Dear Friends,
Someone suggested
recently that I should do a blog
on happiness and the meaning of happiness in the life of a Catholic
Christian. Just to see if people are interested in that topic, I googled
“happiness” and found that the site had had 899,000,000 hits. Are people interested or what? The web tells
us that the pursuit of happiness has sped up in the last ten years,
that it is global in scope, and that it is at the very top of human
desires and needs.
Among the ancients, the Jewish mentality was that happiness
and blessedness are equivalent terms .
People were happy or blessed if they
had good health, many children and success in their economic lives. The
danger then, as now, was that people’s attitude toward happiness could be
completely self-centered: happiness is when things are going my way.
For Jesus, who stood tall among the ancients, happy and
blessed also were interchangeable words with this difference: The person blessed by God was happy. In both
word and parable, Jesus also conveys that happiness is not what we expect.
Jesus engaged life on life’s terms. He reinforced, rubbed,
disagreed, supplemented what he saw and hear. He engaged in prayer and in life’s
incongruities. He became an expert in discovering the good in every person.
With Jesus, no one was ever categorically excluded from happiness.
In the Gospel, those
who suffered had an opening to Jesus. Ironically, happiness came through
suffering. Think of the woman with the hemorrhage in Mark 6 and Bartimaeus
in Mark 10. Happy were the people who
sought for others, for then, they themselves received. Remember the Syrophoenician woman in
Matthew 15 and the Father with the demonic son in Matthew 18. They came to Jesus on behalf of their
children, and they were rendered happy. Happy also were the people whose
possessions did not possess them Contrast Zacchaeus, who gave away generously
once he met Jesus, with the rich young man who went away saddened because he
couldn’t let go of what he had.
Some translations of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 render them
“Blessed are they”, while others say “Happy are they”. (The original Aramaic is
“Mature are they” … but that’s for another time.) What Jesus is saying, in
effect is Blessed are people who are good, whose hand does not strike, whose
mouth does not betray. Blessed are the merciful, those who comfort others, help
and tolerate each other. Blessed are those who do not give way to dominant
powers, those who let go of power and those who, without restraint, speak and
love everything that lives. The beatitudes contain and reveal such depths of
happiness that we can see in them layer after layer of meaning.
The great Mohandas Gandhi studied both Jesus and humanity. From
these sources, he concluded that happiness is when what you think, what you say
and what you do are in harmony.
May harmony and happiness be yours today, and may you share
it with others.
-Sister Joan Sobala
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