We all probably understand that good habits and favorable circumstances have an important effect on our happiness. You may not, however, like the idea that happiness is, in part, genetic. We Americans want to be in control of our own lives. Even the ancients, however, recognized that there were different personality types; the sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. Modern researchers, the ancients and your mother can’t all be wrong. Or at least it is unlikely. We should all recognize that everyone has their own personal predispositions, including ourselves. So, we kind of have a happiness experience that is in a significant degree, based on our predisposition. In short, we don’t create ourselves. We all start where we start. Our habits and circumstances can make that experience better or worse.“Subjective well-being is a term of art usually used by social scientists. Why not happiness? Many scientists consider happiness as a term to be too vague and too subjective, and to contain too many competing ideas. In everyday language, happiness is used to denote everything from a passing good mood to a deeper sense of meaning in life. The term subjective well-being, on the other hand, refers to an answer to this kind of question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” (That is the actual wording from one of the most prominent surveys that address the subject, the General Social Survey.) [i]”
Harvard psychologist, George Vaillant, was one of the leaders on a seventy-five year-long study on students that graduated Harvard between 1939 and 1944. The researchers followed these students into their nineties. Vaillant, reduced all the research on the students experience of human flourishing, to this simple formula: “Happiness is Love: Full Stop.” Humans are made to believe in something or someone greater than themselves. Narcissism is not the road to human flourishing. Human beings want to belong and so family and friends are the sine qua non of human flourishing. We are not the autonomous creatures of philosopher Thomas Hobbes or the individualistic, self-actualizing, uber mensch of the philosopher like Fredrich Nietzsche. We flourish to the extent that we cultivate our relationships with others. Finally, the third equation for human flourishing.This is my summary of thousands of academic studies, and to be fair, many scholars would dispute it as too crude. But I am convinced that it is accurate. Enduring happiness comes from human relationships, productive work, and the transcendental elements of life. [ii]
Many great spiritual leaders have made this point, of course. In his book The Art of Happiness (written with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler), the Dalai Lama stated, “We need to learn how to want what we have not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.” The Spanish Catholic saint Josemaría Escrivá made the same point in a slightly different way: “Don’t forget it: he has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself.” [iii]
Don’t obsess about what you don’t have, focus on the causes for happiness that you possess. Our consumer driven culture undermines our happiness by trying to convince us we need just one more thing.
In the Catholic tradition, the human flourishing described by Dr. Brooks and represented in the academic research leads, on its best day, to an imperfect happiness. Human productivity, family, friends and wants all have an endpoint, death. In our Catholic tradition, happiness is not a feeling, but a flourishing life with joys, sorrows, challenges, successes, failures and the presence of God that can be made perfect only through our deaths. Because human virtue alone, that is the acquired virtues, can only deliver an imperfect experience of human flourishing on this side of the grave, we need something more. That is, we need the theological virtues of faith, hope and love to achieve human fulfillment. That is what the Gospel is about today. Jesus calls his apostles and those who would support their work to live lives of faith, hope and love in him.
Jesus Gives his Disciples Authority
In scripture, the word disciple means a believer who is a student or a learner. In the Gospel, the disciples are Jesus’ intimate circle, the Twelve. The Lord entrusted them with the authority to imitate him by preaching the good news of the kingdom of God. The disciples do not go out and proclaim the Gospel on their own authority, they didn’t commission themselves. Instead, they received their authority from Jesus and are our connection with Christ. The Church communion takes us somewhere beyond our experience of the Church militant, that is the Church of this pandemic filled world. The Church does this because its authority is not purely human. We trust and hope in Christ’s promise.
Jesus calls us to love him more than Mother and Father, Sister and Brother
When Jesus instructs his disciples that unless they love him more than their parents and family, they cannot be his disciples. Jesus asks what only God can ask. In Exodus 20, where the Decalogue is set out, the first three Commandments are about the duties owed to God. Jesus isn’t abandoning social custom; he is demanding what only God can demand from his disciples. As important as family and friends are in the equations of subjective well-being, they cannot lead to perfect happiness for them or us. Faith in Jesus helps us organize vocation, marriage and the vowed life, to a purpose greater than this world has to offer.
Jesus instructs us to take up our cross and follow
He says “whoever doesn't take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” and that “whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake will find it.” What does that mean? In one important sense, we must accept the sufferings that life brings to us. Faith directs our desire for happiness beyond just the immediate circumstances of our life, which can be disappointing or happy. This is the cost of discipleship. The cross is at the center of the Christian life, in marriage, the vowed life and the single life. This is true, not because Christianity is a sadistic religion, but rather, that Jesus’ cross transformed suffering into love and love is the only way to heaven. Any real claim to happiness requires sacrifices great and small We cannot be a disciple without sacrificing for love of God and others. Why be a priest or a religious but for love of God and others? Why work through troubles in marriage and family life, except for the same reason.
Jesus provides for those he sends
Jesus provides for those who minister to the Gospel. Jesus said in the gospel,
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple— amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” Mt. 10
It is not just the disciples who leave their families behind and make sacrifices for the Gospel, Jesus extends his blessings to those who support the apostles and their successors in the work of the Gospel. The disciples would not have gotten anywhere without the support of believers.
Happiness, subjective well-being, flourishing and the Gospel
Of fundamental importance is the love of God; the only absolute. We love others relative to the love of God and for their own sake. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2232, it says that “family ties are important.” We must honor our father and mother and love our families, but they're “not absolute,” they are not God.” Second, to Love God, in part, is to support the work of the Gospel. Everyone has family obligations, but if we don’t take care of our larger community, it is our families and friendships that will ultimately suffer living in a degraded, Christ less world. Priests and religious who live the consecrated life take a vow to radically give up family and friends in order to follow Jesus. Priests and sisters, if they are truly living their vocation, go where they are sent by their bishop or superior. Jesus’ call to discipleship requires us to reorganize our lives around that which is of ultimate importance and does not end in death.
Dr. Brooks, a Catholic, recognizes the need for a trusting faith that puts all of the important demands of our lives into a coherent order that can deliver a more perfect joy. We must manage our wants to be happy. We all start with what God himself has given us in our personal strengths and weaknesses. We ought to use our talents to support family and friends because they are so important to our sense of happiness. That joy, imperfect at best, is a participation in the common good available to us in the here and now. We cannot control how our family and friends love us; we can make free choices how we love them. That is the key to living our faith. Faith is our free choice. God does not make us believe, but in today’s Gospel shows us the implications of belief that includes both the cross and the work of the Church. In all of that, our flourishing requires us to manage our wants so that we can make trusting choices about what and who we support. Because our fundamental need that shapes all others is our need for God.