Wow! I'm Happy!

Bettyann and I kicked off the new year, on it’s eve, by dinner with some very long time friends and then to hear a comedian playing to packed auditorium.  We laughed, laughed, and laughed.  I found I laughed so hard a time or two that tears ran down my face.  Leaving the event, people, as it seemed were reminding each other of their personal favorite jokes, slapping each other on the shoulders, hugging and all together “happy, happy, happy.” O yes,  we all bade each other a “Happy New Year”  

As new year’s day broke I found myself, early, sitting at my desk top wondering and writing to the question: Is happiness really attainable?  Although I can’t remember of ever being a part of a formal discussion on the subject, I’m sure it has been debated in the philosophy halls, more than once whispered about at rehearsal dinner of young people to be married on the morrow by grandparents. It’s probably a question that tens of millions have sought to answer. In innumerable television commercials and marketing campaigns promised happiness—particularly New Years day the answer is most definitely answered.  Right!

I have found that countless approaches to pursuing happiness are as diverse as the many definitions of the word. And then yet I had another question: What if the attainability of happiness is intimately connected to my answer to another question? Namely, what is the source of my greatest enjoyment in life? In other words, could there be a connection between my worldview and my capacity to experience happiness?

While doing my ruminating I ran across a fascinating study, where Armand Nicholi, professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University, compared the life and work of Sigmund Freud to that of C.S. Lewis. Each cultural giant was recognized for the remarkable accuracy with which he observed human emotion and experience. And yet, each man defined and experienced happiness in strikingly different manners, through radically different worldviews. 

Interesting to me is that Freud's experience and understanding of happiness emerged as fundamental to his materialist understanding of the world. He observed happiness to be "a problem of satisfying a person's instinctual wishes." Consequently, the possibility of attaining happiness was met with pessimism.  Freud recognized that the human appetite is never fully satisfied. I think his observation is not without merit. Happiness, defined in such terms, is problematic, if at the same time, the goal is to achieve a lasting happiness. Money may be able to achieve my instinctual wish, and yet instinctual wishes ebb and flow with perpetually changing appetites. I have also found that the average U.S. citizen's buying power has doubled during the last four decades, yet studies report that the average American is not any happier, but in fact, less happy than reported in studies conducted forty years earlier. Sadly, Freud's life itself reflected his definition of happiness.  His letters were increasingly filled with pessimism and depression, even mentioning drug use as the only effective mood-lifter he could find.

What makes C.S. Lewis a fascinating point of comparison is that like Freud, he too, was intensely pessimistic about the possibilities of happiness early in life. And yet as emphasized by many biographers and close friends, his life was profoundly transformed in his early thirties, following a dramatic shift in worldview. Through a worldview far different than one of materialism, Lewis reasoned in his writing Pilgrim's Regress , "What does not satisfy when we find it, must not be the thing we were desiring." Happiness, for Lewis, could not ultimately be met in the material. As he found himself approaching a worldview shaped by something beyond the material, Lewis first thought he was coming to a place, an idea, and found instead that he came to a Person, one within the material world and also beyond and behind it. In fact, it was the surprise of finding a person that first redefined the notion of happiness for him—happiness from within this source of joy that marked his life even during times of pain and loss.

Heavenly Father, I humbly thank You that I view this new year of potential promise.  I pray that I will see my ultimate sources of happiness and prayerfully consider each possible option or hopeful resolution. Thank you for the reminder of the psalmist who wrote of a creator as a source within and beyond the material, "You have made known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand." I do think there may well be a connection between my capacity for happiness and my understanding of life. But one thing I am convinced is that there is a person, the Holy Spirit,  who stands and calls me nearer, that my joy may be transformed by a present and enduring love.