Pursuing Happiness

As I write this on the evening of July 5, 2025, I’m remembering seeing a play named The Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson, the second of his Talley Trilogy. The play is set in 1977, opened off-Broadway in 1979, and opened at the New Apollo Theatre on Broadway in 1980.

I saw it on Broadway within a year after I had made the most significant move in my thirty-five years. I’d left my native South to begin what became a 13-year sojourn in Connecticut. It was the first Broadway production I’d seen since the one I’d seen in high school. I went purely for entertainment. I knew nothing of Wilson nor his play.

As it turned out, however, the play dealt with some things that were very much a part of me. Some of those things I was dimly conscious of, if conscious at all. What I now know is that in many ways The Fifth of July is a parable about the trouble that sets in when the myth of independence is exposed, the myth that enthralls people who hunger for happiness.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Jefferson wrote those words out of his familiarity with John Locke’s political philosophy. While Locke never said exactly what Jefferson wrote, he came near enough with this passage from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

“The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action…” [Book II, Chapter xxi, Section 52][1]

This is only a slice out of a major discussion by Locke who was attempting to articulate the foundations of human liberty. If you were like many contemporary Americans, you’d likely miss that “the pursuit of happiness” was not in the minds of Jefferson and Locke a password to do whatever one wants. Rather, the natural desire of a human being is to make decisions that result in the best life, and that requires intellectual and moral effort.[2]

John Locke and Thomas Jefferson were about as remote from my conscious mind in the theatre watching The Fifth of July as Miss Quattlebaum, my high school American history teacher.

The play is about the Talley family. The Viet Nam War made Ken Talley a double amputee and left him struggling to find identity and purpose to lead him away from disillusionment. He wonders if he should sell the Talley home place and return to teaching English literature.

Jed is Ken’s lover who lives with him, a devoted and helpful mate whose ambition is to start a real English garden at the Talley place. That, for him and for the perceptive playgoer, symbolizes rebirth and renewal in a sea of confused people floundering.

John Landis, an old friend of Ken’s from college, visits with the expressed purpose of buying the Talley home for his wife Gwen, an aspiring country and western singer, with the thought of turning the house into a recording studio. John has an ulterior agenda with a teen named Shirley, the daughter of Ken’s sister June, a former anti-war flower child, like most of the other characters .

The fierce guardian of tradition is Aunt Sallie Talley Friedman, who strongly opposes selling “her” homestead, especially since she has come there to inter her husband Matt’s ashes.

All these characters have their baggage: secrets, rivalries, dashed ambitions, broken promises. The long shadow of the Viet Nam War continues to deepen the trauma carved into the characters. The house, not unlike Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, has a power of its own, storing memories of a past romanticized by Aunt Sallie; providing some stability for the only solid relationship in the entire drama, that of Ken and Jed; perhaps offering some hope of what the present might learn from the past, and the fantasy of how the future might be as good as the past seems to have been.

It is fair to say that all these characters are flummoxed by their own or others’ pursuit of happiness. It’s not quite Independence Day, but what happens to various pursuits apparently untethered from much sense of how one goes about obtaining happiness is what the fifth of July discloses.

What happens when we lift this story out of the eve of the Reagan era and plop it down where we are right now in the MAGA era? The particulars don’t neatly align with what’s happening now, at least not on a conscious level. But one way of looking at it is this: the turbulence of the 60’s and 70’s exposed the hard truth that a whole load of American independence mythology wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. People, especially white people, who had gotten used to the USA being on top of the world and everything in it, raged at hippies who flaunted personal fulfillment, however juvenile it sometimes was, as they mocked “bourgeois values.” Lyndon Johnson, the great advocate for civil rights, turned out to be a part of a pattern of Presidential lying about what was really happening in Viet Nam. Seeing a President, a candidate for President, and the chief Civil Rights leader assassinated within a short time raised questions about the stability of American society. Black Power frightened the white majority. And crowning the whole mess was Watergate and the agonizing journey to Nixon’s resigning the Presidency, followed by his successor’s pardon of the man who had besmirched the Presidency and the Constitution.

There have been some jolts and lurches since. At this point, it seems painfully clear that a whole bevy of issues has steadily eroded the progress that has seemed sometimes for a little while to be tide-turning. Inequality of income has become increasingly extreme and now will become even more so. Catastrophic climate events have dramatically increased. Overall confidence in institutions (e.g., religion, journalism, jurisprudence) has deteriorated. The “American dream,” shorthand for the myth of “you can do anything with hard work and dedication,” despite all the overall progress made measured by some markers (increased GDP, for example), seems more and more remote for huge numbers of people. HIV is no longer the threat that it was during the Reagan years and following, but the Opioid crisis has hollowed out many lives of the poor and marginalized.

The Fifth of July, as I hinted above, met me at a time in my life when all was going well. For more than a decade I would experience great growth, huge challenges, painful lessons, unbelievable love, and amazing grace. I would accomplish some things that I can now say were singularly important. Yet, underneath all that there were parts of me I kept tucked away form human eyesight, including my own. I can remember seeing Ken and Jed kiss on stage and having the sight of it take my breath away. In fact, that scene and one other (Swoozie Kurtz sunbathing in silence until she rouses herself from her lounge chair and exclaims, “Wow! Wouldya look at that f*cking sunset!”) are the only two scenes I clearly remember at the distance of 45 years.

I was not only deeply in the closet, but maybe through hiding in that closet I could aspire to be in a major parish someday or perhaps become a bishop. My life unfolded in a much better way than either. I had my share of secrets and fears, of shame and doubts. Most of all, I labored under the weight of compulsive perfectionism. Through it all I learned, sometimes painfully, that pursuing happiness as self-fulfillment requires deep engagement with one's deepest core (never fully possible, but worth the attempt), always examining how being true to oneself, like being true to one's country, involves self-examination, willingness to surrender the ego to the deeper Self, growing appreciation of the incarnate God who makes a nest in the human soul.

Lanford Wilson’s characters worked through a huge portion of their issues and dysfunction. They left me pondering what all their chaos and confusion had to do with independence.

If I were to write a play about the pursuit of happiness, I think I’d pick some characters like those in the painting accompanying this post, by Logan Maxwell Hagege. The artist notes that he had long wanted to paint Taos in some way, but never quite knew until he made a trip there.[3] I live close to Section 14 in Palm Springs, a part of the city infamous for the abrupt demolition of the homes of Native Americans and other people of color who lived there in the 1950’s when, hungry for real estate opportunities, city officials colluded with developers to raze homes of the poor leaving scars still being felt by people including a friend of mine. One day kids came home from school, adults from work, to find "home" was gone. Bulldozed.

Dramatic example though it is, Section 14’s history is congruent with a pattern in American history. Now it’s mushroomed with Presidential leadership and Congressional approval with billions of dollars cut from funding on which millions of vulnerable Americans including seniors, children, and veterans depend, hospitals in rural areas rely to stay solvent, and why? To ease the tax “burdens” of millionaires and billionaires to make the rich richer. Crumbs thrown to a few working people, like those whose income includes tips, are set to expire in a few years, while the tax cuts running deficits of trillions are permanent.

Almost all the people who risk life and limb to crawl into this country are not coming to rape and murder and pillage. Nor are they coming to rip other people off and brag about it as do some felons in high places. If they had the words to tell you what they’re after, it would amount to pursuing happiness. They are people like Irma, who made it across the border to Arizona, dodging rattlesnakes and scorpions until she finally found a way to Washington, DC, where I knew her as a leading parishioner. They are people like Pedro who brought countless families to our parish because they'd communicate with him, as sexton, when they had a baptism to plan or a quinciañera to celebrate. I think my play would be about them.

We are living the Fifth of July. Independence was the hard-won battle of yesteryear. Now we are, if anything, fighting the revolutionary skirmishes, perhaps all-out war, that inevitably follow when independence, real or imagined, is declared. Read the old document, as Lincoln once called it, and pay attention to the complaints and allegations leveled at a tyrannical king and his government. See if they don’t match a similar list of enormities that you yourself have seen since January 20, not yet six months past.

It appears the tyrants’ playbook hasn’t changed much at all. Whether so or not, one thing undoes all kingdoms save one. Greed. Our foundational myth depicts a garden in which every delight possible is freely given to the humans whose home it is. It only takes the hiss of a snake to suggest that they just don’t have enough. God knows you’re a threat, the serpent says. God knows that knowledge and power and the quelling of your aching little hearts’ desires are all just a bite away. Have some. Damn the consequences.

So, bait they took. It was true. Their eyes were opened. They immediately realized they needed something they just had to have. Something to cloak their shame. Shame led to fear of being found out. Go for cover. And on goes the story. Over and over again, people get to believing that somebody, somewhere, just might be depriving them of something, maybe like gold from the River Rhine, that belongs to the earth or the gods. Just take it, they say, paying no attention to the sirens screaming warnings. And then it’s “Quick! Find somebody to blame. The Jews. The Muslims. The people who aren’t like us. Grab a flag, wave it proudly, then decorate yourself with it as you find a trillion things to rip off to make sure you’ll always have something to fill that yawning hole.”

We think, don’t we, that we’re merely pursuing happiness when we feed that emptiness. And indeed we are. We just tend to forget that true happiness consists in things that imagined happiness lacks. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, loyalty, and self-control. In other words, Virtue. Morals. And a gratefulness for the Kingdom of Jesus’ Abba in which lie all these things given to us who are its citizens, should we ever simply show up.

[1] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 35, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, (Chicago, et al: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1952), p. 191.

[2] See the website “Pursuit of Happiness,” https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/john-locke/, accessed July 6, 2025, 15:10 PDT. This website is interesting, as it is run by a 501(c )(3) non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to the promotion of well-being and depression prevention.

[3] See the article on the website of Scottsdale Art Auction, https://scottsdaleartauction.com/artwork/pursuit-of-happiness/, accessed July 6, 2025. From that website:

Logan Maxwell Hagege’s The Pursuit of Happiness was created for the 2018 Masters of the American West exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. A compositionally complex painting, with subjects appearing on numerous planes, from the sandy foreground to the purple-shadowed mountains in the far background, the piece won Hagege the patrons’ choice award at that year’s show. “Although I have wanted to paint a major piece that featured Taos as the subject for many years and have done several smaller paintings of Taos, I haven’t felt like I had a clear idea for a major piece,” he wrote in the exhibition’s catalog. “Recently, I took a trip to Taos and met up with several Taos Pueblo Natives, an experience that was life changing. This painting—the result of my time in Taos—serves as a representation of gathered experiences rather than a snapshot of a particular scene.”

"The Pursuit of Happiness," by Logan Maxwell Hagege