Lynn and I watched the Adele concert aired from the beautiful Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles--beautiful sunset, night sky coming alive with the city lights around her and the stage lights behind her. It was an impressive concert. It was interspersed with segments of an interview with Adele and Oprah in which she spoke of some of the pain that fueled her forlorn music. Most recently [in the last few years] she had felt compelled to divorce her husband and father of her son, not because of any pathology on his part, but in order to “find [her]self”--to “find happiness”. Oprah asked her what it was like for her when her son asked her why she “didn’t love daddy any more.” She said that she told him “I do love him. But I’m not in love with him.” She confessed that she was dealing with some guilt at having “dismantled his life” and “hurt the two people I love the most in the world” in order to find this “self” and “happiness” she was seeking. {I think that guilt is healthy. But I pray it will be healed in her spiritual growth.} Oprah and her spoke of the importance of being able to “love yourself” before you can love others or, by implication, basically do any good in the world. I’m not criticizing Adele when I say this---she has suffered enough without my or anyone’s criticism—but it seems that Adele, [along with probably thousands of others] are chasing the feeling of being “in love” and the elusive butterfly of “happiness”---and hurting people in the process. Or else they are living, as the ladies also alluded to, in the dark, self-generated shadow of staying in an unhappy relationship because of obligation and the desire not to hurt their loved ones. They feel that they are “caving in”, so to speak, to a second-rate life to avoid hurting their loved ones. I’ve had some clients who are chasing this elusive butterfly of needing to be in the state of being “in love”, or who are unhappy and mistakenly believe it is because they married the wrong person—someone who is basically ok, not abusive or addicted to anything, is faithful, etc., but “just not the person who can make me happy”. More than one of my clients have said something like “if I knew then what I know now, I would never have divorced my first spouse.” What they had come to learn was that happiness is an inside job---that it is primarily the by-product of loving people with a deep and committed love; that the “in love” feeling is always time-limited and chasing it is similar to chasing the feelings provided by certain drugs, and that the love that ultimately generates happiness and self-love is sacrificial---the taking up of a cross, as Jesus said [and did!]. This is the Love that brings joy into life—rather than the sorrow so beautifully expressed in Adele’s songs. She looks great, has lost a hundred pounds, works out regularly. Her artistry seems darn near perfect. But she admits that she is not quite there yet as far as happiness is concerned, and she wept [reluctantly] when speaking of some of the sorrow she has generated in her pursuits. Oprah, with her typical keen insight, asked her, “Will you be able to write music when you are happy?” She seemed hopeful but uncertain that she would be able to. The high profile audience loved her performance. They drank deeply from the wine pressed in the crucible of her sorrows. There were numerous standing O’s. But I bet her son still wishes his mom and dad were together.
Is it possible that the pursuit of happiness and being “in love” can become an idol: an altar upon which we sacrifice marriages, covenants, families, childrens’ stability and security? To whatever extent it can, and to whatever extent it is indeed idolatrous, it will lead either to more unhappiness or to an awakening and a turning in a new direction that reveals that much of that sorrow, generated in the delusional state, was unnecessary. Hopefully this awakening, engendered by Christ, can occur without the generation of too much of that sorrow. At any rate, when that awakening happens, we see that all the suffering is miraculously redeemed. All of it. This is Grace. Amazing Grace.
