Lord Jesus’) or Holy Ghost (though very few pray to him because he is so hard to envisage), or any of the saints (‘Dear St Anthony, help me find my lost sentence’), or Pan, I suppose, if you’re a pantheist (‘Dear Lord Pan, help me find my lost virility’), or Mother Mary (‘Help me get pregnant’), but with all these what you are doing is using an intermediary to connect you. Prayer is easier than meditation, which encourages self-centredness and too great a sense of ‘Look at me, meditating!’ You seldom fall asleep when praying for others, as you do when meditating. You just stop when concentration fails.
Perfection is impossible to achieve, of course. But we can try, and angels will attend us, and we can take pleasure from the gentle air of their beating wings.
A Joke: Man Prays to God
‘Dear God, let me win the lottery!’ The voice is piercing, shrill and desperate, amongst all the others pleading to God for help. It goes on for week after week, Wednesday after Saturday after Wednesday: ‘Let me win the lottery!’
The Almighty does his best to ignore the voice, but finally he can’t stand it any more. He speaks like thunder from the clouds. ‘Okay,’ says God, ‘tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway. Buy a ticket.’
The Major Enemies of Happiness
Forget guilt, forget anxiety. There are real enemies of happiness out there, real tribulations, which are powerful and not self-inflicted. Things that just happen.
Difficulties Along the Way
Old age
Illness
Bereavement
Isolation
Debt
Bitterness
Old Age
Make no mistake about it, money helps. It makes most troubles easier, while not necessarily solving problems.
Failing money, friends help – as does a long record of good behaviour and kindness to others. The comfort of strangers, if sought, is often there. What you put into life at the beginning you can take out with dividends at the end.
Old age seen from the outside can look horrific. But if you’re in there in that derelict body it’s still you; there are still pleasures and ambitions left to you. You are Ivan in the Russian story by Solzhenitsyn, the man in the prison camp who guarded his piece of dry bread successfully all day, and when he finally ate it, enjoyed incomparable pleasure. Seen from the outside, it was dreadful; from the inside, triumphant. May it be like that for you.
Illness
Illness is bad. But it can be very interesting, especially if it’s your own. Symptoms are fascinating. It’s another world, a bubble one, perhaps, and precarious, but those in it have already found a way to live with it. The skill of physicians and surgeons is inspiring. As is other people’s selflessness. The walls of your experience may narrow to the width of a hospital bed, but it is still a stage, this is your drama and you are the centre of it. A good performance will get good reviews. Understand and please your audience: the visitors who may or may not cluster round your bed; at the very least the volunteer who brings round the library books or the man who wheels the trolley of newspapers and junk food.
‘How are you today?’ they ask. Well, tell them. That’s pleasure in itself. If ill enough, you are excused selflessness and martyrdom.
And if you are temporarily in a hospital ward, try not to hate it. Go with the flow. The social life of the ward is rich and strange, never mind the routine. People elaborate their symptoms and treatments with a relish others share. They support and understand each other. They joke about death. The ward is a mini-tribe, sharing experiences.
In the private ward you have your comfort but you can be lonely, and another patient is more likely to come to your aid than a nurse. Sometimes money is not the universal solution.
When Children Are Ill
There is nothing good to be said about the serious illness of a child and not much comfort to be offered to the parents involved, other than to try to shift the perspective, see the small body as too frail and weak to support the intense existence of the mind and soul of this particular child. See how the latter exists, how clearly and powerfully it becomes apparent even as the body fails. The inner being makes itself clear – let the parents try to gain strength from it. Difficult, because parental distress is based in one of the most powerful instincts we have: to protect and save the children. The mind has little defence in these circumstances. The soul has. It is strong in the child. Those who suffer with children will understand the concept.
You can pray, though your sense of a benign universe will be somewhat blunted. That in itself is unsettling. The prayers would have to overcome your sense that you are picked out by fate for cruel and unjust punishment.
And it might help you, selflessly, to let the child go, to not struggle pointlessly for the continuation of its existence.
You could try Lourdes. I haven’t been there, but they do say that a community of the like-minded, on the edges of despair, within which you don’t have to explain yourself, with standards you can adapt to, however idiosyncratic and peculiar they may seem to the healthy and flourishing rationalist you once were lucky enough to be, can be a great comfort. You’re with the tribe you have inherited. It might seem grotty compared to the one you were born into, but it is a tribe.
Bereavement and Isolation
We’ll get on to these universal enemies later, and in more detail, when we are feeling stronger. I can be quite cheerful about bereavement, there are cures for isolation, and as for debt, well…
Debt
It’s probably your own fault. You had a vision of yourself which did not accord with reality. You upgraded yourself to a wealthier sort of person than you actually were. It happens. You should have listened to the Voice of Guilt. You have my every sympathy. Earn your way out of it.
Bitterness
Very little in life is fair. Some of us are born with longer legs than others. Some of us are born into poverty in the Sahara desert, others into prosperity in leafy suburbs.
It’s
