#9. The End of the Road to Happiness

The Story So Far: We’ve been following a recorded address by Dr Peter Kreeft called Christ’s concept of happiness v the world’s, (available at http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/06_happiness.htm). Dr Kreeft has contrasted worldly values with the eight beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5. For most of the series, Dr Kreeft has distinguished between  ‘happiness’ (a temporary feeling) and ‘blessedness’ (a permanent state of spiritual well-being based on moral good). This month, we’ve run out of beatitudes, and Dr Kreeft examines the paradox of “death as a blessing” to bring us back to a final focus on happiness once more.

In society’s view as described by Dr Kreeft, our ninth desire is for life, and “life in abundance”. Here is the way we originally summarized this social attitude at the start of our journey.

LIFE

And in contrast to that social desire, says Kreeft, the ninth blessing is death.

It is not that Jesus specifically said in the Sermon on the Mount that death is the final blessing. Kreeft has to make a bit of a stretch to bring it into focus: “Christ teaches us this blessing, of death, not in words only but also deed, by his Cross, which sums up all the beatitudes. And the Cross reveals the hidden source of all eight beatitudes: the historical fact (not the abstract principle) that God, out of sheer love for us, became incarnate, died, and rose to save us from sin and death. As Dorothy Sayers said, ‘The dogma is the drama.’ By this dramatic judo, death itself was turned into an instrument for life, as an earthen dam is overwhelmed by the waters of the flood that conquers it, and the dam is swept along and made into a part of the flood itself. [I really liked that image.] So the flood of God’s infinite life, when it entered our world, not only conquered death, but turned death itself into life’s most powerful instrument. In the words of an old oratorio, ‘Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through its portals we enter into the presence of the living God.’”

As I say, I liked that image as a way of thinking about what it means when we say things like “God conquered death”. The traditional kind of language suggests a contest between equals where one gladiator was lucky enough to beat the other. Death was never an equal of God; indeed, we could make a case that spiritual death is the absence of God, just as darkness is the absence of light, and cold is the absence of heat. But I liked Kreeft’s picture of the washed-out dam becoming part of the flood itself, as our earthly death becomes part of our journey into God’s much greater life. 

But where does that leave us in our search of happiness now, where we live and breathe? Here I think Kreeft can sum it up well:

“The secret to happiness is very simple. It is Jesus. Not just the philosophy of Jesus, but Jesus — his real presence. He actually comes to us in such unlikely vehicles as poverty, pain, persecution. (He has weird taste in vehicles — he came to Jerusalem on a donkey.) And when he comes, he acts, with power, though usually also with subtlety and not bombast.

“He really works! I am haunted by my memories of a few precious hours in the company of the two happiest groups of people I have ever met in my life. In both cases, I was supposed to speak to them. In both cases they spoke to me, with very few words, like Mother Theresa, like Jesus. One group was in fact Mother Theresa’s nuns in Boston’s worst slum. Another was a convent of contemplative Carmelites in Danvers, Massachusetts. What they said to me, simply by being who they were, was unmistakable. See how happy I am ! See how happy Jesus makes me!

“This is how happiness happens. It is not so much taught, like Math, but caught like measles. The church is in the business of spreading the good infection, like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only this is a good infection. And that is the new evangelism; and it is also the old evangelism, that won the world 2000 years ago. It will do it again, for there is no argument against real happiness. The smiles of the saints are the arguments that will win the world for Christ again — they are unarguable.

“Only one thing, then, is necessary to create a world of happiness from pole to pole, and it is not doing any of the many good things that Martha did, but doing the one thing that Mary did — just sit at Jesus’ feet. Just be in his presence. Know his love, all day. That is the scandalously simple secret of happiness.”

Amen.

So it turns out that success in the search for happiness depends on understanding the goal. If all you want is a few feel-good laughs, then sit down with some dark cooking chocolate and a cheery book (Bill Bryson’s Down Under springs to mind), or have friends around to dinner. But if you want true and lasting happiness, put those things aside, and much else aside as well, and sit at Jesus’ feet. Making time to sit still and meditate on his Word seems like a good way to do that, for starters.

Shalom. 

Peter Westhorp