Happiness is More Than A Warm Puppy

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz is credited with the phrase “Happiness is a warm puppy.” It was, perhaps, a foretaste of the internet meme.

The phrase first appeared in a Peanuts comic strip published on April 25, 1960, and a book soon followed.  The phrase was short, pithy, easy to remember, sentimental, and not nearly as profound as people wanted it to be.

I thought of the phrase recently as I was mulling over C. S. Lewis’s thoughts on being a “miserable sinner.” And I soon found myself contemplating a contradiction. While we may all be sinners, we all have access to being blessed.

This led me to thinking about a time when the words “blessed” and “happy,” while not synonymous, were closely related in meaning.  I have even read different scholars argue that the word makarios, which is translated as “blessed” in the beatitudes, can and has been translated as “happy.” (See Randy Alcorn’s “When “Blessed” Means “Happy,” for example.)

Too Many Meanings

One might say that the word happiness has too many possible meanings.  The meanings range from euphoria and satisfaction to existential appropriateness.  This existential appropriateness means a person fits perfectly into the world around them.  This perfect fit means they fill the role they were meant to fill.  They thus experience an ultimate satisfaction made possible only through perfect fulfillment.

But looking around at the various things offered by the world as promising happiness, and the frantic, even frenetic activity centered around many of them that makes it seem the promised state somehow eludes real capture, gives me pause.  I am more and more convinced that it was not wise to have separated “blessed” from “happy” over the years.  

I think I am not alone.

The Purpose Is Not Happiness

Ralph Waldo Emerson  wrote that “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Mark Twain, a notorious skeptic who was infamous for his lack of piety wrote that “Happiness ain’t a thing in itself – it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant. As soon as the novelty is over and the force of contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.” He also wrote that “Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined.”

More relevant to us as Catholic Christians, St. Augustine famously wrote that we are restless until we rest in God. His great insight is that God is the sole source of true happiness.

Certainly, according to Thomas Aquinas, happiness is the perfect good we receive by seeing God when we die in a state of grace.

The Evanescence of Feeling

I mentioned earlier that happiness as a word might have too many meanings to be conveniently characterized as a single state achieved in this way or that. One possible key to this is the fact that, as a feeling, happiness must be fleeting.  

Feelings come and go. They ebb and flow. They are infamously transient and variable.  So if we are to associate happiness with being blessed, we must think of it as something other than an emotion.

There is a possible complication here in that over the years I have heard more than a few people talk about feeling blessed. I have generally found this to be associated with feelings of gratitude for some material or spiritual good.  People speak of being blessed by good health, by healthy and happy family members, and by material prosperity. When I listen closely, I find that they are generally expressing gratitude for conditions they feel they may have contributed to, but for which they cannot conscientiously claim credit.

I do not want to minimize the importance of gratitude in our lives; we all have much to be grateful for. In my case, I fear there is much more for me to be grateful for than I display any actual gratitude for. It is a thing I consider to be a besetting sin and a character flaw.  This is unsurprising, perhaps, given my history, but it is unappealing and requires continuing effort in repentance and reform.

Feeling and Being

This illustrates a human failing of which I am not in sole possession. As humans, we are prone to confusing and compounding a state of being with a feeling. But being grateful and feeling grateful are not the same thing.  It is part of my weakness that I have not done a good job of understanding this and making the proper response to it.

To feel grateful is to experience an emotion directed outwardly to a benefactor (in the context we are exploring, to God). To be grateful is to be humbly aware that a blessing is not really mine in any meaningful sense. The blessing originates, functions, and continues as a gift from God. He grants the blessing for His purposes and not my own. And as with every gift, I am merely a steward. My proper response is gratitude and responsible use, not pride and self-congratulation.

Which is not to say that proper use of a gift from God does not give us delight; it does.  And even though God’s gifts may be burdensome at times, His gifts bring goodness both to the Earth and to those entrusted with their use.

The joyfulness of the Saints, for instance, comes from the presence of God’s Grace and light in their lives.  But it also comes in the pleasure that any craftsman feels in wielding a well-made tool properly, to good effect. When we use God’s gifts properly, we are allowing God to work with us, through us, and beside us.  This is an intimacy we will not find outside of deep and holy prayer, and, at last, in our final reward.

Blessed And Happy

“…for God all things are possible” [Matthew 19:26].

If we treat the Beatitudes as an ethical “cheat sheet” for a Christian – “cheat sheet” because it is very much a skeleton of a behavioral code without much in the way of detail about specifics or how to manage the actions called for – it has a lot to offer us. We can glimpse in the structure of the Beatitudes the possibility of being both blessed and happy.

But it is clear that it would take a lot of work and effort to actualize – probably more effort than an unaided human is capable of. So we must ask for and depend on grace coming to our aid at every moment.

God’s grace includes some manner of prioritizing and pacing the changes we make in our lives.  It helps us live a life that properly fleshes out the skeletal structure of those ways in which we are blessed.  

And it offers happiness far beyond that of a warm puppy.