Happy, Who Learns Happiness from God
The happiest are those who experience God's love and imitate His love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (Introduction, 1) explains that God created man in his own image and called him to live in love. The Creator revealed his love most fully "through his Son, whom he sent as Redeemer and Savior when the fullness of time came". At the center of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ. Because God is present throughout salvation history, we can experience that He exists, that He cares for us, and that He loves us irrevocably. "God himself appeared to us in Christ, revealed his face and became truly close to each one of us. Moreover, God has revealed that his love for man, for us, is without measure: on the Cross, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God made man, shows us in the clearest way how far this love goes – to the point of giving himself, to the point of total sacrifice" (Benedict XVI, Porta Fidei).
The condition for achieving happiness is to understand what it consists of. Those people who confuse joy with pleasure move away from happiness. Whoever makes this mistake will not know joy. God helps man to distinguish between what leads to happiness and what gives a moment of pleasure, and then leads to disappointment, harm, and suffering.
God Gives Eternal Happiness
The Bible explains that every person wants to be happy forever. "We certainly want to live happily. When I seek You, my God, looking for a happy life. I will seek You so that my soul may live. My body lives thanks to my soul and my soul lives thanks to You (St. Augustine). Jesus combines temporal happiness with eternal happiness. Both are closely related, because being happy forever is the result of a happy life in mortality. In this aspect too, Jesus teaches us realism, because he explains that the path to happiness is not once a path of joy. On the contrary, sometimes it seems to be a path to sadness and failure rather than to full happiness. In fact, there are people who are poor in spirit, sad, meek, thirsting for justice, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, suffering persecution for the sake of justice, persecuted and slandered if they only cling to Christ and love like He loves (cf. Mt 5:3-12).
The paradoxicality of Jesus' blessings stems from His realism and from the fact that the Savior shows the man seeking happiness perspectives beyond just the here and now. The Beatitudes that he proposes " reveal the goal of human existence, the ultimate end of human acts: God calls us to his own happiness" (cf. CCC, 1719). It will be full of happiness to see God face to face forever. The Bible emphasizes that the happiness that God gives to man is beyond our understanding and our concept of happiness, because "What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9) Permanent happiness " comes from an entirely free gift of God: whence it is called supernatural, as is the grace that disposes man to enter into the divine joy” (CCC 1722).
God comes to us with love in His Incarnate Son so that we can believe in the happiness, which He brings to us. After original sin, accepting the happiness we find in God requires God's grace and our conversion.
"The beatitude we are promised confronts us with decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches us that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement - however beneficial it may be - such as science, technology, and art, or indeed in any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love" (CCC, 1723). Christianity is a religion that teaches that our daily moral choices determine whether we open ourselves to the happiness that comes from God, or we choose the unfortunate ways of life.
Christianity understood maturely is not a religion of suffering and searching for crosses, but a religion that teaches us to accept love and to love in order to live in temporal joy and to remain on the path to eternal joy. It is not the religion of the sufferers, but of the mighty. Love, experienced and offered, makes man flourish in his divine beauty even after original sin and become a strong man of the spirit. The condition for mature love in contact with imperfect and wounded people is not only goodness, but also wisdom. This is why Jesus wants us to be as pure and noble as a dove, and at the same time prudent as serpents. Otherwise, in contact with people who do not yet love, we will become a naïve victim rather than a wise joyful gift to others. Only this second attitude is the way to God's joy, which this world is neither able to give us nor take away.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george