Necessity to be cheerful to help yourself and others

Around Thanksgiving Day, in addition to showing gratitude,
it is not bad to take a moment to focus on the need to be cheerful and positive thinking.

At our other website which you also might not forget to visit now and then, we started also looking back at 2023.
Each time, we will highlight some highlights or happenings, or bring up a few things that may have escaped your notice and had not yet been mentioned on that site.

Being cheerful on the outside can help you – and others – feel it on the inside

Our chief preacher, Marcus Ampe, (during the course of this year, before his heart attack) emphasised how we need to ensure that we strengthen ourselves spiritually to keep us healthy and to energetically stimulate others as well.

He stressed that the inner man, the wellbeing of our soul, is the most important thing to help us and others move forward in life.
In these times of a shortage of real conversations, as everything is done fleetingly through social media, our society, according to him, lacks self-confidence and a healthy state of mind.

“The surest sign of wisdom is a constant cheerfulness,”

wrote the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century.

According to Mr Ampe, in the long run, we should ignore people who influence us badly and focus more on positive impulses we can get in life.

He also said there is no point if we are too preoccupied with the things that go wrong in our lives. We need to learn to worry less about all the things we see going wrong around us.

“Be cheerful,”

commands the fictional character and the protagonist (Prospero) of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest – arguably the wisest of all of Shakepeare’s characters – in The Tempest. Yet the impact of cheerfulness – and the power it gives us to get through difficult moments in our lives – is hard to define and easy to disregard or dismiss, even as we strive to be happy.

Someone who is cheerful is happy and shows this in his behaviour and makes that person have or express a buoyant or self-confident air. With good humour we should try to spread God’s Word which is a message of joy and gladness, bringing the Good News of better times to come.

The ITMA cast at rehearsal during a visit to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, January 1944

Marcus Ampe also warns us, that we need to prepare spiritually for much more difficult times ahead. To get through those terrible times, we must have a sound mind that will not let itself be dragged into the depths by what is happening around us. He reminded us of the BBC’s wartime radio comedy It’s That Man Again – or ITMA – that kept British peckers up during the blitz. It was a morale-boosting cavalcade of wacky characters, cheeky catchphrases and proto-Goon sound effects, in which the recurrent character depressed charlady Mona Lott, played by Joan Harben, in the 1929–1949 BBC Radio series would drone the latest awful thing that had happened to her and then hit you with the devastatingly deadpan punchline:

“It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.”

Let us not forget

“Saint Paul had pointed to cheerfulness as the mediating affect that defines our relationship to the mystical body of Christ in the community of the new church”.

It is a learned discipline, to be taken perfectly seriously as something that promotes social cohesiveness and personal humility. He finds Friedrich Nietzsche to be a key figure in the history of modern cheerfulness. While not obviously Mr Cheerful, the philosopher was someone who rejected the idea of it as mere placid wellbeing.

Marcus Ampe is totally aware that it is not, or will not always be easy, to be ‘cheerful’ or to be friendly and receptive to everyone. It is something we shall have to learn and work on.

We should also remember that our face speaks volumes and no false facade should appear on it. As followers of Christ, we should always be honest and our faith in the future should radiate through our attitude. Even though we may be handicapped or in great pain, we should make the best of ourselves and always remain open to the pains and complaints of others, whom we should then relieve and give hope.

Cheers is also about a community spirit, or a kind of moral hospitality, a rejection of self-indulgence and a prioritising of the general mood.

“Cheerfulness is a psychological and emotional resource, a way of approaching actions and situations,”

says Timothy Hampton, a professor in the department of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I can say hello to you – but I can also say hello to you cheerfully. It’s not part of the saying ‘hello’, it’s some kind of colouring of what I am saying.”

And what we are saying and what we are doing as Christians is very important. We should be an example to others. An example of good spirit. According to Hampton, for whom getting through the day was very difficult is cheerfulness a resource

– you can make it, manage it and put it into action.
And that seemed to me to be a really precious and interesting thing that we don’t think about as much as we should.”

he says.

> Read more about it:

Being cheerful on the outside can help you – and others – feel it on the inside

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Related

1. Something to Remember
2. Accepting the gift of God’s peace
3. Loving others when you don’t feel like it
4. Laugh Often
5. “Janice’s Attic: Giving Thanks” (Episode 4)
6. Unhappy with Life? Thankfulness Produces Joy!
7. Thought For The Day: Feb. 5, 2018 “Being Cheerful”
8. Reasons to be or not to be cheerful, or not. Or something.