On the couch with St Paul #1

Interesting article in the Good Weekend today. All about 'positive psychology', a developing practice where psychologists and therapists are focusing their energies on uncovering those attitudes and environments which lead to feelings of happiness as opposed to feelings of sadness and depression. Kinda like a preventative psychology, a move away from the common practice of dealing with the problem (like finding treatments for depression) and instead helping people create lives where happiness and contentment are fostered in an effective and ongoing way. Their initial findings indicate that helping others (surprise surprise) is an important element in becoming happy, although the ultimate measure of ones approach to life is still centred on the self: I help others because it makes me feel good. Still, it got me thinking...


As the article pointed out, the pursuit of happiness has always been a focus of psychology; it's just that now some practitioners are being a little more proactive in helping people 'learn happiness' rather than just helping them to not be as sad as they might be. But the fact that happiness has always been a concern of psychology (and philosophy) indicates that it has always been a concern of humanity. So reading this article I was left wondering: "Surely as the Church we must have profound and helpful things to say about happiness and contentment. Surely we can provide some kind of answer to the questions that are driving those looking for answers in 'positive psychology'". It was interesting to note that those interviewed in the article didn't want to provide a 'religious' answer to happiness (even though religious ideas formed part of their research data). But can't we afford to be a bit more positive about what a NT faith can offer the individual and society in terms of ideas about happiness?

I suspect that many churches have failed to really hit this squarely on the head. Some speak a lot about happiness and fulfilling your potential but do so in a theologically naive way. It is my contention that such an approach only causes damage in the long run. Others seem to view NT faith in a way which uses lots of negative expressions "The Gospel is about our sin; the first thing to say about humanity is about how sinful we are; church is all about service and duty". It is fast becoming my view that this approach is also theologically naive, and can truncate our enjoyment of the Christian life while exposing the sad fact that we don't actually have much too say about happiness.

So this is what I'm planning to do. I want to start to explore and build up a theology of happiness. I feel that in doing so not only will we enrich the spiritual lives of our churches but we will also open up another avenue into the world of those outside our communities. People want to be happy. Surely we can say something to them which goes beyond the glib soundbites of an underdeveloped theology. The first step will be to put some theological pegs in the ground...

10 points for the first to tell me what this picture is of.