The Happy and the Unhappy

There are two ways of life, two competing ways. There is the way of the blessed. And there is the way of the resentful and miserable. Bliss is the old English word for happiness. Bliss and bless are related, indeed one comes from the other. We are blessed, and so made happy, by God. You are happy if you have been given life and the good things that belong to it. You are happy if you know that you have received some of these good things, and may expect more. You are happy if you realise that these are indeed good things and if you are able to look forward to more. Thankfulness makes for happiness. You are happy if you can say ‘I am content, I have enough’. And you are happier still if you meet other people who make the same acknowledgement, express the same gratitude and experience the same gladness. You can share your happiness with one another. We are the people who turn everything to good. We may turn terror and disaster into a challenge that we can overcome or at least come through, with tears, through gritted teeth, sometimes after much horror and shock and numbness. And afterwards, we may give thanks and find that happiness has returned.
The strange thing is that both the happy and the unhappy want to share their experience. Just as the happy want to share their happiness, those who are in misery want to make us feel as they do. They want to make their misery ours. Sometimes, if they have never pushed back against it, their misery becomes so strong that they want to frighten, hurt and break everything up, no longer caring whether what they do is good or bad. Evil grows, when we don't push back against it. In their misery some want to bring the world down. They believe that if they are not going to survive, no one else should be allowed to either. They do not wish the world to continue on without them. They enter a tail spin. Their rage shrivels them, and attempting to take the place of God they destroy and become destroyers and are burned up by their own fury. We see this fury aimed against the West by those excluded from happiness by their own evil, particularly when this evil is given ideological justification by their primitive cult.
But why should we talk about the Unhappy? We should talk about the Unhappy only in order to be able to identify them and avoid the signs of contagion. We walk through them, and they hammer away at us. It is only important that we do not turn aside, try to split the difference with them and so get drawn in to them. No identifying with our persecutors, no Stockholm syndrome for us. Every week we come up to the altar in order to confess, to retch and cough up all the bile in the air which we have breathed in during the week. We do not confess our own sin only but all the sin around us. As we confess it, its hold is broken, we are released from it and then we are in our right mind again, and may give thanks and be glad.