Easter, Passover, Forgiveness, and Pursuing Happiness

From the desk of Chuck Fuller

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” – what do these words have to do with this extraordinary time of the year, Easter and Passover? What do these powerful words mean in our current political environment?
 
I invite you to spend a few moments with me this morning to take a closer look at a much deeper meaning to these words in America’s history and how they relate to our lives today. We’re many generations removed from America’s revolutionary era. Like many things, how we’ve come to define “pursuit of happiness” has changed with the passage of time…
 
Stacy Schiff, in her book The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, captures that founding spirit of happiness, which seems so foreign today:
 
(Note: The below excerpts have been lightly edited for length, clarity, and ease of reading; some passages have been reordered to distill Ms. Schiff’s points as they relate to this piece.)
 

Adams’s Boston was a town in which you had your pick of harpsichords, where you could acquire a fine umbrella tipped with ivory or brass; a box of fresh Malaga lemons; a set of false teeth (designed by Paul Revere, a goldsmith); silkworm eggs; a ripe, delicate pineapple; French lessons; The Complete Woman Cook; or “as fine a pleasure boat for sailing or rowing as perhaps ever built.” Plenty of families kept coaches; a select few rode out accompanied by servants in scarlet livery. The incursion of those superfluities was surveyed with some alarm. “Luxury and extravagance,” the adult Adams would fret, “are in my opinion totally destructive of those virtues which are necessary for the preservation of the liberty and happiness of people.” … In Adam’s expostulations his opponents heard the resentment of a man without fortune. They were correct about the poverty, mistaken about the envy.
 
Samuel Adams was the kind of man you would like to believe exists, but rarely meet. He was firm in his convictions. He was clear how he felt about his associates (“What is life without friendship!”); about matrimony (“designed to complete the sum of human happiness in this life”); about happiness (“too easily squandered on the road to our destination”). Adams “could see far into men.” He seemed immune to small-mindedness, boasting, doubt, frustration. When he waxed rhapsodic it was about liberty and the rights of men.
 
He rarely missed an opportunity to proclaim the value of a sound education for young men and women. Essential to a republic, it was the requisite partner to virtue.
 
Adams believed all was ordered for the best; he was not put out when things failed to proceed exactly as he liked: “By fretting at unfortunate events we double the evil.” He heard only the sensible and the honest. He excelled at friendship, was even-tempered and sweetly obliging, and patient in the extreme. He was fussy when it came to words. Meaning mattered. Pride and vanity kept their distance. He found ambition suspect. He thought the best of people until he could no longer.
 
All five of the Massachusetts signers of the Declaration of Independence graduated from Harvard. John Adams would claim it had been the college – and Samuel Adams’s town meetings – that had set the universe in motion. Hancock declared that Harvard could be considered ‘the parent as the nurse of the late happy revolution.’
 
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer. Natural rights and principled defiance resonated deeply with his faith. At the time of Adams’s Harvard graduation, it was also true that an American intellectual was, by definition, a clergyman. Adams seemed fleetingly headed in that direction; it was the traditional career for the gifted, book-loving New England son. The families of both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams hoped their sons would enter the ministry.

 
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Given the background in their family and faith, it’s not surprising the Founding Fathers had a deeper and nobler meaning of happiness than we do more than two centuries later. Missouri law professor Carli Conklin has concluded that, for Jefferson and the Founders, the right to pursue happiness meant something like the freedom to align one’s life with laws of nature.
 
Author Jeffery Rosen describes it this way: “happiness as the pursuit of virtue – as being good, rather than feeling good.” Rosen goes on to list the virtues embraced by ancient philosophers and quoted by Franklin: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
 
There is a path to virtue and integrity. The Founding Fathers did their best to walk this path. It was their pursuit of happiness.
 
We should embrace these ways of righteousness. As a Christian, to me that means following Christ’s path of integrity. In our pursuit of happiness, we must be people of our word, honest, and reliable. We should do what we say we will do and, when we fail, own up to our mistakes and seek forgiveness.
 
As I was crafting this message, a personal memory stuck in my mind. In 1996, I was managing a fierce statewide political campaign. The day we launched the first negative press release, my team refused to send it. They said, You’re in charge, you need to take full responsibility. If you want this to go out, you need to be the one to hit the send button. I did without hesitation, and for the next four months we unleashed daily attacks against our opponent – taking him apart – probably ending his political career. We won, but at a high cost.
 
Fortunately, he went on to do many great things for North Carolina. On March 16, 2018, I visited with him at his office. He was gracious to receive me. I went to apologize for the way I had treated him on that campaign 22 years earlier. He was kind, accepted my apology, and said he hadn’t thought anything about it. Being even more gracious, he complimented me. We had a nice conversation. I’ll never forget that day. Since then, things have looked different from me in many ways.
 
We should be people who look for ways to offer others an opportunity at greatness, being generous with our resources and encouraging others in the spirit of kindness, peace, and joy.
 
There is no better way to live without regret than to use integrity as our shield.
 
As we celebrate Easter or Passover, let’s remember that the fundamental lesson of both faiths is to accept the forgiveness we have been graciously given, and offer the same forgiveness to others.
 
The Founding Fathers taught us to live with integrity, courage, grace, and hope – in other words, be virtuous.
 
The pursuit of virtue – being good rather than feeling good – is where we will find happiness, forgiveness, and wisdom.
 
Our families, workplaces, and communities will be better places when we do. This is what the “pursuit of happiness” meant when the words were written, and it’s past time we reinvigorated their original meaning.
 
As you ponder these thoughts with me during this amazing time of year, if someone is now on your mind that could take interest in this message, take a moment and send it to them.