The Happy Vampire

A sermon delivered in Christ Chapel on April 24, 2003, by the Rev. Dr. Alan P.R. Gregory, Associate Professor of Church History

I was reading the back of his paper when he suddenly folded it up, slapped it on his knees, and stared at me. He was middle aged, I think. I'm sorry to be so vague about this but he wasn't quite describable, everything important was suggested, when I looked closely he only seemed ordinary and forgettable. He had a high forehead, eyes that were oddly bright, his clothes were casual, neat but somehow jaunty, as if he was a man on a permanent holiday. At one moment his face was loaded with experience -- centuries of it -- at another, there was the mischievous look of a child that's never been caught. And he had an unsettling smile that showed the only exactly memorable thing about him, rows of rather pointed teeth.

"Tell me what you were reading," he said. "About the murder," I replied. "Of course you were, I knew that, now tell me what struck you?" "The blood, a young unidentified woman found hit on the back of the head -- that's ordinary enough, I suppose -- but she had no blood in her, like she'd had a transfusion but someone forgot to put the stuff back." "They're calling her Snow White," he said. "She's the fourth, too," I added, "though they knew the names of the others. And that's another odd thing, isn't it: two of them were men. That's not your conventional sex crime." "Of course not," the idea clearly offended him, "Still, you're right so far. Now, let me tell you something nobody else knows. I did it." My insides tingled and my heart rate started to hurry away, which was just what I wanted to do. Even in a crowded airport, it's unsettling to sit opposite a really dedicated loony. "No don't get up," he leaned across and touched my knee, "your flight's not boarding yet. You don't believe me, of course, but that's only natural. And I don't really care, I simply want you to hear why I killed them."

"The four in the paper... . They're not all, of course, I've been doing this all my life, and I must say, I've had a very long life. Nobody puts it together, but, then, I move around a lot. I love airports, it's like window-shopping. I've had a long life and a very happy one, too.

Happiness -- I truly want you to understand this," he lent forward again, "happiness is the most precious experience in this world. If you don't believe that, you simply haven't known true happiness. Real happiness is pure, you see, not your feeble, half-baked momentary distraction from the general gloom, real happiness soaks into the nerves, flows in the blood, cells steep in it." He paused to move closer to the edge of his chair. "Happiness has not a shadow of a thought of anyone or anything outside it. And it lasts, I float on it. What does the world know about happiness?" He said it so sharply, I jumped. "There you are, you're a bag of nerves -- totally unsuitable for happiness. It's always compromised for you isn't it? You can't give yourself to happiness because you think 'my bliss is another's misery.' But that's your problem. Just think, please think. Don't you want to know that happiness, unalloyed bliss is possible in this sorry world? Wouldn't it be good news that somewhere in all this ambiguous, groaning mess with its fugitive, treacherous joys, that somewhere, someone, in defiance of the world, was truly happy? Wouldn't that joy be worth some sacrifices? I've never sucked the life from a happy person. I'm very particular. Snow White, remember her -- you were reading my paper -- she was a misery, wretched half-lit little life, with school photos on the wall, no mail --in either spelling -- and TV every night. I used to follow her home. On Valentine's Day, she stood outside a flower shop pressing a handkerchief to her face. Then, I knew she was mine. When I dropped her body, very gently, one of her white arms stretching out along the floor, there was ecstasy. She died for that. Wasn't that worthwhile? I took her life and turned it into happiness. My unique and exquisite bliss. She died for a great and very rare good."

He stood up, looking down at me. "Forget the coffin stuff," he said, "hanging around like a bat with your bum in the air. Light doesn't bother us, why should it, we're happy... we're very happy." He smiled -- those funny little teeth. "You believe me, don't you? Well, not much, perhaps, but just enough to call security. But then, you'll miss your plane -- and they'll think you're crazy." From behind me, I heard my flight called. I turned and, then, when I looked back, he was gone. I thought I saw him in the crowd, then lost him, saw him again, maybe, but he slipped away indistinguishable.

I think that our mailman is in love. He has been sitting on the stairs next to a girl also dressed in a postal uniform. I do not mind. I think it is to be encouraged. They were looking very steadily at each other and mumbling those fragments, not quite sentences that intimate we are beginning to understand one another. If, for the rest of this semester, my mail arrives strangely perfumed, I do not care. If the mail is late, if all over their respective routes there are lapses, copies of erudite work on Immanuel Kant arriving at the Yellow Rose, a package of exotic underwear for the Diocese, what does it matter? In their eyes, they are pursuing Utopia, they are beginning -- she brushes the dandruff from his shirt -- the exegesis of happiness. They are finding that happiness is a pursuit, finding the heart of a perfect Saturday night. He feeds her hair through his fingers and wanders into her eyes again. They are happy and think of what is to come, their joy breeds anticipation, eyes widening in expectation, the happiness that lures them on. In a strange way, love empties us, makes us poor, turns us into beggars who are determinedly unsatisfied. Their happiness lures them on. Rising and falling and again rising. It will always be the same: laughing in the restaurant, while outside the rain pours and she ruins her dress on the way home; or, so excited she drops the key, takes three tries to turn the lock, then rushes in with the news to find him irritable and distracted. This is the way of things but love must be stubborn and nimble, traveling by the hope of happiness, the thin membrane of tension by which the little insect makes its way upstream.

"It's getting dark," he said, hearing someone behind him. "Yes, I can hear wolves." He turned, "Angel of God," he said, "just look around you." The whole landscape was stricken, bilious green rocks, twisted trees, and the sun crashing in bloody streaks upon the horizon. "You can't make a life here." "What do want?" said the angel. "I want what you have," he said, "I want happiness, my own portion of bliss, now. And, quite frankly, I don't care how many brothers I have to cheat -- but you can just hand it over." "You want happiness?" "You heard," he said. "From me?" He nodded. "Well," the angel backed away, "I'll wrestle you for it." They hit each other like bulls. At first, the angel's grip took his breath away and all he could do was push back, his feet slipping on the sand. Then he kicked at the leg nearest him, the grip loosened, and, for a moment, he broke away just enough to force his arm round the angel's neck. Seconds later, he was on his back. For hours, he grabbed and pushed, fell and staggered, and gripped, feeling the angel sweat under his fingers. Slits of light opened in the dark around them. Everything he'd been told about the night, every screeching, blood-sucking, stalking thing came out at once, running over the rocks. Pain from his bruises buzzed in his head, and he went half deaf from the strain. When the slips of morning light fell over the rocks, he'd long forgotten how many times he'd fallen, how many times he'd thrown his weight against the angel, how many times, he'd thought the angel would pin him to the earth and win. Then, he was down again. "Give it up," said the angel. "Not until you bless me," he hissed and grabbed again. "All right, stop, here's your blessing, you've earned it," the angel grabbed his chest with one arm and struck his hip with other. The pain was horrible and he collapsed on the ground. "That's it," said the angel, "happiness. Now, it'll always be ahead of you and you will limp after it."

This war with Iraq has had me thinking about the pursuit of happiness. That was, after all, what it was about -- behind the appeals to security, freedom, the ability to sleep in our beds without fear of explosions, behind it all was the protection of our happiness, our continued enjoyment of it, and our unhindered pursuit of it. We are, of course, civilized these days and very careful about those we kill. We use only precision missiles and -- don't get me wrong -- I'm grateful for that, but when the bombs land precisely on an orphanage we say that the thing shouldn't have been there or that the numbers went awry or the satellite's unblinking eye, just winked, and, besides, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. However consoling this technology, though, however tidy, distancing, and exact the language of strategy and military prediction -- "these divisions," he said, "are no longer a credible force" -- it's a flimsy disguise for the most bitter unhappiness. "They are no longer a credible force," all those husbands, brothers, sons, fathers, friends, all gone -- gone in pain, gone in fear, gone in surprise -- all gone, gone into the dark.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular conflict, the rhetoric of war reveals one of those tragic cognitive distortions that characterize our falleness: the knowledge of our good is an evil for others. Put it another way, we privilege our happiness, privilege it viscerally, as a matter of course. I think that ancient twist of falleness is there, behind our outrage at those who would harm us, behind the certainty that we know what they're up to, that we understand while they are benighted, behind the rhetoric of confidence. We are the wealthiest, most technologically complex, innovative, inventive, liberated, comfortable, and happiest civilization ever. Isn't that remarkable, doesn't it take your breath away, isn't it worth protecting? Can't it be said that the world is a better place, a more hopeful place because we are so happy, because we have the means for such happiness? Isn't our joy worth sacrifices? Do any lesser happinesses really matter very much? Doesn't the very existence of our happiness put all the misery of others in a properly diminishing perspective? If you listen between the lines, you'll hear that argument: but, that, as you know, is the argument of the happy vampire.

What, then, is happiness? The mailman touches the hand of his beloved, runs his finger across her wrist. In love, he puts his happiness into the hazard, he will have joy only with her or as he receives it from her hands. He chooses for his happiness, the genial ache of desire and the pilgrimage of the heart, where the trail is much lost and overgrown. He is not far from the Kingdom of God, though: not far from the teacher on the hillside, who says to us: "Happy are you if you have been ravished by me. Happy are you if I have robbed you and made you poor. Happy are you if I have lain you low and hobbled you. Happy are you if what you have seen, if what you have heard has emptied you, so that nothing is satisfactory any more. I will make you desire something so much that life is unsupportable without it. Every morning, when the alarm goes off, you will long for the dead to rise." You and I have found a love that, even now, is freeing us from our privileged happiness, from that happiness we assume, without thinking, is worth everything, the happiness we cling onto, for which we are willing to ignore or sacrifice others. Such a happiness, though, so alive to ourselves and so blind to others, is a dark and false joy in which I slowly wither, grow cold, dusty and pinched in heart and mind, short-sighted, fearful of the light, becoming, in a word, a vampire.

We, however, have died with Christ, have given over our happiness and let him take it to the grave; we did little good with it. Now the only happiness we will ever have is the one given to us; the one that, like loaves and fishes multiplies, so we may give it away. This Son of God, teaches us -- and who else could teach us -- the courage to count happiness as something not to be held on to but ventured in love, and received -- finally and fully -- only when the tears of others are dried and their mourning turned to gladness.
Amen.