A parishioner called the parish office to ask for prayers for her thirty-year-old daughter who was hospitalized in the ICU. When the pastor was informed, he decided to visit the young woman. When he arrived and entered the hospital room, the young woman rolled her eyes.
“Did my mother send you?” she asked.
“No,” the priest responded. “She only asked us to pray for you. I came because I wanted to come.”
“Did she tell you what I did?”
“No,” the priest said, “she didn’t. What did you do?”
“I’m divorced, lost custody of my children, drink too much, and am empty inside, so I take drugs. After I take them, I’m still empty.”
“Do you pray?” the priest asked.
“No.”
Then the doctor entered the room and asked the young woman what she had taken.
“Dozens of antihistamines,” she said.
“What happened afterward?” the doctor asked.
“I felt a rush, and then everything went dark and I woke up here.”
The Desire for Happiness
Why do we sometimes do that which makes us miserable? The desire for happiness is written into our human nature. God placed that desire within us at the moment of our creation. It’s a natural desire and is impossible to escape. It is the fundamental motivation behind all our decisions and actions.
Why, then, do we sometimes make decisions that lead to misery? Why do we do things that leave us dry, unsatisfied, and empty? Saint Paul aptly described this experience in his own life:
What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7:15–23).
Even the great Saint Paul struggled with doing that which his spirit didn’t want to do. He discovered that within his fallen human nature, in his “flesh,” dwelled sin. As a result, rather than doing the good that his spirit wanted to do, he did the evil that his flesh was drawn to do. His spirit was his “inner self,” where the law of his mind was at war with his disordered desires. This realization further led him to say:
Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin (Romans 7:15–25).
The anecdote of the hospitalized young woman and Saint Paul’s testimony present the purpose of this book. We all want to be happy, yet many of our actions lead to misery. Even after our baptisms, we live with the consequences of Original Sin. Among these consequences, we suffer from what the Church calls concupiscence. Concupiscence is the strong inclination to sin that each of us experiences. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it this way:
[Original sin] is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin—an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence.” Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle (#405).
If we want to fulfill the innate desire for happiness, we must understand that a spiritual battle will occur within our souls. Concupiscence leaves our human nature wounded and inclined to sin. It clouds and confuses our intellects, proposing false goods that draw our wills into making decisions contrary to the Truth—as is in the Mind of God—and our eternal good. Our disordered inclinations are what we must fight, overcoming them by grace and divine Truth so that we can experience the freedom God wants to bestow on us. As Jesus taught us, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32).
Within our consciences, we hear two “voices.” One voice leads us into slavery and sin, the other into freedom and fulfillment. The erroneous voice comes from the devil, the errors within the world, and the confusion arising from our concupiscence. The voice that leads to freedom and fulfillment is the Voice of God, either spoken directly to us or through the mediation of the angels and saints. The good news is that when we listen to the Voice of God, He imparts His Eternal Truth to us and the grace we need to fully cooperate with that Truth, be transformed by it, and be led by it to the freedom and happiness we desire.
The challenging news is that, in order to hear God’s Word, His Truth, and to live according to that Truth, we must overcome sin and concupiscence. We must engage in a profound interior battle in which grace enables us to resist every deception and false promise of happiness and cling only to the deepest spiritual truths that God speaks. Rarely is this accomplished overnight. We can choose to begin the spiritual journey instantly, especially with the Sacrament of Reconciliation and a firm and devout prayer coming from the depths of our hearts, but doing so only sets us on the right path. From there, we must ascend the mountain to the summit of grace and Truth—or the steps of the “golden staircase”—where we will find the complete freedom and fulfillment for which we long.
In order to begin our journey toward the summit of happiness, the summit of perfection, we need a map. We need to know the directions. We also need spiritual energy. The “map” for such a journey is the Word of God, found within the Deposit of Faith. The “spiritual energy” is grace. The Word of God floods our minds with Truth and provides the direction we need to take every step of the way. Grace, with which we must cooperate, nourishes virtue within us, providing strength, perseverance, and resolve.
Oftentimes, we allow our fallen and confused human nature to mislead us. Our disordered desires and unruly emotions propose to our minds that this or that will make us happy. As with the story of the hospitalized woman, people do not take illicit drugs because they believe those drugs will make them more miserable. They take them because they have believed the lie that this drug, this high, will satiate the burning desire within them for happiness. And it does satiate it for a moment, in an artificial and shallow way. But then it leaves the soul even drier than before.
The same can be said of every disordered desire. Illicit sexual activity, the drive for earthly riches, the search for honors and recognition, and many other lies promise a fulfillment of that innate desire, but always fail us. Even if a person attained all the riches of the world and was able to indulge daily in the most satiating fleshly and worldly pleasures, he would repeatedly find himself empty in a never-ending, deepening cycle. The more people seek to satiate the desire for happiness in illicit ways, the more they experience the feeling of emptiness. The more often they feel emptiness, the more they are tempted to seek satiation by illicit means until the cycle is finally broken and grace and Truth take over.
There is one answer and one alone—the Truth of the Gospel and God’s grace! The true Gospel seeks to penetrate us to the core of our being. Guided by this Truth, grace enables us to engage in battle with our disordered desires, purify those disorders, reorder them, take hold of our lives, and transform ourselves into a new creation in Christ. It is not easy in the sense that the Gospel demands everything of us so that we can be freed of everything that leaves us dry and unhappy. It is also purifyingly painful within our disordered appetites to permit grace to enter our lives and reorder those disorders within us. This purgation or purification of our whole being requires total surrender to the will of God so that God’s will alone is done in us.
True Happiness
True happiness on earth consists of doing God’s will. This often means acting contrary to the desires of our fallen human nature. God and God alone can make us happy. God and God alone can fulfill our deepest desires. If you believe that, then the long and arduous journey to freedom and human fulfillment must begin.
The journey toward complete happiness, also referred to as a life of beatitude, is no small undertaking since it requires a complete re-programming or transformation of our minds. “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2). In our fallen natural state, we fail to immediately perceive the spiritual and moral goods that make us happy. When we make the wrong choices and indulge in disordered delights, we become even more confused because we form bad habits, and habits are hard to break. They take hold of our wills and continuously propose errors to our minds. Such errors are impossible to resist without the assistance of God’s grace.
God’s Truth is often beyond what our human reason alone can discern. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). God’s ways and thoughts will lead us higher into authentic happiness than human nature can attain on its own. The spiritual Doctors of the Church defined the highest form of happiness on earth as Divine Union. In the state of Divine Union, the soul is freed of every disordered desire and continuously responds to God’s Truth and grace. Divine Union becomes a habitual state; once attained, a person rarely, if ever, deviates from it. Within this state, the soul is as fulfilled as it can be in this life, prior to seeing God in Heaven. Every virtue and spiritual gift is fully alive, and every emotion and desire is reordered to obey those virtues and gifts.
In Stanza XL.II of A Spiritual Canticle, Saint John of the Cross describes the culmination of Divine Union and speaks of five graces that the soul receives:
The first is that the soul is detached from all things and a stranger to them. The second is that the devil is overcome and put to flight. The third is that the passions are subdued, and the natural desires mortified. The fourth and the fifth are that the sensual and lower nature of the soul is changed and purified, and so conformed to the spiritual, as not only not to hinder spiritual blessings, but is, on the contrary, prepared for them, for it is even a partaker already, according to its capacity, of those which have been bestowed upon it.
In other words, the soul no longer looks to fleeting and passing things as the source of fulfillment. The soul needs only a profound attachment to God that exceeds its deepest longings. It is free and no longer even recognizes the “voice” of these disorders. If the soul has overcome the devil and put him to flight, the devil and his fallen demons no longer have the ability to deceive the soul. In fact, the soul’s holiness so completely manifests God’s presence that the devil flees in fear; he cannot stand being in the soul’s presence. All desires and emotions are properly ordered and no longer control the soul. Instead, grace directs and controls every desire and emotion within the soul by ordering them to God. They take delight in God in ways that fleshly indulgence and sin could never produce.
This is not Heaven, but it is as close as we can get to Heaven on Earth. It’s what Saint Teresa of Ávila referred to as a “second Heaven.” It’s the most fulfilling level of happiness we can attain before death. It’s a state of profound holiness, freedom, joy, order, and peace. God uses these holy souls to affect others’ lives, by the power of their prayers, through the influence of their charity, and by the fulfillment of their vocation and mission.
Next: Chapter Two: Beginning with the End
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