MEANINGFULNESS & HAPPINESS

Enjoy. I was ending a counseling session with a client, and he said to me, with a smile, “I really enjoyed that session today!” I was a bit shocked because I never think about enjoying counseling and often counseling sessions are not enjoyable sessions, not in the way you enjoy eating a seaweed and kale salad (ok, maybe you don’t enjoy that). It reminded me of statements in which someone says that the reason we help people and do good in the world is that it feels good. I’ve thought about it for awhile, and I have participated in debates in which some people say we don’t enjoy such work and some people admit to enjoying it. I know why people disagree about this. It’s because they are speaking about two different things.

If you are helping people superficially or giving money non-relationally, then yes, you might do it because it feels good. If you volunteer in a one-time way or once-off, then maybe it feels good. If you give money to charity and then walk away feeling like you did something good, you might feel good. So I see and understand that.

However, those of us who actually roll up our sleeves and engage in the tough relational work of helping people know often it does NOT feel good. When you make yourself vulnerable and open up your home to people, whom others don’t trust, and they burn you; when you are counseling prostitutes or people riddled with diseases or suffering a loss, it does not feel good as we work through issues. When you work with ex-offenders and ex-convicts (who should not be defined by what happened in the past) and work through recidivistic tendencies as well as dealing with stereotypes people place on them, it does not feel good. When you are working with a woman who has turned against all men including you, it does not feel good. When you push a crippled person around, a person who is bitter at the world, it is not very nice. I could go on, but I think the very act of getting deep with people who need help and dealing with them as people, with all their pain, all their issues, all their expectations, and all of YOUR hurt, it does not feel good at all. It is hard. Often times you fail when you help people. You don’t know if you should start again, you don’t know if it matters. You feel like quitting.

It’s like any relationship really.

It just doesn’t always feel good.

And when you’re in a position of habitual, relational, continual help, working alongside someone as that person seeks to move forward, it’s often not a happy feeling, it’s work. You get frustrated, you cry, you get hurt. You hurt them. They hurt you. You feel like quitting, you see no progress. Where’s the impact?

Then suddenly someone talks about the difference she notices. A step forward is made. The person is in a better, stronger position in life. The person has actually started helping others, slowly but surely. And in that moment, however small, however fleeting, that person finds meaning. And, relationally, you find meaning, too. Meaning was never lost, but sometimes you lose sensitivity to it. So in that small moment, you, once again, feel the meaning or significance that was probably there all along. You experience a bit of satisfaction. You taste a bit of fullness. You begin to understand how you can be sad and fulfilled, simultaneously unhappy and satisfied. The happiness is emotional or circumstantial or superficial, the fulfillment or satisfaction or meaning is deep, very deep, undergirding, untenable, impalpable, and so real.

It’s why I can spend time with people with whom I have difficulty liking even though I don’t enjoy the experience and it doesn’t make me happy. There is meaning there.

It’s exactly why I’ve seen some of my friends shut out close people around them because of harsh treatment but other friends embrace pain-causing people because, as unhappy as those interactions are, they find meaning in continuing to love those people through presence and quality time.

This is exactly why Jesus was often sad, as described by certain writers. It’s why Mother Teresa’s most recently released letters show a deep long-term unhappiness, frustration, and depression, even amidst the meaningful work that she continued to do. It is why MLK was frustration, conflicted, and downtrodden sometimes. It’s why faith can be so important to people in such situations because it can help maintain, sustain, motivate, encourage, and even propel them forward through such long and constant periods of unhappiness, sadness, and unenjoyable times. They do it, we do it because there is meaning there. There, is love.

A lot of people ask me about being happy in life or in a career, and I’ve learned by now, it’s not about being happy. Though language is so imprecise, so often I will incorrectly use those word “happy.” But when I ask if someone is happy, I actually mean to ask if the work is fulfilling or meaningful. If you leave one job because you are unhappy to go to another job, it is rare that you will find happiness there. If it’s an amazing situation and circumstance, then it’s possible. Often, in practice, because it’s so hard to find an amazing situation and circumstance people end up unhappy in the new job. However, if you learn, first, how to be content in any and every situation, that’s a key to the deeper joy. Then, you can make a move to a new job, not from a place of need or negativity (I need to find something that will make me happy; I lack contentment; I hate these people and this place; I gotta get out of this dump). No, you are already content. You are moving to a new job from a place of positivity. You are growing and a new job automatically allows you to grow more and positively impact more people. The new job allows you to increase meaningful work in society and create greater social value. The new job allows you to help fulfill more people. The new job is just a better fit for you such that you are running to a job not away from a job. The new job allows you to express passions more and allows you to work in your love language more and cooking more of your love food.

A great example of life choices involving fulfillment and unhappiness is Viktor Frankl. I often wonder how his life would have been different if he didn’t live and survive a concentration camp during WWII. By age 16, he had started a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and Freud sent a two-page paper Frankl had written to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. And this was before formally studying medicine and practicing clinical psychology. By 1941, Frankl's ideas and work had received international attention. His logotherapy helped people overcome depression and attain well-being through finding unique meaning in life (not happiness). He had also established suicide-prevention centers for teenagers. But it was in the same year he had to decide whether or not to move to America. This is an excerpt from an online Atlantic article about him.

"That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field."

It was a choice between being happy (circumstantially or superficially or temporarily) and feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled due to his suffering parents or feeling like he was doing meaningful work as it relates to his parents and yet unhappy (because he, too, would probably end up in the concentration camp). To be fair, I have simplified the matter. Obviously, by staying in Vienna, he most probably imperils his wife and future child, and by leaving, he definitely saves them. What I’m differentiating simply is the difference between personal pleasure and temporal happiness from a situation, circumstance, feeling, or moment in time to satisfaction or meaning which can often be more long-term, unrelated to an unpleasant situation, constant in the face of suffering, and focused on others as opposed to self. I’ll let you see how he decided what to do, what he decided, and the implications of that choice in his life and the lives of others today. There’s more to life than being happy.

A MASS FOR THE DEAD

There was a man, Rafael Schaëchter, who knew about life and reinventions. He was captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp in Terezin (Thereseinstadt) in the Czech Republic. He was a composer, choral conductor and vocal coach, and he smuggled one copy of Verdi’s Requiem into the camp. Using this one copy and a broken piano in the camp, he decided to recruit singers from among the prisoners to perform this piece.

Schaëchter recruited 150 singers to perform this very difficult piece of music. The piece is hard enough to perform with healthy, well-food, well-rested vocalists who each have their own copy of the music and are able to read music. But this group of prisoners learned the piece after a long day of being overworked through manual labor, underfed, and malnourished. Some could read music and some could not, but it didn’t matter because there was only one copy of the music, and so they had to learn the entire requiem by rote.

This group of prisoners learned the entire requiem and performed it 16 times from 1943 to 1944 including one performance for the Red Cross. Schaëchter continued to recruit new prisoners to replace those who were deported to new camps.

The amazing part of the story is that the prisoners were tired at the end of the day, at the end of 14-hour days. And Schaëchter was a perfectionist. And yet, during the few hours of rehearsal at night, the prisoners forgot about the fact that they were hungry, sick, hurting. They forgot about the fact that they were overworked and underfed, confused, and uncertain about their future. They forgot about the fact that they lost family and were without hope because. . . .for a few hours each rehearsal they were hope. . .ful. They were hopeful.

The seeming contradictory tension is astounding. Here was a group of Jewish prisoners singing a Catholic mass. If that doesn’t make you think and learn to find God in unexpected places, imagine this: a requiem is a mass for the dead. And yet, these prisoners were using a requiem, a mass for the dead, to inspire life. In those moments during rehearsal and performances, even in front of an international Red Cross delegation that were being shown a camp to falsely “prove” that the camps were not death camps that abused the Jews, even in that situation, they sang this Catholic mass for the dead, this requiem, as an act of defiance. It was as if they were saying, “You can take my health and age my body. You can hurt me and beat me, but you can never, will never take my spirit, my attitude, my hope. That belongs to me.” Think of some of the parts of this Catholic mass in Latin: Dies Irae - day of wrath. Appropriated in the hearts and minds of the Jews it perhaps referred to the day of wrath awaiting the Nazi perpetrators and captors in judgment for their atrocities. Or the imagine the final part of the requiem: Libera me - Release me! Liberate me!!! In the hearts of these singers, they were not asking for their souls to be liberated to heaven from their earthly frames, but they were asking to be liberated from these camps back to life as normal, or liberated by death from these concentration camps. The whole event was too staggering to comprehend and required a fully immersive experience.

The conductor, Murry Sidlin, was a professor at Catholic University and he founded the Defiant Requiem Foundation that puts on these concerts of the Verdi Requiem around the world. What is special about how the concerts are done is that we didn’t just sing the requiem. Through the different movements/parts of the requiem, we had bits of film, interviews with actual prisoners, and readings to help paint the picture. Actual prisoners from the actual camp, actual survivors, actual surviving choir members attended the performance and were there. Two sons of a choir member prisoner joined us in singing in the choir. And we performed this all in the Kennedy Center. It as a powerful performance.

What is amazing about Murry is that he’s a conductor that actually makes music. Music is both an art and a craft. But most of the time people work on the craft part--simply learning the piece, learning the notes, playing them with the best intonation, technique, fingering, mouthing, blowing, plucking, etc. Murry inverts it. Work on the notes and learn the piece outside. With him you will work almost exclusively on the musicality--the phrasing, the dynamics, the nuance, the subtext (for vocals), the sub music, breathing, speaking through the music. It was both easy since the context for the performance of this piece was provided by the story, but it was harder because we wanted to do justice to the prisoners and honor them and their courage and defiance. Murry made us FEEL the story and sing from that place of darkness, of crying out to God, of not understanding why things are happening the way they are and not knowing what to do. We sang from the point of not having any hope and yet hoping with what we have left, where we struggle with the events happening and yet cling to the God who defies understanding. We cried out through the music; it was powerful, powerful, powerful. It was impacting, it was earth-shattering. I kid you not. There was such movement in the music with the orchestra and choir, I was amazed. I have never felt that intensity in a performance ever. And he pulled it out of us, inspired it from his inspiration, encouraged us to put ourselves in their shoes (with utmost respect), and came alongside us in this journey. And in the end, the surviving choir members who were there were pleased and thankful.

I don’t know what it is they went through, but I thank them for allowing me to participate in the remembrance of their experience.

Requiem Concert
Kennedy Center Promotion