'Where can you always find happiness?' When caffeine fails to awaken my senses, my daughter’s questions tend to do the job.
My mind began scanning its dusty archives of Platonic philosophy, and mused on the potential flaw in the question: Can one use such an absolute adverb, ‘always’ in association with an experience that is, at best, surely subjective? Can happiness always be found? Can it ever be found?
Happiness in 2024
The pursuit of happiness has captivated and tormented men’s minds and souls in every age, with each claiming its absolute definitive philosophy of how to live the best, happy life. Yet the data is far from consistent or conclusive.
Today, our world’s definitive truth is that there are many truths. And our philosophy of happiness is no different:
- Each individual is encouraged to construct their own happy life as they think best.
- While doing so, one must applaud the efforts and journeys of others in their exploration of self. We must champion the right to live as each man would.
- We must admire and marvel at how some find happiness in the same places that pose fear or sorrow for others.
We pride ourselves on ‘open-mindedness’, ‘open-heartedness’ in the achievement of this exploration and pursuit of personal happiness. Yet in reality our ideas are far from liberating, and far from novel. Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, writing and ministering in the 4th century, faced the same cultural crisis and clash with Christianity.
A human problem
While society’s situational context may have changed over the last 1800 years, nevertheless the existential soul-crisis of man remains woefully the same.
We are still left bearing the burden of burnout, despair, loneliness, and a mental health crisis that feeds our podcasts, lines our bookshelves and leaves the pursuit and reality of happiness just as out of reach as ever.
Back to sharing these musings with my daughter. I was faced with a patronising shake of the head and bemusement…
‘Where can you always find happiness? In the dictionary of course!’
Happiness: the state of being happy
Happy: feeling or showing pleasure or contentment
There you have it. Although of course, you don’t.
To experience the state of happiness is a longing planted deep within the human soul. But so, too, is the weight of the torment and sorrow of never attaining or achieving this best life. As humans, we are united in our soul-longing, and soul-lamenting.
Should we long for happiness?
But should we long for happiness? Desire it, and pursue its promises?
For Christians, we may shake our heads and balk at the self-centred sense of this path. We may recoil and shift uncomfortably in our pews at such preaching.
We fear and shy away from worthless, hedonistic living, and desire ‘instead’ the righteous life. We see and grieve the superficial pursuits of the world, the filling of life with transient pleasures, the self-medicating of souls with the happy pills of holidays, therapy and hobbies - and long for a better life. Surely, this better life is holiness, and purpose?
However, have we too missed the mark? Could we also be in danger of displacing happiness? Either by embracing this soul pursuit but pursuing from self, or avoiding it and naming the desire of it as sinful?
If so, let us ask ourselves this: in our pursuit of holiness (‘rather than’ happiness) who is our God that we are seeking to emulate, in this holy living?
A happy, holy God
God is Holy. Of that we are sure, and familiar with hearing and preaching. But how about: God is happy? How does that sit with our souls?
What if I were to say to you that both holiness and happiness are intrinsic to the very being of God as Father, Son and Spirit. It is in this reality that happiness truly comes to life. In the reality of the godhead alone that our life of happiness is always, and eternally found.
Augustine led me down a path of soul-examination regarding this.
Not only is there an eternal, mutually-loving, holy communion of happiness in the godhead, between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Not only is this holy happiness so perfectly complete that God seeks no need outside Himself.
Not only, therefore, was it as a gracious, pleasing overflow of this perfect happiness that our eternally righteous, holy, happy and loving God chose to create His children in His own image.
Not only all this - but it was a choice of pleasure and purpose, to bring us into this eternally happy home of the godhead. Essential to the reason of your being, is enjoyment within divine, eternal and holy happiness.
Hear Augustine’s words as he writes in City of God: 'It is in Him alone and thanks to him alone that men can be happy, by sharing his immortality...'
There is one place alone in which people's souls can find their eternally holy, happy home: in God alone. From God alone. Not something that can be achieved, gained or grasped, but given, gifted, and received.
Grace upon grace
But Augustine’s words, and the grace of God through them, do not end there. There is grace upon grace.
'It is in Him alone and thanks to him alone that men can be happy, by sharing his immortality; it was to persuade us of this that the Son of God came to share in our mortality.'
For when God’s children wilfully chose to reject this life of eternal holy happiness, by grace, the Son of God came to earth willingly. Not only to persuade man of God’s holy happiness, but to redeem the Father’s fallen children and secure them within this holy communion.
So if we for one minute think we can separate holiness from true happiness, let us look afresh to the nature of our Holy God who created us, redeemed us, renewed us, remakes us, and who lovingly, purposefully, willingly does so.
