In the opening chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck lives with Miss Watson, a Christian spinster. She takes a dim view of Huck’s fun-loving spirit and threatens Huck with the fires of Hell. She speaks of Heaven as a place everyone should want to go, but Huck sees it this way:
She went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it….I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.[i]
It wasn’t only an unhappy Heaven that Miss Watson projected. It was an unhappy present life, full of obligation and self-inflicted misery. And although she may not have made such a claim out loud, the clear subtext is that if God is the author of a Christian life that’s unhappy, God himself must be unhappy too.
Had Huck seen in Miss Watson a deep, cheerful affection for Jesus and consequent grace that overflowed toward him and Tom and others, perhaps he would have also seen Christ, the church and Heaven as attractive.
Huck’s view of God reflected that of author Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain.[ii] I wonder if anyone told Clemens that the God he saw as so stern and humorless was, yes, a holy God, but he was also a happy God who invented playfulness, fun, laughter and whitewash—and was the source of Twain’s wit and humor.
Sadly, the same perceptions exist today. Many non-Christian young adults view Christ’s followers as “hypocritical,” “insensitive” and “judgmental.”[iii] These words all describe unhappy people. (If the world judges us, so be it, but it shouldn’t be because we’re chronically unhappy.)
Unfortunately, the world’s characterization of unhappy believers is too often correct. I see too many long-faced Christians who seem continuously angry, disillusioned and defensive over politics and the infringement of their rights.
Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva (1567–1622), said, “I cannot understand why those who have given themselves up to God and his goodness are not always cheerful; for what possible happiness can be equal to that? No accidents or imperfections which may happen ought to have power to trouble them, or to hinder their looking upward.”[iv]
