(The Nationalist, 9 December 2005)
The world we live in is full of bogus, pretended happiness. Advertising and the entertainment media abound with it, and it’s as artificial as the smile of someone advertising toothpaste.
Happiness is never found as a result of being sought for its own sake, but always as a side-effect. If we say, ‘I just want to be happy, that’s all’, we miss the point. We’ll never find happiness by looking for it, any more than we’ll find the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow by looking for it. We find it by forgetting ourselves, not giving ourselves a moment’s thought, but thinking of others instead. Then we will find ourselves surprised by joy, pleasantly ambushed by happiness. It is one of the paradoxes of life: in order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.
A paradox seems like a contradiction, but it isn’t. We can expect paradoxes in life; otherwise we would claim to understand life and to have mastered it, and only a fool would do that. (We don’t understand even ourselves.) An example of a paradox is in the prayer of Saint Francis: ‘It is in giving that we receive’. That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. It’s true, whether it applies to give things, like Christmas presents, or giving one’s time, energy, interest – in short, giving oneself.
The people who are happiest are those who are self-giving, self-sacrificing, self-denying. The least happy are the self-indulgent, self-centred, self-assertive, self-pitying, or simply selfish. This is the easiest thing in the world to understand, but the most demanding to do.
What helps us to be self-giving rather than self-seeking is the knowledge that we are loved unconditionally by God. Jesus radiated peace, assurance, happiness. That was because of knowing that he was loved totally by God his Father. To know that we are loved frees us from the stifling and never-ending demands of self-love.
In God, all is joy because all is giving. What is God for? God is for giving – and you can take that as one word or two – they’re both true. ‘In the end, we will be judged on how we have loved’. (St. John of the Cross)
For those in a hurry: ‘Contemplation consists in the simple enjoyment of the truth’. (Saint Thomas Aquinas)