You Are Called to Be Happy
Day 31
In the chapter ‘Better Than I Used to Be but Far from Well’, Buechner recounts a significant dream he had about his mother after she died.
“The dream was set in the bedroom of her apartment on 79th Street, only the room had been cleared at last of all the years of her accumulating. The furniture, the pictures, the things under beds and in closets, the clothes, the boxes, the old letters-they were all gone. It was superbly empty now. The walls and ceiling had been repainted white. The floors had been waxed and polished. The dusty venetian blinds were gone, and the sunlight came sliding in through the windows and made clear, geometric shapes on the bare walls. All the dramas that had taken place in that room were over and done with. All the life my mother had lived there and the death she had died there were over and done with too. I thought how now there could be new tenants there, new life. Then suddenly my mother was there, and my brother, Jamie, and I were there with her. My brother reached out and patted her as she went by as if to show me she was real. She was paying no particular attention to either of us. She looked very well, in her thirties or early forties maybe. She was getting ready to go out some place, and all of her energies were being devoted to that end. She was fussing about her hair, her clothes. She said she had to meet a woman somewhere and didn't want to be late. She even named the woman, who was somebody I knew she'd particularly disliked for over sixty years, which helps me believe that maybe the Kingdom of Heaven was where she was and is. That's all I can remember her saying, and that's about all there was to the dream.
“It didn't seem a very important dream to me at the time, but what it said to me was important. I think it said that my mother was somehow back in business. It said that there was no need to worry about her anymore. When she was alive, the rule she laid down-all the more devastating of course by never saying it in so many words was that my brother and I had no right to be happy as long as she was unhappy. The dream said that was over with now. She had her business to get back to. My brother and I had ours.
“The most important part of the dream, in a funny way, was the recognition of the rule: You have no right to be happy unless I am happy. You have no right to talk about the past because that makes me unhappy even if it makes you happy. Of course we internalize those rules. And I think the rule had not only been internalized by me to the point where my happiest times were always marred, shadowed, but I expanded it to a rule that said it was all right to be happy as long as every-body for whom you feel responsible is happy too. And that’s a terrible curse to sail under.
“You have every right to be happy. Dostoevsky said through Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Anybody who is completely happy can be sure he's doing God's will on earth.’ We are called to be happy, not only for our own sakes but because that's what life is all about. That's why the morning stars threw down their spears and sang for joy. You're not only called to be happy for your sake, but you're called to be happy for everybody's sake.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp103-105.
To help you reflect…
How much importance do you give your happiness? Sit with the last sentence from today’s passage and hear these words as though they are being spoken directly to you. What do you notice in yourself? Listen for any invitation or inner nudging.
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