Who Is Really Living the Good Life?
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“Look carefully at the people who are truly flourishing. They may not be the people you expected.”— A contemporary paraphrase of Jesus’ Beatitudes
I was enjoying food with a group of women after church last Sunday when our conversation turned briefly to Kyrgyzstan. John is returning tomorrow from traveling there with our neighbor Randy Smith and several others, and in a few weeks they will be telling us about their trip. The tentative title for the program is “Kyrgyzstan: Connecting with and Understanding Our Muslim Neighbors from Across the World.”
I encouraged the program, but I admitted that I am a little nervous about it.
This week we remember September 11, 2001. Those of us who lived through that day remember the terrible images, the thousands of lives lost, and the fear that followed. The attackers identified their cause with an extremist interpretation of Islam, and for many Americans the words “Muslim” and “terrorist” became connected in ways that have been difficult to disentangle.
We can know intellectually that the lives of nearly two billion Muslims cannot be defined by nineteen terrorists and still discover that fear has left its mark on us. Fear does that. It simplifies people. It divides the world into “us” and “them.” It can turn an enormous and diverse group of human beings into a category.
That is what makes the story behind this Kyrgyzstan trip so interesting.
Our neighbor Randy was also horrified by September 11. But eventually he did something quite unusual with his fear: he decided to get closer to people he did not understand rather than farther away.
Through a series of connections, he found a way to visit Kyrgyzstan, a predominantly Muslim country in Central Asia. Randy is an orchardist, so agriculture offered a place to begin. Perhaps people from two very different cultures could exchange agricultural knowledge. They could work together, learn from one another, eat together and become acquainted.
That was more than twenty years ago. The relationship continued. People traveled back and forth. Connections and friendships developed. This year John went with Randy and others.
As I was telling some of this story at the table Sunday, one of the older women said something very simple.
“I’m always curious about people.”
She is, I believe, about 89 years old. She recently suffered a fall and broken bones and is still recovering, yet neither age nor injury seems to have diminished her interest in life or other people. She is one of the most flourishing people I know.
I try to learn from her.
As I thought about her words later, they reminded me of a very old question: What kind of people actually live good lives? Not necessarily easy lives. Not necessarily wealthy or impressive lives. What kind of people seem to live meaningful, connected, deeply worthwhile lives?
That question takes us somewhere I wasn't expecting it to take me: to the Sermon on the Mount.
An Ancient Argument About the Good Life
You don't have to be Christian to find the Sermon on the Mount interesting.
You can approach Jesus as one of history's influential Jewish teachers and ask what he thought made a human life worth living. Read that way, the Sermon on the Mount is not simply a collection of religious commandments. It is a provocative argument about human flourishing.
Jesus lived in a society shaped by Roman rule, economic inequality, religious divisions, social hierarchies and periodic violence. His Jewish people lived under the authority of a powerful foreign government. Questions about enemies, power, justice and how to respond to people who threatened you were not theoretical.
Into that world Jesus said some extraordinary things: “Blessed are the merciful.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Love your enemies.” “Pray for those who persecute you.” “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
Those ideas can sound sweet when printed on a greeting card. They don't sound nearly as sweet when you actually have an enemy.
That is why September 11 gives me a different way of hearing the Sermon on the Mount.
What do human beings do after someone frightens or hurts us? Do we move closer or farther away? Do we become more curious or more certain? Do we see individuals or categories? Do we seek understanding or simply confirmation of what we already believe? What happens to our own humanity when we become afraid of someone else's?
These are not only Christian questions. They are human questions.
Who Are the Makarioi?
The opening lines of the Sermon on the Mount are traditionally called the Beatitudes. Most begin with the familiar words “Blessed are…”
But “blessed” can be misleading.
The Greek word is makarios; the plural is makarioi. Behind it stands an older Jewish tradition represented by the Hebrew word ashrei, which appears repeatedly in the Psalms and other Jewish wisdom literature.
The sense is not simply, “God likes these people.” It is closer to an exclamation: “How fortunate!” “Look at this person!” “Here is a life worth noticing.”
The wider Greek-speaking world also spent a great deal of time thinking about the good life. Philosophers used the word eudaimonia for human flourishing, a life going well in the deepest sense rather than simply a life containing lots of pleasure.
Jesus was a Jewish teacher, not a Greek philosopher teaching Aristotle. Yet he was participating in a question that crosses cultures and centuries: Who is really living well?
His answers are surprising.
Look at people who know they need others. Look at those whose hearts can still be broken by suffering. Look at people who possess strength without needing to dominate. Look at those who hunger for things to be made right. Look at the merciful. Look at the peacemakers. Look even at people willing to suffer rather than abandon what they believe is right.
Makarioi.
These, Jesus says, are lives worth noticing.
Maybe We Are Using the Wrong Scoreboard
We still have our own ways of deciding who is flourishing. We notice wealth, accomplishments, influence, beautiful homes, status, attractiveness, authority and recognition.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those things. Achievement can improve the world, wealth can be used generously and leadership can be compassionate.
But Jesus asks whether we have confused these things with living well.
Luke's version of Jesus' teaching makes the challenge even sharper because alongside “blessed” Jesus uses another word: ouai, usually translated “woe.”
It is not simply a curse. It carries the sense of warning or lament: “Alas.” “Be careful.” “The road you are traveling may not take you where you think it does.”
Perhaps we could call these people the not-makarioi. Or as some younger ones may say, "the not macaronies."
They may look enormously successful while becoming less connected, less compassionate and less capable of recognizing the humanity of others.
Translated into our world, perhaps Jesus' warning would sound something like this: Be careful when accumulating becomes more important than sharing, when winning becomes more important than loving, when being right becomes more important than understanding, when strength becomes domination, when disagreement becomes contempt, and when belonging to our group requires us to stop seeing the humanity of another group.
You may be winning according to the wrong scoreboard. And the ladder you are climbing may be leaning again the wrong tree.
What September 11 Can Still Ask of Us
Twenty-five years after September 11, we can remember those who died and honor the grief of those who loved them without allowing the terrorists to determine how we see every Muslim person we encounter.
Perhaps there is even a way of remembering September 11 that asks something of us.
What kind of people did that terrible event cause us to become, and what kind of people do we want to become now?
Fear is a necessary human emotion. It alerts us to danger. But fear is not particularly good at introducing us to other human beings.
Curiosity is better at that.
That is why I keep thinking about Randy and the woman at the church lunch table.
Randy's response to fear eventually became encounter. He traveled to a Muslim-majority country and started with something he knew: growing things.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about that. No grand interfaith summit. No attempt to solve the world's religious conflicts. An orchardist essentially saying, “I know something about agriculture. You know something about agriculture. Maybe we could begin there.”
More than twenty years later, people are still traveling back and forth.
Perhaps peacemaking sometimes looks like that.
Before I can understand you, I have to become interested in you. Before you can stop being a category in my mind, I may need to know your name, hear about your family, eat your food, listen to your stories, learn what frightens you, discover what makes you laugh and find out what you hope for. Watch your sports (they attended the World Nomad Games which you simply must look up on youtube.) See what we have in common.
Curiosity can become a doorway to understanding. Understanding can become a doorway to empathy. Empathy can make mercy possible. Sometimes all of those things together become peacemaking.
None of this means pretending differences aren't real. We don't have to agree with one another about religion, politics, morality or culture. Understanding is not the same thing as agreement.
It means refusing to let difference erase humanity.
The 89-Year-Old Teacher
Which brings me back once more to my 89-year-old teacher of the good life.
“I’m always curious about people.”
Curiosity isn't one of Jesus' Beatitudes. He never said, “Blessed are the curious.”
But perhaps curiosity helps make several of them possible.
It is difficult to be merciful toward someone we have reduced to a category. It is difficult to make peace with people we refuse to know. It is difficult to care about justice for people whose stories we never hear.
Perhaps the good life begins, in part, by remaining interested in other human beings.
Modern research on flourishing points repeatedly toward relationships, belonging, purpose, generosity, contribution and connection. Jesus was not teaching twenty-first-century positive psychology, but there is an intriguing resonance here.
The good life is not necessarily the easy life. A person can grieve and flourish. A person can struggle and flourish. An 89-year-old woman can break bones, endure rehabilitation and remain intensely interested in other human beings. An orchardist frightened by terrorism can eventually travel halfway around the world to meet Muslim people he doesn't understand.
The journey to the good life may have less to do with what we accumulate than with what we become.
We become more curious. We become more merciful. We become less interested in dominating others. We allow suffering to touch us. We listen. We repair relationships. We become willing to cross some of the distances fear has created between us. We see the humanity in each other.
Maybe that is part of becoming makarioi: not people whose lives always feel wonderful, but people whose lives are becoming meaningful, connected and deeply worth living.
Seven Teachers of the Good Life (and something to try this week.)
For seven days, notice one person each day who seems to know something about living well. Don't look for a perfect person or an impressive person. Look for something small.
Perhaps someone listens unusually well. Perhaps someone makes lonely people feel included. Someone remains curious instead of judgmental. Someone has endured hardship without becoming bitter. Someone disagrees without becoming cruel.
Someone is generous. Someone makes peace. Someone makes another human being feel seen.
At the end of each day, ask yourself two questions: “What did I see in this person?” and “What might I practice because I saw it?”
At the end of a week, we will have seven teachers of the good life.
One of mine is already an 89-year-old woman sitting at a table after church.
“I’m always curious about people.”
Twenty-five years after September 11, perhaps that is not a small thing to say.
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount asks us to look at the people we admire, the people we overlook and even the people we fear, and then reconsider what a successful human life actually looks like.
Perhaps we have sometimes been looking for the good life in the wrong places.
How might we journey together to the good life by staying curious about one another, crossing some of the distances fear creates between us, noticing the people already living meaningful and connected lives, and practicing what we can learn from them?
Several nights ago I watched Apple TV's highly popular new movie, MayDay. It's set in the cold war era. many of us remember it well. It's funny, it's action, and it makes us grapple at least a litle bit with how we stereotype and see each other. And... it reminds me of listening to may son argue with his Chinese wife after they were first married. She: "You've been brainwashed." He: "No you've been brainwashed."
A little aside quote:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on thse accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable view of mean and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." Mark Twain
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