You can ask anyone you meet, and they will all tell you the same answer. They want to be happy. This is the goal of human existence.
This goal was not made up hundreds of years ago or thought up in some laboratory. It is the essence of who we are as human beings. Happiness drives the actions we take, the thoughts we have, and the purpose of our lives.
That being said, why aren’t more people able to reach happiness? This might seem harsh, but I don’t actually think there are many people in the world who are actually happy. So, where do we get real happiness?
“This desire [happiness] is of divine origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it” (CCC 1718). God is the only source of true happiness in life, and if we aren’t seeking Him, then there is no way to achieve the end goal of happiness.
That seems simple enough – seek God and attain happiness but, it’s a lot easier said than done. “For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19). All of us are constantly bombarded by temptations and images of pleasure which try to take the place of our seeking happiness. The Evil One does not want us to achieve happiness, because he wants us as far away from God and true fulfillment as possible.
So, the devil, the prince of lies, made us to believe that this pleasure the world offers us really is the happiness we seek, and that if we achieve as much pleasure as possible we will be truly happy. This lie of pleasure as equal to happiness is nothing more than a failed attempt at humans trying to be their own god, useless and unfulfilling.
You see, pleasure looks like happiness a lot of the time, but pleasure only lasts as long as the act sustaining it. Like, when you’re eating ice cream, it brings you pleasure because it tastes good and you find a sense of fulfillment in it. However, when you’re done eating the ice cream, that sense of fulfillment is gone because it was never fully there in the first place. This same thing can be said with many other actions in life, such as, drinking, pornography, or pre-marital sex. These things seem to give happiness, but when they are all over, that sense of fulfillment is gone because it was really just pleasure. Once that sense of fulfillment is gone, most of us will just go back to the same things that we tried before, feeding ourselves with pleasure instead of going to the true source of happiness, God.
It was Albert Einstein who said that insanity is doing something over and over again expecting different results. That’s right; the devil has literally tempted all of us into insanity. We try to find fulfillment in things that don’t every actually satisfy, and we do them over and over again trying to fill a void that just keeps getting bigger every time we try to fill it with pleasure.
Therefore, it’s going to take a lot of effort on our part to differentiate between moments of pleasure and moments of happiness in our lives. They can both give the same feeling at times, but usually the motivation behind them is different. You see, God is the source of real happiness. So, if we don’t have a relationship with Him we cannot be fully guided in making decisions of happiness. However, if we invite Him into our lives and start to develop a relationship with Him, we can have happiness readily available to us.
Actions, in themselves are not what lead to happiness. A person should perform an action not to become happy, but because he/she is happy. For example, a person can go to a party and have some drinks with friends because the person is happy and wants to share this happiness with his/her friends in a social way. While, on the other end of that example, a person who is not happy and seeking pleasure in this situation would make drinking the main action of the night in order to fulfill something empty within themselves. They use their drunkenness to mask their unhappiness and try to gain as much pleasure for themselves as they can.
Pleasure in itself is not bad at all. God made things pleasurable as a blessing to us and as a way to point us back to Him who is the source of happiness. But, it is us who have abused those things in life that give us pleasure. We have made pleasure our God instead of God Himself.
The only way to attain true and lasting happiness is through a life with God as the center. This should not be something to deter us, but it should excite us in knowing where we can find happiness in our lives. It’s all about taking that first step out into the unknown and allowing ourselves to be loved by a God who only gives blessing. So, take that step. What do you have to lose? Whatever you think it is, trust me when I say, you have so much more to gain.
paxinlife 