Meaning and Happiness
Eliseo Mercado
We fantasize that for us to be happy we would need to be in a situation within which we would be free of all the tensions that normally flood into our lives from: pressure, tiredness, interpersonal friction, physical pain, financial worry, disappointment in our jobs, frustration with our churches, and every other headache and heartache that can appear.
However looking back on our lives, we see that sometimes certain periods of our lives that were fraught with all kinds of struggles were indeed very happy times. Conversely, we can also look back on certain periods of our lives when there may have been pleasure in our lives, but that phase of our lives now appears clearly as an unhappy time.
C.S. Lewis taught that happiness and unhappiness color backwards: If our lives end up happy, we realize that we have always been happy even through the trying times, just as if our lives end up unhappy, we realize that we have always been unhappy, even during the pleasurable periods of our lives. Where we end up ultimately in terms of meaning will determine whether our lives have been happy or unhappy. Many people, including Jesus, suffered great pain but lived happy lives. Sadly, the reverse is also true. Happiness has a lot more to do with meaning than with pleasure.
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis tells his readers that his journey to Christianity was not an easy one. By his own admission, he was “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” But one of the things that ultimately brought him around to the Christianity was precisely the realization that meaning trumps our normal conception of happiness. He came to understand, he writes, that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man and God’s compulsion is our liberation.
Money can’t buy happiness. It can buy pleasure, but, as life itself eventually teaches us, pleasure is not necessarily happiness.
To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/meaning-and-happiness/#.YCKrSmNMHDY