So how can pastors who may feel maybe stuck in discouragement reframe their ministry in some of those ways that bring them a greater sense of happiness?
Yeah, this is one of the things that I do with a lot of leaders, not just church leaders. I do this a lot with hedge fund managers and politicians and military leaders. I’m sort of the striver whisperer. And I’ll ask across these three silos: enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. I say, “Where 10 is the highest score and one is the lowest score, give me your score compared to everybody you know on enjoyment of your life. And what I find with religious leaders is inevitably, their sense of meaning is pretty high. So, I’d say that most of them find about a nine in satisfaction and about a six or a seven in meaning, which isn’t too bad. But about a three in enjoyment.
And this is the thing: A lot of Christians feel guilty about enjoying their life. And the reason is because they’re making a mistake. A lot of Christians—a lot of people—think that enjoyment and pleasure are the same thing and they’re not.
Pleasure is called a limbic phenomenon. It’s processed in the limbic system of the brain, which you have in common with all of the mammals. So your dog feels pleasure like you feel pleasure. A squirrel feels pleasure like you feel pleasure. Enjoyment is a very human experience that moves pleasure into the prefrontal cortex, this big processing computer that only humans have. This is a real connection to the divine because no other animal can understand God, let alone talk to God.
So here’s the thing: Enjoyment starts with pleasure. Pleasure plus people plus memory equals enjoyment, and enjoyment is one of God’s gifts.
Now, what this means is that when we have a conscious prefrontal cortex management of our pleasures, then our pleasures don’t manage us. A lot of Christians feel really guilty when they’re feeling some sort of a pleasure, as if that pleasure is a temptation, as if that pleasure is a perdition. It is if you don’t turn it into enjoyment.
And here’s the ultimate social science test. If you’re doing something that gives you pleasure and it can be addictive and you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong. A lot of clergy spend a lot of time alone, and that leads them to be tempted by pleasure, not by enjoyment. And the result of that is that they try to cut it out of their lives. They cut out enjoyment and they get unhappier.
You highlight faith as this pillar of happiness, but for pastors and church leaders faith is personal, but it’s also their job. So that’s where it sometimes gets tricky, and maybe it gets rote and it gets spiritually dry and they find themselves not enjoying, not walking in the fullness of their relationship with Christ. Share with me your thoughts on it.
Look, you know what it’s like to be a happiness professor? The truth is I have very, very high negative affect. I have very intense negative emotions. That’s the reason I study happiness. And this is the vulnerability that clergy need to bring to the job is to say, Why am I clergy? Not because I was born praising Jesus, but because it’s hard for me. That’s why I’m doing this. I’m walking the path of difficulty. I’m walking it with you. I need you to support me as I support you. And that sort of vulnerability is really important.
St. Ignatius of Loyola—the 16th century Catholic saint who founded the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuit Order of Priests—he created something called the Spiritual Exercises. Protestants can really appreciate this a lot too. What he talks about is the process of deepening faith, not just by the consolation that comes from a feeling of deep faith, but from the desolation that inevitably comes to us, the desolation of feeling far from God. This is really, really important.
What I find with a lot of clergy, a lot of priests and pastors, is when they naturally feel desolation, that gives them a feeling of fraudulence. It gives them a feeling of sort of a counterfeit faith.
“Our earthly experience entails some suffering. Why? So that we can purify ourselves, so that we can understand what real happiness is and we can get ourselves ready for the unmitigated, unending joy that we hope will be our lot in heaven.”
I mean, I’m super sympathetic, they get up in a pulpit and they say, “Do you feel the presence of Jesus Christ in your life?” And inside they’re saying, I don’t feel it. And St. Ignatius of Loyola said, Good! Do it anyway. Do it anyway. I mean, feel the fear, feel the pain, feel the suffering, and praise Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, notwithstanding your feelings. That’s how you get over the hump. That’s how you get over the desolation.
You’re not a fraud. You’re a man. You’re a woman. You’re a person. And recognizing that it’s not fraudulent; it’s human to feel desolation. And this is how you draw closer to Christ. Just like this is how you draw closer to your wife, Ed. If you only stayed married when you felt romantic love … I mean, I’ve been married 34 years. I would have been married 34 minutes if I were relying on love as a feeling. No, it’s a commitment. It’s an act. And doing that, and recognizing that, and being authentic about that, that is the ultimate solution that will sustain a person.
OK, so pastors experience spiritual depletion, right? Where they’re poured into others and maybe not being poured into. You talk about self-management. What practices of self-management could help pastors sustain their inner lives and experience that happiness.
It’s a lot of the same advice that I give to people who are caregivers. If you’re taking care of an aging parent, then it’s all them, all them, all them. And you’re just kind of desiccated, you’re dry, you’re dying inside. You have a feeling of desolation about the relationship with your parent.
For people who are in the business of the consolation of others, it’s like they say on the airplane: You gotta put on your own oxygen mask first. I know a lot of clergy who are not putting on their own oxygen mask first. And that means having a serious set of spiritual and physical protocols in your life.
Over the past 10 years, my career has exploded in a way I never anticipated. I’m doing 150 speeches a year outside of my full-time teaching job, and I’m working in media, and it’s really wonderful and I’m grateful to God that he gave me this path. But I recognize that I will become depleted talking about this with other people all the time. So I have developed, using the science of protocols, what will actually make it possible for me to do this. And they start with exactly what I need to do to sharpen the saw every day—that’s the words of Stephen Covey [in] The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.