibling, or child. People always have touching memories to share. No one has ever said to me that what they loved about dad was that he made a lot of money and was able to buy them all the things they ever wanted. And for sure no one ever says that they remember fondly all the times mom or dad was gone in the evenings because he or she was working late to make more money to buy more stuff. No, people remember times they shared together.

Now that I have more life to look back upon than to look forward to, I have thought about the precious times of my own life. Like so many people, I’ve lived through good financial times and times that were pretty lean. And yet, the times in my life I value most have nothing to do with my income. In my life, in fact, there has been a negative correlation. Some of the very best times have been periods when my income was very low. As I look back at the periods of my life that have the greatest meaning, they are all times when I was on an idealistic adventure. There was going to British Columbia when I was 25 and spending a year working at near minimum wage on a little weekly newspaper. Later, there were the years in Oregon struggling to make a living as the publisher of the small newspaper we owned. There was the time I took a leave of absence and went to Peru to be an advisor to a newspaper in that developing country. And, of course, there was entering seminary within a couple of weeks of my fiftieth birthday. How crazy was that! Yet serving here as your minister has been the most rewarding of all my adventures. (And thank you for paying me a comfortable salary!)

Now, I’ll be honest. There have been a few times when I have wondered whether I should have stayed in civil service. I would have made a lot more money. I would be able to retire very comfortably right now or in a year or two. We would have our house paid off by now. Yet deep down I know that would have been a kind of hell for me. In my life, the “crazy” decisions were actually the sanest.

Think about your own life. Our reading this morning talks about what people say they would do if they had 24 hours to live. Let’s ask a different question. If you knew you had 24 hours to live and you had a day to look back upon your life, what parts of your life would you most treasure? What would people remember most fondly about you at your memorial service?
Does money have anything to do with what you and others would most treasure about your life? Probably not.

Interestingly enough, academic economists and psychologists have been paying a lot of attention to the relationship of between money and happiness in the last decade. It turns out that our grandmothers were right: money does not buy happiness.

For example, for many years people who do surveys have been asking people about how satisfied they are with their lives. In the last half century or so, Americans have experienced a huge increase in economic well being. In the period after the Second World War to 1970, for example, America experienced a per capita economic growth of around 60 percent. Did it make us any happier? No. The number of people who describe themselves as happy stayed absolutely the same.

Now, there is a dark side to these numbers. One sad truth is that you and I really do worry about the proverbial Joneses. We feel better if we are doing better than our neighbors and friends, and badly if we are doing a little worse — no matter how we are doing on any absolute scale. A lot of how we feel about ourselves economically is, sadly, a matter of how we see ourselves in relationship to others. This is a pernicious fact. We are enslaved by seeing our selves in relationship to others. Regrettably, most of us feel bad if we feel we are doing worse economically than our peers. It does not matter that we are living better than 99 percent of the people who have ever lived and living in far greater comfort than our parents and grandparents.

Part of achieving financial freedom has nothing to do with money. A lot of financial freedom has to do with freeing ourselves from the debilitating anxiety of comparing our situation with our neighbors. It is so easy to fall prey to this. I live comfortably. Yet most of the people I compare myself with, my close friends in college, have done better than I have. Every once in a while I catch myself feeling badly about this. This is just crazy. By any reasonable or historical standard I am doing just fine. Are my friends who have more money happier? No.

There are other fascinating findings in the research on what actually makes people happy. One of them is that relationships matter. We should not be surprised. We are deeply relational creatures. The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our relationships. These relationships include, of course, our relationships to our spouse or partner and within our family and circle of friends. But they go much further. We need community, including religious community. People who attend church regularly are happier than people who attend occasionally. Those who never attend are the least happy. People who donate money to churches and nonprofit organizations are happier than those who don’t. Think about that. People who give money away to institutions they care about are happier than people who don’t. Keeping more for ourselves makes us less happy than sharing generously. It isn’t just more blessed to give than to receive in some metaphysical sense. Research shows that giving money away to things that truly matter to us brings us more happiness than keeping it.

The research is clear: the quality of our relationships matters more than money. Despite what our consumer society spends billions of dollars trying to tell us, buying more stuff does not buy happiness.

It isn’t that the pursuit of financial rewards and the stuff it buys is intrinsically evil. It simply does not work. That new car and fancier house and big screen TV and new pair of skis promise what they can never deliver. Soon after the purchase the thrill is gone. We are truly no better off with more stuff.

Now, I am not advocating an ascetic existence. I am not advocating the radical proposal that we give away everything. I think the traditional religious teachings against materialism are also wrong. Poverty is just awful. Poverty is dehumanizing and soul destroying. Anyone who has been unemployed for a long period, who has struggled to have enough money to meet his or her family’s needs, who has to worry if the car will make it and how to scrape together money to fix the furnace will tell you that poverty is not the answer.

What we need is a sense of what truly matters. We need a sense of how much is enough. We need it not only on the individual level, but at the social and global level. When millions of people pursue the self defeating idolatry of material and financial success, the result is global disaster. The looming disaster of global warming is the latest example. The pursuit of consumer goods not only destroys our souls, it destroys life on our planet.
The way we are living today is simply not sustainable. The consumer madness all around us not only threatens to destroy our souls by tempting us to waste our lives in pursuit of trivial junk, consumerism threatens to destroy the very sources of life.

So where does all of this leave us? On the one hand, the compulsive pursuit of more junk is clearly not the answer. Each of us knows that. That is why we are here. We know from experience that worshipping the almighty dollar is not the answer. On the other hand, I don’t think any of us is likely to give away all of our possessions and live lives of complete poverty. That path is based on what I believe is the wrongheaded notion that what is “spiritual” is somehow opposed to what is “material.” There is a long religious tradition of opposing the physical with the other worldly, of advocating physical suffering and rejecting the things of this world. I don’t think becoming a monk is the answer. I don’t believe that physical pleasures are evil.

I believe that this world is the only world we have. I like running water and sanitation. I like central heat in the winter. I have lived with worries about having enough money to make it to the end of the month. It didn’t build character. It didn’t make me more spiritual.

No, the challenge for us is to find a middle way. The research on what actually makes people feel happy and fulfilled is pretty clear: enough is enough. More is not better.

Money is power. Money allows us to do things and to make things happen. A central spiritual question for us who live in affluent times is how we can make money serve and enhance what we hold sacred. How can we use our money and not let our money use us?

The answer, of course, is to use our money on those things that really matter. The challenge is to bring our financial lives into alignment with what we really care about. This is another way of saying that how we spend our money is a matter of how faithful we are to what we hold sacred.
Going back to the image of the cartoon of the fellow on his death bed, what do we want to say as we look back on our lives? I don’t think any of us wants to say that we wish we had bought more junk.

I think you and I want to be able to say that we lived the best we could. I know that I want to say that I was faithful to my ideals.

Money won’t buy happiness. Ah, but it isn’t that simple.

Actually, money can do a lot. How we spend our money expresses who we are and what truly matters. Money is one way that we make connections in life. Our money is our energy going out into the world. We can spend our money and energy on what matters, or waste it on stuff that won’t make any difference in the long run.

Ironically, money can indeed help each of us find fulfillment and happiness. And the money that will bring us the most happiness and the most fulfillment is the money that we give away, the money we spend connecting to what we love the most.
There is a old saying that we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. We make our selves rich by what we give away. All the great religious traditions tell us this. Now scientific research tells us the same thing.

So, in the end, it turns out that grandma was not completely right. She was right when she said that money won’t buy happiness. The truth is that the money we hoard and the money we spend on stuff does not buy us happiness.

The money that we give away wisely and lovingly does bring us happiness. And the money we give in love helps to bring us more than superficial happiness; it helps to bring us a deep peace that comes from using our energy in the service of something greater than our selves.
On my death bed I hope to look back and say that I was faithful. I pray that I don’t wish I had bought more junk. Like you, I have too much stuff right now.

May each of us say, with thanks and love, that we were wise and faithful. May each of us buy some happiness by giving generously to what we love.

Amen.

This is the time when we normally take the offering. I usually say something to the effect that this community is sustained by our generosity. It is. I usually go on to say that if you are visiting for the first or second time that you should feel no obligation to put something in the basket today, that you are our guest and that we are honored to have you with us.

Today is different. Today is a reverse offering. Today the baskets will pass with dollar bills already in them. Take a dollar. Put it in a special place. If you are a visitor today, take a dollar as well. Today I want to challenge each of us to think about how we can connect to what we love through generosity. Now, a dollar isn’t much. This is a special dollar, though. Think about what you would like to give some money to. I urge you to give away this dollar, and maybe even some of its cousins sitting in your wallet.

I also invite you to talk among yourselves at coffee hour. Share your ideas. Share them with me. Send this special JUC idealistic dollar into the world and let it do some good. Let it carry your compassion and idealism.