I suspect that if you asked people what their main goal in
the new year is that somehow their answer would boil down to being happy.
Resolutions represent changing factors in our lives that are obstacles to being
happy. But what is the happiness that people pursue? We usually discuss
happiness as a subjective category that each person fills in for themselves. We
no longer have the notion that happiness is something more defined than that.
If we are created by God, He’s made us for certain purposes,
and our happiness is tied up in pursuing those purposes. God has created all
kinds of things that add to our happiness, but only if we engage them in the
way He intended. Misuse can never lead to their ultimate purpose.
So to be happy we have to find the proper paths to it.—Melinda
Penner
Defining happiness
Is happiness really attainable? It is a question many have
sought to answer—debated in philosophy halls, whispered about at slumber
parties, promised in innumerable marketing campaigns—and particularly at the
turn of a new year. Our countless approaches to pursuing happiness are as
diverse as our many definitions of the word. But what if the attainability of
happiness is intimately connected to our answer to another question? Namely,
what is the source of your greatest enjoyment in life? In other words, could
there be a connection between your worldview and your capacity to experience
happiness?
In a significant study, Armand Nicholi, professor of
clinical psychiatry at Harvard University, compared the life and work of
Sigmund Freud to that of C. S. Lewis. Each cultural giant was recognized for
the remarkable accuracy with which he observed human emotion and experience.
And yet, each man defined and experienced happiness in strikingly different
manners, through radically different worldviews.
Freud’s experience and understanding of happiness emerged as
fundamental to his materialist understanding of the world. He observed
happiness to be “a problem of satisfying a person’s instinctual wishes.”
Consequently, the possibility of attaining happiness was met with pessimism.
Freud recognized that the human appetite is never fully satisfied. … Sadly,
Freud’s life itself reflected his definition of happiness. His letters were
increasingly filled with pessimism and depression, even mentioning drug use as
the only effective mood-lifter he could find.
What makes C. S. Lewis a fascinating point of comparison is
that like Freud, he too was intensely pessimistic about the possibilities of
happiness early in life. And yet as emphasized by many biographers and close
friends, his life was profoundly transformed in his early thirties, following a
dramatic shift in worldview. … Happiness, for Lewis, could not ultimately be
met in the material. As he found himself approaching a worldview shaped by
something beyond the material, Lewis first thought he was coming to a place, an
idea, and found instead that he came to a Person, one within the material world
and also beyond and behind it. In fact, it was the surprise of finding a Person
that first redefined the notion of happiness for him—happiness from within this
source of joy that marked his life even during times of pain and loss.
In this new year of potential promise, ultimate sources of
happiness may be as worth considering as each possible option or hopeful
resolution. The psalmist writes of a creator as a source within and beyond the
material. “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with
joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” There may
well be a connection between our capacity for happiness and our understanding
of life. In the Christian view, Christ stands in flesh and blood calling you
nearer that your joy may be transformed by a present and enduring love.—Jill
Carattini
