The Happiness Project (28 page)

These suggestions were intriguing, and I was reading stacks of books about various figures, but I didn’t feel a particular affinity for anyone until I came across Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I’d become interested in Saint Thérèse after I saw her praised in Thomas Merton’s memoir
The Seven Storey Mountain
. I’d been so surprised to see the cranky, monkish Merton write reverently about the sappily named “Little Flower” that I was curious to read her spiritual memoir,
Story of a Soul.
That book fascinated me so much that, without quite realizing it, I developed a mini-obsession with Saint Thérèse. I bought one book about her, and then another, and then another. I reread
Story of a Soul
several times.

One day, as he saw me trying to cram my latest Saint Thérèse biography onto the shelf (between
The Hidden Face of St. Thérèse
and
Two Portraits of St. Thérèse
), Jamie asked with a note of disbelief in his voice, “How many books about Saint Thérèse are you going to buy?” There are few topics that would interest Jamie less than the life of a Catholic saint.

I looked with surprise at the shelf and counted the biographies, histories, and analyses of Saint Thérèse. I’d bought
seventeen,
and I’d read every single one. I also had a videotape and a used book that was nothing but Saint Thérèse photographs—for which I’d paid
$75
(“Indulge in a modest splurge”). Light dawned. I
had
a spiritual master.
Saint Thérèse
was my spiritual master. But why was I attracted to this Catholic saint, a French woman who had died at the age of twenty-four after having spent nine years cloistered with some twenty nuns—Saint Thérèse, the “Little Flower,” known for her “Little Way”?

After I thought about it for five seconds, it became perfectly obvious.

I’d started my happiness project to test my hypothesis that I could become happier by making small changes in my ordinary day. I didn’t want to reject the natural order of my life—by moving to Walden Pond or Antarctica, say, or taking a sabbatical from my husband. I wasn’t going to give up toilet paper or shopping or experiment with hallucinogens. I’d already switched careers. Surely, I’d hoped, I could change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.

Everyone’s happiness project is different. Some people might feel the urge to make a radical transformation. I was vicariously exhilarated by these dramatic adventures, but I knew they weren’t the path to happiness for me. I wanted to take little steps to be happier as I lived my ordinary life, and that was very much in the spirit of Saint Thérèse.

Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon, France, in 1873. Before her parents’ marriage, her father had tried to become a monk and her mother a nun, but both had been rejected by religious orders; her five sisters who survived childhood all became nuns, and Thérèse became a saint. Thérèse tried to enter a Carmelite convent at Lisieux at age fifteen (two of her sisters were already there), but the bishop wouldn’t permit it because she was too young. She traveled to Rome to ask Pope Leo XIII’s permission personally, but the pope stood by the bishop’s decision. Then the bishop changed his mind. When Thérèse was in the convent, her “Mother” was her older sister Pauline, who instructed Thérèse to write the story of her childhood, which became the basis of
Story of a Soul.
In 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Thérèse died an agonizing death from tuberculosis.

While she lived, no one outside her family and convent had heard of Thérèse. After she died, an edited version of her memoir was sent to Carmelite convents and Church officials as an obituary notice. Just two thousand copies were printed initially, but the popularity of this “Springtime Story of a Little White Flower,” as she’d characteristically titled it, spread with astonishing rapidity; just two years after her death, her grave had to be placed under guard to protect it from pilgrims seeking relics. (It’s hard to understand how such a short, modest account of childhood and youth could have such spiritual power—yet of course I feel it myself.)

Accordingly, in a suspension of the ordinary requirements, Thérèse got a fast-track canonization in 1925 and became “Saint Thérèse” just twenty-eight years after her death. To mark the centenary of her death, in 1997 Pope John Paul II made her a Doctor of the Church, the elite category of thirty-three supersaints that includes Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

To me, the fascinating aspect of her story was Thérèse’s achievement of sainthood through the perfection of small, ordinary acts. That was her “Little Way”—holiness achieved in a little way by little souls rather than by great deeds performed by great souls. “Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by…every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”

There was nothing outwardly striking about Thérèse’s life or her death. She lived an obscure existence, much of it without stepping foot outside her convent, and though she was born just one year before Churchill (while she was dying in the convent infirmary, he was fighting as part of the Malakand Field Force in British India), she seems like a figure from the distant, quaint past. Thérèse didn’t overcome a dysfunctional family or monumental difficulties; she had loving parents and a tender, indulgent upbringing in prosperous circumstances. Although Thérèse confided in
Story of a Soul
that “I want to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a doctor of the Church, a martyr…I should like to die on the battlefields in defence of the Church,” she didn’t perform outstanding feats or undertake daring adventures; indeed, except for her trip to petition the pope, she stayed in her neighborhood and with her immediate family for her whole life. She wanted to suffer and to spill her blood for Jesus, and she did, but in a
little
way—not in a glorious confrontation in war or at the stake but by dying in agony, spitting up blood, as a pitiful tuberculosis victim.

As Pope Pius XI emphasized in the Bull of Canonization, Thérèse achieved heroic virtue “without going beyond the common order of things.” (Reading about Thérèse taught me a lot about Bulls of Canonization and all the mechanics of saint making.) I couldn’t aspire to Thérèse’s saintliness, but I could follow her by aspiring to perfection within the common order of my day. We expect heroic virtue to look flashy—moving to Uganda to work with AIDS victims, perhaps, or documenting the plight of homeless people in Detroit. Thérèse’s example shows that ordinary life, too, is full of opportunities for worthy, if inconspicuous, virtue.

One of my favorite examples: Thérèse intensely disliked one of her fellow nuns, Teresa of Saint Augustine, whom Thérèse described, without identifying her, as “a Sister who has the faculty of displeasing me in everything, in her ways, her words, her character.” Instead of avoiding her, Thérèse sought out this nun at every turn and treated her “as if I loved her best of all”—so successfully that this sister once asked Thérèse, “Would you tell me…what attracts you so much toward me; every time you look at me, I see your smile?”

After Thérèse’s death, when this disagreeable nun gave her testimony during the process of Thérèse’s beatification, she said smugly, “At least I can say this much for myself: during her life I made her really happy.” Teresa of Saint Augustine never knew that
she
was the unlikable sister mentioned in
Story of a Soul
until thirty years later, when the chaplain, in a fit of exasperation, told her the truth. It’s a little thing, of course, but anyone who has ever suffered from a whiny coworker, a narcissistic roommate, or interfering in-laws can appreciate the heavenly virtue that befriending such a person would require.

Because of my happiness research, one of the passages in
Story of a Soul
that most struck me was Thérèse’s observation that “for the love of God and my Sisters (so charitable toward me) I take care to appear happy and especially
to be so.
” Thérèse succeeded so well at seeming effortlessly happy, and her laughter came so easily, that many of her fellow nuns didn’t recognize her virtue. One sister said, “Sister Thérèse gets no merit for practicing virtue; she has never had to struggle for it.” Near the end of Thérèse’s life, another sister observed that Thérèse made visitors to the infirmary laugh so much that “I believe she will die laughing, she is so happy”—at a time when Thérèse was in both secret spiritual torment and excruciating physical pain.

Buddhists talk about “skillful” and “unskillful” emotions, and this has the right connotation of effort and competence. People assume that a person who
acts
happy must
feel
happy, but although it’s in the very nature of happiness to seem effortless and spontaneous, it often takes great skill.

I set out to imitate Thérèse by doing a better job of acting happy when I knew that my happiness would make someone else happy. I didn’t want to be fake, but I could make an effort to be less critical. I could look for ways to be honestly enthusiastic—about foods that weren’t necessarily my favorite things to eat, activities that weren’t my first choice, or movies, books, and performances with which I could find fault. Usually I could find something to praise.

Also, I saw that I needed to make a bigger show of my happiness. For example, when my Kennedy biography came out, various family members asked questions that, in retrospect, I realize were meant to elicit responses from me such as “I’m so thrilled! It’s so exciting to see it on the shelves! Everything is going great! I’m so happy!” But I have a perfectionist, dissatisfied, fretful, worrying nature, and I’m not easily thrilled. Looking back, I realize that the loving thing to do would have been to act happy not only for myself but also
for them.
I know how happy I am when one of them is very happy. How happy I was to hear Eliza say excitedly to my mother, as they were setting up an elaborate tea party, “Bunny, this is
so fun!
” and to hear my mother say, “Yes, it
is!
”

As often happened with the happiness project, it was only once I vowed to stop criticizing and carping that I realized the strength of my instinct to criticize and carp. But for the love of my family and friends, so loving toward me, I tried to appear happy and especially
to be so.

A worthy model closer to home than Thérèse was my father. Nicknamed “Smilin’ Jack Craft” by my sister’s friends, one of his most lovable traits is that he is—or, I should say, he
acts
—unflaggingly cheerful and enthusiastic, and this makes a tremendous difference to everyone else’s happiness. One day not too long ago, when we were visiting Kansas City, my father came home from work and my mother told him, “We’re having pizza for dinner.” My father answered, “Wonderful! Wonderful! Do you want me to go pick it up?” I knew my father well enough to know that he’d answer that way even if he didn’t want pizza for dinner and even if the last thing he felt like doing was heading back out the door. This kind of unswerving
enthusiasm looks easy, but when I tried to adopt that attitude myself, I realized how difficult it is.
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

Acting happy and, even more,
being
happy is challenging. Furthermore—and it took me a long time to accept this perverse fact—many people don’t want to be happy or at least don’t want to seem happy (and if they act as if they’re not happy, they’re not going to feel happy). I’m not including depressed people in this category. Depression is a serious condition outside the happy/unhappy continuum. Whether in response to a particular situation, such as a job loss or the death of a spouse, or an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, or some other cause, depression is its own beast. But many nondepressed people are unhappy, and some seem to want to be that way.

Why? It turns out there are a lot of reasons.

Happiness, some people think, isn’t a worthy goal; it’s a trivial, American preoccupation, the product of too much money and too much television. They think that being happy shows a lack of values, and that being unhappy is a sign of depth.

At a party, a guy said to me, “Everyone’s too worried about being fulfilled, they’re so self-indulgent. It’s there in the Declaration of Independence, and people think they should be
happy.
Happiness isn’t the point.”

“Well,” I said, “now that our country has achieved a certain standard of prosperity, people set their goals on higher things. Isn’t it admirable that people want to be happy? If happiness isn’t the point, what is?”

“Working for goals like social justice, peace, or the environment is more important than happiness.”

“But,” I ventured, “you think it’s important to help other people, to work for the benefit of others, and of course it is—but why? Why worry about children living in poverty or malaria in Africa unless, at bottom, it’s because you want people to be healthy, safe, and prosperous—and therefore happy? If their happiness matters, doesn’t yours? Anyway,” I added, “studies show that happier people are more likely to help other people. They’re more interested in social problems. They do more volunteer work
and contribute more to charity. Plus, as you’d expect, they’re less preoccupied with their personal problems. So being happy actually makes you more likely to work for the environment or whatever.”

He laughed derisively, and I decided that the proper happiness project response was to change the subject rather than get in an argument. Nevertheless, he’d raised the most serious criticism of happiness: it’s not right to be happy when there is so much suffering in the world.

Refusing to be happy because someone else is unhappy, though, is a bit like cleaning your plate because babies are starving in India. Your unhappiness isn’t making anyone else happier—in fact, quite the opposite, given the fact that happier people are more likely to act altruistically. That’s the circle of the Second Splendid Truth: