“What politician or moralist ever placed happiness in the cross?” (Watson 30)
I like this glib little phrase. I like glib little phrases generally, but this one jumped off the page at me: First thought – ‘There must be a backstory!’. I don’t know enough about his life and times to opine upon who Watson had in his crosshairs here but, regardless of that, there is a principle lurking beneath the rhetorical barb here. ‘Politicians’ and ‘moralists’ seems to be his shorthand for those whose ultimate concern is the present and whose purview of life stops at death’s door. Plenty of past cultures have placed their hopes in an ‘afterlife’ which consists solely of living on through their progeny. That it is so common in our days to live without even that kind of ambition should strike as strange. We are the anomaly.
And that is what Watson is getting at here: the modern person considers their happiness to be bound up squarely in individual well-being, avoiding harm at all costs even when that harm is really the path to their happiness. Watson cites Job 5:17 How happy is the one whom God corrects. Job is the classic example of the man who lost everything – at the hands of God – and yet lives to prove the truth of the verse above.
But is it clear how affliction is supposed to make us happy? It seems a knotty and contradictory idea. Watson says “The moon in the full is furthest off from the sun: so are many further off from God in the full-moon of prosperity; afflictions bring them nearer to God. The magnet of mercy does not draw us so near to God as the cords of affliction.” The paradox is that we are creatures made to relate with others and finally with our Creator. Creature comforts – the full-moon of prosperity – auger against the happiness which we are built for in our most basic being. I doubt very much that anyone particularly likes being corrected; it carries connotations of exposure of ignorance and the shame of failure. Yet, if that correction comes from love, and holds at least the promise of restoration, perhaps it will begin to be easier to be happy in the moment.