Intention Matters
Every so often there’s a headline in the popular media about the psychological benefits of doing good things. This week it was a report on the positive effects of giving money away. A study had found that people reported more happiness from giving $20 away than from spending it on themselves. Reports like this have appeared frequently in recent years, suggesting that people who pray regularly report greater contentment than those who don’t, or that people who go to church regularly have better social relationships than those who don’t.
All of this suggests a calculus of happiness. Give to charities; pray; perform acts of kindness; go to church. Why? To make yourself happier. It seems reasonable enough; after all, we can observe that generous, loving people are often happy, so why not do what they do in order to be happy like them? Except that it doesn’t work that way.
When we do something only for the sake of its positive effects on our lives, the joy goes out of it. The most obvious example is exercise. Regular exercise is good for us, but to do exercise purely for the sake of its health benefits is exceedingly tedious, as many people find each January after a few weeks of trying to follow New Year’s resolutions. Depending on how badly we want to become fit or lose weight, we may suffer through our scheduled workouts anyway, but we’ll drop them like a hot potato if an alternative comes along. (Why do you think diet pills are so perennial popular, despite the fact that people ought to know better?)
Compare that to how an athlete feels about exercise. The avid runner, or tennis player, or fencer, or surfer, does not do the sport because of its health benefits. The surfer surfs, the fencer fences, the runner runs for joy of the activity. As a fencer myself, I can tell you that I enjoy the strength and muscle tone that I get from fencing, but I don’t fence to become fit. If I did, the downside would have driven me away long ago: sore muscles, late practices knowing I have to get up early the next day, making sacrifices to afford the gear or the lessons, getting injured, dealing with plateaus in training. The “not so fun” part of being an athlete ranges from the trivial to the painful and difficult. So why do it?
What makes someone keep it up, day after day, week after week, year after year, is the activity itself. The flow state of running. The thrill of body and mind working together in fencing. The challenge of the waves and the peace the surfer finds out in the ocean. The runner, the fencer, the surfer all enjoy the benefits of fitness, of a healthier body and a refreshed mind, but to a great extent, the good health that results is incidental. It’s the joy of the activity itself that fuels the whole endeavor, that makes me not just willing but eager to take on whatever difficulties and challenges arise in my training.
As I think about how God made us, that starts to make sense. He made us to be creative, active, interactive beings, and when we act in ways that are in line with those attributes, we are blessed with more than the immediate enjoyment of the activity. We are happy and healthy because we are being what we were made to be. There’s no way to take a shortcut here; if we cut out the process, we lose the end result.
But our culture has less and less patience for experiences, for process. We want it all, and we want it now – without working for it, without waiting for it, without even experiencing it. We want health and fitness without exercise; we want peace of soul without commitment. So we keep looking and looking for the right numbers to plug into the equations, for the right way to solve the calculus of contentment.
What we get are psychologists who, in all seriousness, suggest that we should pray so that we feel comforted, that we should give money away so it will make us feel generous and happy.
When these activities are done for the right reasons, yes, we are often happier. But that’s God’s gift to us – when we do the activities for the sake of getting the happiness, the happiness evaporates. Expect it, and it will not be there.
Intention matters.
To give money away because it makes me feel better is an attempt to buy happiness, just as much as if I went to the mall with the money. It might seem like a better way – doesn’t someone benefit from my charity? – but it’s probably not. The selfish kind of giving puts chains on the soul of the giver and receiver alike: chains of obligation, expectation, humiliation, pride.
There’s another kind of giving that is with open hands, freely and with a joyful heart – that is the kind of giving that blesses both giver and receiver. But this latter kind of giving is never done with the objective of feeling good. Those who give like that, give out of a generous spirit, because it is the right thing to do. And the Lord blesses them for it.
We give, when we give rightly, in grateful response to all we have been given. To give simply because it makes us feel better is to shrink love of neighbor into love of self. And love of self that is not rooted in love of God will collapse in on itself.
The tragedy is not that the attempt to solve the happiness equation will fail – although it will. The tragedy is that the very attempt to do so poisons our relationships. If I am kind to you because being kind to others is supposed to make me happy, what happens when I don’t get that happy feeling? I’ve already been using you as a tool for my own selfish needs, an act that generates contempt for the other person. Contempt slides ever so easily into hate, and so if you don’t give me the emotional satisfaction I demand from my act of supposed kindness, I will probably hate you for it, somewhere deep inside.
Our actions matter. Our decisions each day shape us into who we are becoming. If we assess whether to give on the basis of how it will make us feel, how long before that self-interest creeps into our friendships, our family lives? Is it already there?
And that is why I fear the worst from the “science of happiness.” It will fail, yes. What scares me is that we may be fooled into thinking that it has succeeded: that we will become so locked into our self-centered private universes that we are completely alienated from our Lord, the Giver of Life. I fear that we will earn, and buy, and give, and mouth polite words, and sit in church, and fill our hearts with hate. We will hate our neighbor for not giving us what we need, hate ourselves for not being happy. And out of hate, despair; and out of despair, death.
Charity, kindness, prayer, fellowship – these things aren’t right to do because they’re good for us; they are good for us because they are the right things to do. And in that distinction lies all the difference.
Related posts:
Dr Holly Ordway came to Christ through reason, in the pursuit of truth. "In your hearts honor Christ as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 15).
She writes about her journey from atheism to orthodox Christian faith in her book "Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith" (Moody Publishers).
