One
of the more popular songs of the last few months is Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”
(from the film “Despicable Me 2”). While
the tune is catchy, the words don’t seem to say a whole lot, although the word
“Happy” appears multiple times in the song.
Maybe that’s why the song has been played often these past few months:
everyone wants to be happy.
However, I wonder if we’ve lost a true
sense of what happiness is. For example,
just in the past few days I’ve noticed advertisements stressing the words
“happy” and “joy”. No, the
advertisements have nothing to do with Church or faith or religion; they’re not
about ways to de-stress one’s life; they’re not about insurance or ways to be
financially secure.
The advertisements are about consumer
goods, specifically food. Eat this,
drink that, and you’ll be “happy”. It
seems to me that we’ve reduced the notion of happiness or joy from an innate
longing for ultimate fulfillment to what I would call “momentary pleasure”. (I would even suggest that the desire to be
happy is a longing for union with God, which is eternal satisfaction, not just
“momentary pleasure”.)
However, there’s not a lot of money in
focusing on eternal things, so clever marketers bring the idea of “happy” into
the present moment. McDonald’s has had its
“Happy Meal” for a long time and retail sales have emphasized “Happy” Holidays
as a way to keep the public spending. So
we issue what has become a standard greeting to one another on special
occasions: “Happy Easter”, “Happy Thanksgiving”, “Happy Valentine’s Day”,
“Happy Fourth of July”, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day”, “Happy New Year”, “Happy
Groundhog Day”. Of course, the venerable
“Happy Birthday” has been around a long time.
In using the greetings, we offer well wishes (“momentary pleasure”) to
others—not a bad thing, of course, but it does focus an awful lot on the present
moment.
As Catholic Christians, we certainly
don’t ignore the present moment, but we are keenly aware that the goal of life
is not to experience as much “momentary pleasure” as we can; the goal of life
is to live life in such a way that we will one day know eternal happiness. That goal can only be achieved by embracing
that to which God calls us: Scripture gives us advice, counsel, consolation, encouragement
and challenge, and the sacraments are God’s way of encountering us in a deep
and lasting way. We must not only listen
to, but also follow, what Jesus tells us: love God with our whole being (learning
to do that is a lifelong process) and our neighbor as ourselves (often
sacrificing our own wants for the good of someone else).
Unfortunately, the culture surrounding
us has little interest in things eternal (I think it did many years ago)—God
and faith and prayer are best kept out of normal everyday life (according to
the culture)—and so we are bombarded with opportunities to be “happy today”. I would venture to say that’s a recipe for
ultimate disaster. Every great
civilization declined when individual happiness in the present moment became
more important than building for the future.
The “I” and “me” became more important than the “we” and “us”.
Fortunately, as Catholic Christians we’ve
been given the gift of the Holy Spirit, Who continually reminds us (if we’re
listening) of what really matters in life.
Unfortunately, sometimes the voice of the Holy Spirit gets drowned out
by the noise of the surrounding culture.
The Good News is that we can make a conscious decision to listen more to
the former than to the latter. The Bad
News is that no one else will do it for us.
Have a blessed week . . . filled with the Good
News of what really leads to happiness . . .
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