Outside A Dog

Quickly, before I disappear again: next book!

I was asked to review a copy of Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life by Abbot Christopher Jamison, and though I would label myself as more spiritual than religious, I really did enjoy reading this book and contemplating my own reaction to it.

Abbot Christopher begins his book by addressing the history of the idea of happiness, citing Plato and Aristotle and comparing their ideals to those to the monastic vision of happiness. From there, Abbot Christopher moves forward in time to examine the ways of Saint Antony of Egypt and the first Christian monks and nuns. In the second part of the book, each chapter explores one of a set of traits called the Eight Thoughts — gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sadness, acedia ( “a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray”), vanity and pride — and how to best recognize and overcome them in our lives.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not exactly a religious person, but I would hesitate to classify this as strictly a religious book. While Abbot Christopher does explore the religious basis for everything he presents, he does so in a manner that I found to be not at all ‘preachy’. One of my favorite passages in the book is about hope:

“Hope is the surest remedy against sadness and so we have to take conscious steps to sustain hope. While we recognize the need to foster a loving attitude in children, today people tend not to foster hope with the same self-conscious energy. Cassian invites us to exercise a discipline of hope. This means not placing our hope where it is subject to change and decay, avoiding reliance for our interior well-being on wealth and position. We are heading back to the primitive definition of happiness if we have placed our hope in financial markets or promotion. The disappointments and the successes of our daily lives should both be treated with balance and not be the source alternately of sadness and elation. Hope is bigger than these, on par with love, so that just as I do not determine my love for somebody just by my mood today so my hope should not be subject to passing events.” (pg. 131-132)

This is another book that made me sit and think quietly when I had turned the final page, and I’ve since become a little more aware of my own shortcomings and stumbling points on my quest to be truly happy.