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
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.
