The Saints' Guide to Happiness by Robert Ellsberg
O'Brien, Dennis
BOOKS Going places The Saints' Guide to Happiness Everyday Wisdom from the Lives of the Saints Robert Ellsberg North Point Press, $23,219 pp. Dennis O'Brien You can tell right away that this...
...I ought to tidy my soul and the book on the nightstand proves it...
...Dennis O'Brien You can tell right away that this is a spirituality book because it has one of those red satin ribbons to mark your place...
...But this kind of ascetic zeal is not meant to inhibit joy-on the contrary...
...Nevertheless, each of the lessons in this book offers an entry point to that journey....Like any great enterprise, this journey begins with the first step...
...Therese of Lisieux died at twenty-four in an obscure Carmelite monastery...
...If health and sickness are objective "places" in which we live, happiness is also a place...
...In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow...
...Dennis O'Brien is the author of, most recently, The Idea of a Catholic University (University of Chicago Press...
...Appropriately then, Ellsberg opens his concluding chapter: I have spent much of my life reading books about the saints: medieval legends, spiritual memoirs, martyrologies, and manuals of devotion...
...If that is all it takes to be happy then, as Thomas Merton says, "I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle until now...
...It does not matter if you are not a spiritual hero...
...People buy diet books as a substitute for dieting itself...
...Brigid: heaven as a large family gathering round a lake of beer...
...Anthony lived on a hilltop in the Arabian desert for twenty years, fasting, refusing to sleep, and exposing himself to all sorts of temptations...
...There is Dag Hammarskjold who lived at the epicenter of world politics...
...Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-seven years living on pillars in the desert...
...The place that this book tries to locate is happiness, though not the sort of happiness one usually aspires to...
...It is unreality that deadens the soul because its enticements are evanescent, fading as they are attained, moments only on a treadmill of desire...
...Yet there is a suspicion that spirituality books are like diet books...
...If the canonized saints are prodigies of the spiritual life, not everyone is called to be a prodigy," Ellsberg writes...
...Writing about happiness as an "objective condition," Ellsberg quotes Flannery O'Connor: "I have never been anywhere but sick...
...Gandhi led a revolution, St...
...In the parallel world of television commercials, for example, everyone is young and beautiful, there is no suffering that cannot be cured by the proper lotion, and death has vanished from the earth...
...Yet this is how St...
...The final word in the story goes, however, to a hitherto silent member: "We all say that it would be good to live as God bids us...but...it seems that none of us may live rightly: we may only talk about it...
...We have to locate happiness somewhere in those defining points of human life and experience...
...Saints are those who have found the place of happiness, though the ways they get there are as varied as the colorful assortment of figures (some canonized, some not) that Ellsberg has assembled as guides...
...an objective condition...a way of being, a certain fullness of life...
...There is St...
...Ellsberg has located some of these entry points, but one's special "saintly" place is likely to be "where there is no company, where nobody can follow"- except, of course, God...
...The others point to the folly of the resolution...
...For every moment of austerity in the lives of the saints, there is the final vision of the good life as seen by Abbess St...
...William Blake writes about "priests in black gowns,...walking their rounds, / ...binding with briars, my joys and desires...
...What the saints have in common is a clarity of vision in rejecting the charms of unreality...
...The saints, in the midst of life or in the monastery, are great realists...
...Yet with happiness, as with holiness, it is not what we read but what we practice that makes all the difference...
...Tellingly quoting from Tolstoy's short story, "A Talk of Leisured People," he reports: A group of guests at a country estate fall into an earnest conversation about happiness...
...All confessed that they were living worldly lives concerned only for themselves and their families, none of them thinking of their neighbors, still less of God...
...Purchasing the book shows you have a right intention even if you don't actually do anything...
...On the contrary, real happiness is "something analogous to bodily health...
...Consider Anthony of the Desert...
...Maybe that is what spirituality books are supposed to do: mark your place...
...The bestseller lists are chock-full of how-to books on attaining spiritual serenity...
...The eight chapters of The Saints' Guide to Happiness might be said to offer the coordinates of the place of happiness...
...Even more than in the past, modern society assails us with "parallel universes...
...Ellsberg is correct in beginning his book with a chapter on happiness as "learning to be alive...
...Finally one of the company resolves to "sell all he has and give to the poor...
...It is the realism of their vision which Ellsberg commends...
...Where is happiness in relation to work, love, silence, suffering, and death...
...The chapters describe "learning": Learning to be alive, to let go, to work, to sit still, to love, to suffer, to die, and to see...
...Ellsberg is very much aware of this problem...
...Reading tales of fasting and flight, hair shirts and self-flagellation, one is inclined to grant Blake his denunciation...
...Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Orbis books and author of the very popular All Saints, is not seeking some inner feeling or subjective state...
...Athanasius described him: "His soul being free of confusion...so that from the soul's joy his face was cheerful and well...he was never troubled...he never looked gloomy, his mind being joyous...
...Because of this, the saints can be radically misunderstood as naysayers...
...The problem of happiness is finding its place and finding out how to live there...
...Though Flannery O'Connor was never anywhere but suffering/sick, bound for early death, as she arranged her life around her work she learned to be still in rural isolation, to see deeply into the human heart, and finally to let go because of her belief in God's abiding love...
...The problem with books about spirituality, with "guides to happiness," is with how they should be read-or maybe whether they should be read...
...Finally, you have to go there-to the places of work and stillness, love and suffering in the heart...
...The English word happiness, he notes, can be misleading since it is derived from happens, as if happiness was a piece of luck...
...If happiness is a place, then any guide to happiness tells you no more about the territory than a map...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 22
