The Catholic Standard and Times

Union with God — the only true happiness

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

Believe it or not, we were created for happiness.
It’s supposed to be our usual state.

In the words of one of the great mystical Doctors of the Church, St. John of the Cross, we’re supposed to be happy to the point of “always walking in festivity, inwardly and outwardly.”

Even here on earth, it’s possible to “enjoy all peace, taste all sweetness, delight in all delight as far as this earthly state allows,” to such a degree that we become “insensible to the disturbances and troubles” of life.

In fact, we can reach a state of such bliss that it will seem as if “God has no one else in the world to favor nor anything else to do” but to lavish us with His constant attention.

These words might sound like something out of a popular self-help book, but they’re actually 500 years old, and they agree with the sentiments of many other saints and philosophers dating back as far as Aristotle.

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” St. Augustine once wrote.

The more contemporary theologian, Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., explained it this way: “Man by his very nature desires to be happy. … The desire for happiness is not a mere hypothetical wish; it is innate.”

If that is true, then why aren’t we happy?

There are many answers to this question, but the most common reason is that we mortals have a bad habit of seeking happiness in all the wrong places.

The “innate” desire for happiness that Father Lagrange speaks about is not the superficial kind. It’s not based on the merely pleasurable sensations that come from acquiring possessions or high honors. Even while pursuing those things with the greatest energy, deep down inside, we somehow know there’s something more.

That inner-knowledge springs from our innate desire for real happiness — the kind we were designed to enjoy. That is a deeper and more lasting joy, the kind that can only be found at the point where we reach the summit of our existence and finally realize the purpose for which we were created. It is a summit that can be found only in the heart of the One who created us.

Especially in this culture, such notions are dismissed as pious nonsense.

But a look at the soaring rates of depression and suicide in the most affluent countries on earth should make us think twice before dismissing the idea. If happiness can be found in things, and we have so many of them in the richest nation in the world, shouldn’t we be happier than we are?

Father Lagrange explains that most of us go wrong in trying to satisfy our thirst for happiness by seeking after carnal pleasures at the expense of the spiritual.

“The heart and will have also their profound spiritual needs, and so long as these remain unsatisfied there can be no true happiness,” Father Lagrange writes.

Man is not just a carnal being. He’s also a spiritual being, and the spiritual part of him needs a lot more than a house and a new car in order to be happy. That part of us wants love, meaning, purpose.

Only a moment’s reflection is all we need to see the truth in this. How many of us have aspired for that bigger house, or car, or promotion, only to get it and experience a kind of let-down inside?

This is a common experience. Father Lagrange describes it as an “empty void in the heart that always remains, making itself felt in weariness of spirit.”

Deep down inside, we instinctively know there’s more to life than things: “Is this all there is?” must be the most commonly asked question in the human experience.

We somehow know there’s a higher joy, a higher love, a higher existence, and we continue to pine for it the way the “soul naturally desires to live forever,” Father Lagrange writes.

“Intelligence tells us that not even the simultaneous possession of all these goods, finite and imperfect as they are, can constitute the good itself which is conceived and desired by us, any more than an innumerable multitude of idiots can equal a man of genius.”

In other words, when it comes to true happiness, “quantity has nothing to say in the matter; it is quality of good that counts here,” Father Lagrange writes.
So why do we keep seeking happiness in all the wrong places?

Because, Father Thomas Dubay explains in his book, “Fire Within:” “We are so immersed in our egoism … we assume that if we give up our self-centered pursuits we’ll never be happy.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, Father Dubay says. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is when we give up our own ideas of happiness that we finally find what we’re looking for.

But letting go is hard, especially in a culture that presents the faithful in such negative ways. It’s easy to believe that the only people who seek happiness in God are the kind who hide themselves in prayer all day. We see them as backward-thinking, almost marginal, living on the fringes of life.

In reality, the opposite is more true.

Persons with faith are more alive and engaged in life than the rest of us.

They have undergone a “radical healing, a transformation” that removed the shackles of “self-love” that kept them chained inside their little box rather than allowing them the freedom to live for love alone.

“The four passions, the emotions of joy, hope, fear and sorrow, are well under the guidance of reason and thus lose their excessive and disordered tendencies,” Father Dubay writes.

All of those “small attachments and selfish clingings are nonexistent: preferring this food or drink to that, seeking more gratification in this activity rather than that, desiring the best for oneself, clinging to one’s own preferences. In place of inner turbulence and overwrought feelings there ensues a calm and abiding serenity even in trying circumstances.”

That is no marginal person. It’s more like a superhuman.

Our history is ripe with evidence that union with God can make us capable of incredible things, even the ability experience utter joy while suffering the cruelest martyrdom.

“Jesus alone has been able to accomplish such things, by giving to the martyrs in the very midst of their torments peace and true happiness through union with God,” Father Lagrange writes.

If union with God can enable us to be happy and at peace even in the midst of torment, imagine what it can do for us in our ordinary life.

By the time we reach the summit of union with God, we will have been freed from the source of all of the misery in our lives — sin. We will have been completely transformed into a totally new creation — not just an improvement on the old — but someone entirely new.

We will have finally become the person we were meant to be.

“When one is anchored deeply in the divine solution to all problems, outer turmoil cannot disturb the inner tranquility,” Father Dubay writes. “It is a grace that surpasses all understanding.”

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615