Happiness is…

A warm puppy: That is what came out of the Peanuts tradition of Charles Schultz when Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang were all the rage. I seem to remember there were a number of ways to finish the sentence to suggest what happiness is. Such speculation has not been taken up only by the modern cartoonist. It is a pervading question of the human experience, ancient and modern. It is one of the ways ancient philosophy thought of its task: wisdom with respect to the pursuit of happiness. Even in the body of the Declaration of Independence, we recall, one of the unalienable Rights named as endowed by the Creator is the “pursuit of Happiness.”

In simple terms, people want to be happy, and often cannot say definitively what happiness would look like. It is not so much that a single good answer eludes us, rather, there are so many good answers to, “What defines happiness?” As another Peanuts poster has it, “Happiness is different for everyone.”

The opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount, the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew consists of an enigmatic listing of those who are happy. The Greek word, “makarion” is translated to English either as “happy” or as “blessed.” If you were shown the following list (groups of people) and asked what they have in common, I wonder what you would say: The poor in spirit; those who mourn; the meek; those who hunger; the merciful; the pure in heart; the peacemakers; the persecuted; the reviled, slandered and cursed. Would you guess the category is people who are miserable or frustrated?

Oddly enough, Jesus, as a way of proclaiming the nature of the kingdom of heaven is declaring to the crowds it is these who are happy, these who are blessed. Read slowly through the whole body of Jesus’s opening of the sermon, which we call “The Beatitudes”:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.  —Matthew 5:1-12

We can surmise in the most general terms the kingdom of heaven is nothing like we see on the surface of things in earthly existence, and is a very surprising reality. We might go on to imagine Jesus has a way of fulfilling blessedness and happiness that is deep within a person, or in the ultimate consummation of reality, rather than in the midst of earthly circumstances. We might have known, when we are “in” the kingdom of heaven, we are not in Kansas nor in Oz, alas, not even in Texas anymore. We are in the transcendent, kingdom of Love. The kingdom seems to turn things inside out.

In her thoughts about the nature of saints, the inimitable Evelyn Underhill, the British scholar and writer of the nineteenth century, says the notable saints progress in the ways of love and the Spirit. She posits that a saint is far more aware of his or her sinfulness than of saintliness. Saints have a sense of perfection and awareness within themselves of how far from it they are. It is more common for others to have a sense of sinfulness, and a confidence of how far from it they are compared to others. It is common for the “average guy” to think of himself as pretty good, and for the saint to think of herself as a sinner. One finds within the saint a humility, authentic and unaffected.

In her work Mixed Pasture, Underhill describes the proclivity the saint has for pursuing the kind of happiness that others sidestep. She says saints focus on the two supreme objects of their love: God and the World, concentrating of course on “that special bit of the world” available to them, upon which they can pour out their charity. She says the saint is not pursuing flight from the world but immersion in it for love’s sake:

The very genius of Christianity is generosity, Agape; and the saint stands out as the self-emptied channel of that supernatural Love. The rich, active life-giving character of Christian holiness depends directly on the Christian doctrine of the Nature of God. By that constant re-immersion in the atmosphere of Eternity, which is the essence of prayer, the Christian saint becomes able in his turn to radiate Eternity; and the more profound his contemplation, the more he loves the world, and tries to serve it as a tool of the Divine creative love.

In these terms, returning to where we began, we might add to the list: happiness is prayer; happiness is love manifested in action; happiness is certainly movement toward union with God.