The Task of Happiness: A Reflection on Human Suffering and Christian Joy

"THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. We all want to be happy." This simple statement of fact, these honest ordinary words, occur in a passage written centuries ago by St. Augustine of Hippo. But so resonant and so fresh are Augustine's words, they might almost have been written today or yesterday. Augustine himself was well aware of their likely impact. His full statement regarding the task of happiness reads: "There is no doubt about it. We all want to be happy. Everyone will agree with me even before the words are out of my mouth . . . so let us see if we can find the best way to achieve it." ¹

Within the Christian tradition, such an unembarrassed desire for happiness was not something peculiar to St. Augustine. The statement strikes a note or a chord that was, in fact, common in the early Church. In The Shepherd of Hermas, for example--one of the most ancient Christian texts--we read: "Cleanse yourself of this evil sadness, and you will live for God; all those will live for God who banish sadness far from them, and are reclothed in joy." ² Joy--a sharing in the mysterious joy of God himself--is at the very heart of the Gospel message. "All this I tell you," Jesus said to his disciples, in John 15:11, "so that my joy may be yours, and your joy may be complete."

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, was overheard to remark on one occasion, "Nobody is as happy as a real Christian." The statement is encouraging certainly, but its validity stands or falls by that small word "real." For how many of us, in practice, attain the happiness of which Pascal speaks? The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche--no friend to the Christian gospel--but well aware, all the same, of its most important claims, remarked once on the impact of Christ on human history: "His disciples," he said, "should look more redeemed!" ³ And, on another occasion, addressing directly those followers of Christ, among his own contemporaries, who appeared to him rather glum and joyless, Nietzsche remarked: "It's not your arguments that tell against you--it's your faces!"

Obviously, it would be unwise to avoid the challenge contained in this statement. But that does not mean we must encourage as normative for believers, or make somehow compulsory, a sort of willful, back-slapping heartiness. There are few things, I suspect, more depressing for the human spirit, or more harmful for human relations, than a commandment that insists that all of us turn up at work, or arrive down to the breakfast table, wearing the same bland smiles, the same jolly faces every day! I feel an enormous sympathy, therefore, for a young girl named Rachel, whose letter home from summer camp I read a few years ago. Rachel, a normally robust, nine-year-old American, had survived about a week of camp-life before she wrote home to her parents:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Please come at once and take me home. I can't stand it here. The grown-ups, the leaders, are really strange. They force us kids to be happy all the time. Night and day. It's weird, honestly. They all act like Barney!

Rachel's "holiday camp," with its mad insistence that everyone in the camp should strain to be happy, or at least appear to be happy all the time, sounds not unlike the rather panicky, high-tech, pleasure-driven civilization we all live in today, whether we find ourselves living and working in "the big city" or not. If St. Augustine, from the fourth century, were somehow able to drop in on our Third Millennium, and walk down the thoroughfare of one of our main cities, what would he think of us...