Tom Hollander and Olivia Colman have returned to our screens in “Rev”. Hot on the heels of a recent report that the happiest workers in Britain are vicars.
I remember spending a day with a journalist in and around Liverpool showing her some of the work our churches were doing. After touring a tough parish in Huyton with a young talented priest she turned to me in the car and said, “You’re just showing me the best ones.”
“Well”, I said, holding my breath, “At any stage you can say ‘stop the car’ and I‘ll take you to the nearest vicarage.” She didn’t, and we ended up in Everton hearing all the stories that make episodes of Rev such riveting viewing. As the journalist left, the vicar shouted after her, “It’s the best job in the world!”
Well, apparently in 21st Century Britain it is.
Happiness and well-being are again rising to the top of the public agenda with the recent launch of a new Commission into Well-being and Public Policy by the Legatum Institute. It’s chaired by Lord O’Donnell previously Cabinet Secretary. They’ll be looking into how you can measure wellbeing and integrate it into public policy.
Speaking at the launch Lord O’Donnell said that in the past we’ve relied too much on GDP as the measure of our success. In other words, those who believe, “It’s the economy, stupid!” need to move over and make way for other ambitions.
From Aristotle to the Dalai Lama happiness is seen as the goal of life, so why shouldn’t it be the aim of politics and business too? A hundred years ago in 1914 John Spedan Lewis laid the foundations for a business where the first principle would be the happiness of all its partners.
The classical Greeks had a word for it ‘Eudemonia’ and the Jews called it ‘Shalom’. Jesus prescribed for it with the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. And one of our greatest scientists said, “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?” Although that might sound like one of the misfits from the cast of Rev, it was in fact from the brain of Albert Einstein!
Today the Church of England in its calendar of holy people celebrates one of its most famous vicars, John Donne, Priest and Poet. He wrote about love but in one memorable line tilted at happiness with the words:
“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.”
.