Happy

Psalms 144:15

Happy is that people, that is in such a case: yea, happy is that people, whose God is the LORD.

 

Happiness.  What is it?  What does it feel like?  How do you get it?  How do you keep it?  How do you multiply it?  How do you give it to others?  Well…

Is happiness an it, like some commodity in which we want to trade?  If we say that happiness is a feeling… is it merely this?  A biological response of brain chemicals or hormones to some stimuli and nothing more?  I don’t know.  Surely, we do experience happy feelings.  But, when we really think about life and what true happiness is, what we are thinking about is something deeper, more satisfying and longer lasting.  Something beyond pleasant feelings, beyond pleasure itself.

So, what then?  In Scripture we hear, “… happy is that people, whose God is the LORD.”  This immediately strikes my ears as a little funny, as though it is saying that those who are happy are those whose God is God.  What other God would we have?  To the modern Judeo-Christian, or Muslim, the idea of there being gods from which to choose is not only foreign, it’s ridiculous.  And, yet, of course, religiously speaking, other people of the world do choose some other god to worship, believing in the existence of more than one.  Though we may call these gods false gods, they can direct followers, even just as mere symbols, toward the One True God and even draw them closer to Him.  But… what about our own false gods?

What do you worship?  What do you adore above everything and everyone else?  Money?  Fame?  Possessions?  Your romantic partner?  Your children?  Your body?  Fun?  Pleasure?  Your idea of what happiness is?  Sometimes, I think, we put happiness itself up on a pedestal, we set it up as the highest goal and supreme purpose of life.  And all the other things, and even people, that I mentioned, are merely ways of achieving this goal.  We will leave our jobs, we’ll break up our relationships, we will even risk our lives, all for our idea of happiness, without ever really knowing what happiness itself actually is.

What if we put first things first?  You may ask, what is first in the order of life?  Isn’t it happiness?  No.  First in the order of life is the origin of life, the Source of Life.  Life itself would not exist without this Uncaused Cause, this Uncreated Creator, this Unmoved Mover, who is the Author of life.  Who this is is “the ultimate reality that everyone calls God.”  (St. Thomas Aquinas.)  Unless we put the Source of Life first in our lives – unless I put God first in my life, my life will always be out of order.  And I can’t be truly happy if I’m out of order, because, surely, the goodness that our idea of happiness represents can’t truly flow in me and through me if I’m out of order.  That’s why you can’t get candy from a vending machine that’s out of whack.

Thinking about this, I do wonder… what does it mean to put God first in my life?  Practically speaking, I’m not entirely sure.  But, it must mean that my God is God.  In keeping the First Commandment, I must do as God directs: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  (Exodus 20:3)  And that doesn’t mean that because I’m a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, that I don’t have to worry about ever breaking this Commandment.  If my main ambition is not to do God’s will in this life and to be united with God forever in the life after death, then I am falling miserably short of the First Commandment.  Yep, I’m sinning.  And this is not just bad because I broke a rule.  It’s bad because it’s falling short of my own true happiness.  The reason that it’s bad, the reason that it’s a rule at all, is because my true happiness, the full realization of my true identity, the point of my whole life, lies in being united with the Source of Life.  If I’m living my life, spending time and energy in the worshiping and adoring of things that are not God, then I’m missing the whole point of my existence and going through life ignorant, crippled, blind, deaf and dumb.  I cannot be fully myself and live the fullness of my life without knowing that God is above everything and everyone and that the highest goal and ultimate purpose of my life is to truly love Him and receive His love.

God is to be adored even above my own sense of happiness.  By sense of happiness, I mean that ideal I hold in my mind of pleasure and pleasant feelings.  God wants us to be happy and putting Him first doesn’t mean that we won’t ever have pleasure or pleasant feelings in our lives.  It doesn’t mean that we won’t have people that love us or that we can’t have good health or good jobs.  But, putting God first does mean that when we aren’t experiencing pleasure or pleasant feelings – when we are even experiencing pain, sorrow and grief – when we are betrayed, abandoned or ridiculed by the people we love, when we are diseased or disabled, when we are unemployed or having to suffer through a miserable job, we lose nothing in the way of our goals and our purpose.  Our happiness lies in identifying with God as our Creator and uniting our will with His.  Nothing on earth, and nothing in Hell, can destroy this happiness if we don’t let it.  If we TRULY love God, then we know that He Truly loves us through all of the earthly experiences that come our way, through all the people that we encounter in our lives.  But, we have to look and we have to listen.  We have to remember that the First Commandment in the list of the 10 Commandments is the same as what Jesus said is the first Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” – and the second is in keeping with the first – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  (Luke 10:27)

To live in divine love, then, is the goal and purpose of life – is happiness itself.  Not merely loving the pleasant feeling, or love for the sake of the pleasure it can bring, but eternal love that is willing to sacrifice and suffer, knowing that all things eternal are happy things: true love, the human soul, divine grace, God.

Christina Chase