By Rev. Tom Keyte

The title comes from the first line of Stevenson’s
`The Celestial Surgeon’. I wonder if you have ever thought of
it like that? That happiness is an obligation we have to other
people and to God.

I don’t mean for a moment that we should all become
incurable optimists, or cultivate the kind of fixed grin that
irritates other people unspeakably. Nor do I mean that we should
go about telling people that everything is for the best in this
best of all possible worlds.

I realise, of course, that it is possible that your
circumstances are not in the least conducive to happiness. An
impossible boss, a job you hate, the fact that your health is
not all it might be, tension in the home, a host of causes may
militate very strongly against happiness.

But the happiness I am talking about does not depend
to any great extent on circumstances at all. Stevenson is a very
good example of what I mean. He battled all through his life against
chronic ill-health, but his most cheerful writing was done in
the times of his greatest weakness. Somebody went to see him one
day, and remarked, `How sickness must colour your life.’ It is
not recorded whether he threw a pillow at the visitor, but his
reply is worth noting, `Yes, it does, and I propose to choose
the colours.’

I am thinking about the kind of happiness that Jesus
knew, a happiness which had nothing superficial about it but went
down to the very depths. Even on the night before his cross he
could speak to his fearful friends about his joy, which he wished
them to share.

At times like these, when there is so much to depress
and discourage, this is the attitude which, as Stevenson suggests,
it is our obligation to contribute to our common life, to others.

It is not easily come by. Certainly it does not come
by making happiness our aim in life. The search for happiness
shows about the lowest winning average of any human quest. Phil
May’s cartoon in London `Punch’ sums it up. A burly coster from
the East End has taken his small son to the circus for the first
time. The boy is rather over-awed, and is not enjoying himself
as his father thinks he should. So his father is giving him a
slap on the side of the head, saying, `Be happy, cantcha!’ Some
of the most miserable people in the world are those who are trying
hardest to be happy.

The fact is that happiness is rather a sort of by-product
of something else altogether. It does not depend on favourable
circumstances. It is the product of a faith in God, that there
is a purpose in life to give oneself to which is the biggest and
most satisfying thing a person can do with life, and getting one’s
shoulder under somebody else’s burden and giving them a hand with
it.

That must have been what R.L.S. had in mind when
he spoke of happiness as a task, an obligation to other people,
rather than something we seek for ourselves.