Pursuit of Happiness

MY ATTENTION was drawn recently to a very sad story from the United States. It concerns a couple who were found dead in their New York apartment, having committed suicide with helium gas. They left notes saying that life had become too burdensome for them.

What was particularly poignant was that the couple had hosted a radio show on The Pursuit of Happiness, in which they advised others on personal development, growth and creativity. They also led a life coaching consulting company, offering coaching “designed to help foster and encourage your inner strengths,” and “put you confidently on the path to designing the life you’ve always wanted to live,” according to their website.

It would not be right for me to speculate or pass judgement on a personal and individual tragedy of which I know nothing but a few media reports. But the story prompts me to ask the questions, “How are human beings to find true happiness? And how is it that often people sincerely seeking it fail to find it?”

 

Self-knowledge

 

For St. Anthony the true happiness of human beings lies in the knowledge and love of God. In various places in his sermons he maps out the journey, from the state of beginners who are just turning to God, through their progress in virtue to the desired perfection. The first step is to see ourselves as we really are. He quotes St. Augustine, who prayed, “Lord, let me know myself and know you.” Our fundamental relationship is with God, who has made us (as St. Augustine also says) for Himself, so that our hearts find no rest except in Him.

The first mistake we can make, in seeking happiness, is to suppose that it can be found in ‘developing our potential’, our natural gifts, without reference to the Giver of all gifts and the purpose for which He has given them. Only when we understand our total dependence on the Father of Light, from whom every good gift and every perfect gift comes (as St. James tells us in his Epistle), can we set out with confidence on the path to happiness. Confidence comes from ‘to confide’, to have trust in, to have faith. It is this faith, this total trust in God, that ‘justifies’ us, putting us in the right relationship with Him and thereby with the whole of creation.

 

True progress

 

Another mistake we can make is to see progress in life in terms of worldly success, measured in fame or in wealth. The true riches are those which God values, the praise we seek is to hear His “Well done, faithful servant,” at the end of our lives. When St. Anthony wrote about progress, he made it clear that this too is a gift from God. It is Christ who “carries souls onward from strength to strength.” The word for ‘strength’ is virtus, which can also be translated ‘virtue’. True progress consists in developing the Christian virtues of humility, patience, charity and so on.

Anthony likens the human soul to a garden, in which Christ the gardener is tending all kinds of beautiful plants. As in a natural garden, the beautiful flower is only an intermediate stage, fulfilment comes in the fruit. “By their fruits you will know them,” our Lord says. Medieval theologians such as Anthony and Bonaventure used the word ‘fruitio’ for the fulfilment of human life. This seems a better word than ‘happiness’, which can be grounded in superficialities.

The ‘life coaches’ who took their own lives seem, in the end, to have despaired of finding happiness. “I can’t take it any more,” one of them wrote. Yet we do not have to think their lives were, in fact, totally unfulfilled. If they were genuinely trying to help others to find happiness (however imperfectly they conceived it), then they may have achieved something worthwhile. God is generous and merciful, and looks at our muddled intentions rather than our results. He looks for the best in us, not the worst.

 

The ladder

 

The journey of life is a journey upwards. St. Anthony speaks of the cross – the way of suffering – as a ladder whereby we climb to the vision of Christ Himself. It is in Jesus that we find not only the inspiration and call that sets us on our way, but the faithful companion who invisibly walks with us and sustains us in our weakness, until at journey’s end we not only see Him, but enjoy His friendship for ever.

Anthony frequently likens ‘journey’s end’ to the Sabbath rest which God initiated at the close of his creative work. Such a rest is not simply a state of inertia, but one of fulfilment and peace. The soul is perfected in mind and heart, and exists in harmony with God and with the saints in glory. Likewise the body (after the resurrection) is endowed with a certain freedom from its present limitations.

 

Praying for others

 

If we look for happiness within the confines of this life, we will ultimately be frustrated. If we cannot even conceive of happiness beyond this world, we will be tempted to despair: better non-existence, we may think, than a life of pain and misery. Fortunately, God desires our salvation far more than we do. He sees that many of the mistakes we make are due more to muddle than to malice.

When we read of brothers or sisters who have so lost their way that they have taken their own lives, we should pray most fervently for them. We do not know how God may reach out to them in this extremity, but we do know that He can, and that He loves them, and wants them to find Him. When we pray, we are not trying to change God’s mind. We are trying to align our own wills and intentions with His. In relation to the salvation of others, we do well to join St Anthony, who wrote:

“And so, dearest brethren, I pray and beseech the Lord with tears, the Lord who created and re-created us with his blood; I pray that he may establish us in eternal bliss. With him who is the Origin of all creatures, and by his grace, may we attain eternal life.”