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Tim keller sermon manuscript12/9/2023 ![]() ![]() They most likely do not exist, and even if they did, it is preposterous to believe that they could possibly care, that they are watching over you and keeping a strict accounting of your behavior. Step One: Do not believe in God, or in the gods. His method, like most methods of personal reform, had set steps, in this case four such steps. Epicureanism is generally understood to be about indulging fleshly pleasures, especially those of food and drink, but it is, I think, more correctly understood as the search for serenity.Įpicurus, who met with friends (disciples, really) in his garden in Athens, devised a program to rid the world of anxiety. Consider, though, the advice of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), who lent his name to the school of Epicureanism but who was, in my reading of him, the world’s first shrink. In the last stage of life, even with the cheeriest outlook, it isn’t easy to keep thoughts of death at bay. (I’ll put the quote below in it’s entirety.) Joseph Epstein, retired professor of English, wrote an article in the Notre Dame magazine.The old philosophers were all about detachment. and get what philosophers and Buddhism is about. ![]() Then you say ‘the only way I’ll get serenity is to stop pursuing joy. What happens is, because our hearts want joy, our hearts are a big vacuum pump, that has an enormous amount of sucking and it fixes itself on something and says ‘this will really make me happy’ but we know it will not last. For some sports teams are still breaking our hearts, but for most of the rest of us it’s a man or a woman, it’s love or a career or success.What I said was, ‘never again! I’m never giving my heart to _. “I understand this…” Baseball illustration of being a boy whose joy was the Philadelphia Phillies.The only way to get serenity is to not to try to be happy, not to try to pursue joy. No matter what it is it will disappoint you. If you really want serenity in life don’t pursue happiness because anything you get joy from will not last. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. (Keller then abbreviates another quote from the end of the article.) The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books it’s happiness itself.“What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.” “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in 1853. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons. ![]() (Here’s the whole quote, Keller abbreviates it.) Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. Amy Bloom wrote in the NY Times essay The Rap on Happiness . The intelligentsia hate all of that talk.
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