Most people, deep down inside, want to be happy.

It's even in the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Someone has said there are two things that are true of every person: we all want to be happy, and we're all going to die.

Augustine said, "Everyone, whatever his condition, desires to be happy."

And French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, "All men seek happiness. This is without exception."

You may be surprised to know that God wired us that way. According to the Bible, we can be happy. According to the Bible, we should be happy. We just need to look for it in the right place.

The problem is, however, that far too many people look for happiness in the wrong place. And ultimately they conclude that if they don't find it there, then happiness cannot be found.

For example, we will not find happiness in personal possessions.

They can improve our lives, but they won't bring us personal happiness.

They can make our lives more comfortable, but they won't bring us the real happiness we're searching for.

The Bible says in Proverbs, "Just as Death and Destruction are never satisfied, so human desire is never satisfied" (27:20 NLT).

Also, being beautiful or handsome will not bring personal happiness.

In 2018, Americans spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery.

Some experts believe the rise of cosmetic surgery is due to the selfie. We're taking more photos of ourselves than ever before and use Photoshop, Instagram filters, and other enhancements to look our best.

The problem is that we can always find someone more handsome or beautiful than we are. So physical attractiveness will not make us happy.

Having relationships will not make us happy, either.

We're wired for relationship.

We're wired to have someone whom we'll love and marry one day. That is not a bad thing.

But if you think that marriage will make you happy, then you're in for a big shock (maybe even before the honeymoon is over).

You're asking someone to do something they simply cannot do: meet all the needs of another person.

Then there is the pursuit of pleasure.

Pursuing pleasure never will bring personal happiness.

That doesn't mean we can't have happiness in pleasure.

There are many fine pleasures in life that are good. But then there are perverse pleasures, pleasures that are sinful. The Bible even speaks of "the fleeting pleasures of sin" (Hebrews 11:25).

There can be a little fun in that pleasure for a time, but then come the repercussions of it.

That is why the Bible says that she "who lives only for pleasure is spiritually dead even while she lives" (1 Timothy 5:6).

In fact, living for pleasure is one of the least pleasurable things you can do. It's been said that the best cure for hedonism is an attempt to practice it.

Where does happiness come from?

So if happiness doesn't come from those things, then where does it come from?

Where do we find personal happiness?

The answer is simple: the only place to find real, lasting happiness is in a relationship with God.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: "God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way. … God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself."

The people who know God are the happiest people. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't have sadness if you're a Christian. Continue reading

I discovered it accidentally at first, and marveled at the direct, immediate correlation between the days I exercised and the days when I'd think, "Today was a good day."

The wonder quickly gave way to slight irritation, because the pleasant mood boost required sometimes unpleasant physical exertion.

Sometimes I gave it up entirely, for months or years, and only lapsed back into exercise out of desperation.

But I always lapsed back into it, because I knew that it was the one thing guaranteed to make me less grumpy and more relaxed.

What I didn't know back then was that exercise doesn't just have that effect on someone's personality for one day; the positive effects of exercise last for decades, according to Business Insider:

You might not be surprised to hear about the harmful health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle, but perhaps less obvious is that physical inactivity is also associated with unwelcome changes in personality over time.

Previous research has documented these effects over periods of four and ten years.

A new paper in the Journal of Research in Personality has extended this, finding that greater physical inactivity at baseline is associated with deterioration in personality two decades later, even after accounting for any differences in initial personality.

As the researchers, led by Yannick Stephan at Université de Montpellier, point out, there is an upside: the findings suggest that even a moderate increase in your activity levels today could have positive implications for your personality decades from now.

The research was combined from three long-running, statistically significant studies from people nationwide, and the findings consistently revealed that baseline physical inactivity directly correlated with a significant deterioration in personality decades later.

Specifically, researchers found that the more sedentary a person was at the study's outset, the sharper the decline was in their conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness two decades later.

Surprisingly, the researchers also found a direct link between sedentary lifestyles and late-life neuroticism.

Basically, not exercising today will make you a grumpy, neurotic miser — no matter who you are or what your life is like.

That's right, the study controlled so effectively for demographic and life factors that the effect of physical activity (or the lack thereof) on personality change was as great or greater than the personality changes stemming from demographic factors and even disease burden.

So not exercising could literally have a more detrimental effect on your personality than living in poverty, or suffering from an autoimmune disease. Continue reading

• Image: The Atlantic

Joy is a wonderful word. I prefer it to "happy". Joy is really deep, whereas I think happiness is more fleeting. I think babies are born joyful, but the circumstances of upbringing and society and family change that in us.

Joy encompasses a whole lot of things. You can't be full of joy if you're anxious. Joy is about harmony and peace of mind.

I've had a lot of anguish and pain in my life but now I'm in a really good place. Maybe adversity is part of joy; if you go through something hard, joy is the reward.

My real joy is my spiritual life. I'm a Catholic and that has been pivotal for me. Without that connection, I wouldn't have any joy in anything else.

I'm a convert - I was brought up a Presbyterian - but I became a Catholic when I was 34. It didn't come easily to me, it came after I suffered a real tragedy in my life. I had an abortion, which is a pretty tender subject.

Becoming a Catholic was a very slow progression, but it's been a beautiful journey. That is my centre and all the other joys in my life have come from that.

Finding joy in food started when I was a child. I grew up on a dairy farm at Henley on the Taieri Plains and food was a predominant thing in farm life - growing things, raising animals to eat.

There was a lot of hospitality and we were quite self-sufficient. We had our own hens, our own pigs, and my dad made cheese for a while. Growing food and sharing it has been part of my life ever since.

My dad died when I was 10. We moved off the farm and into the local hotel, where my mum had the restaurant and grew it into a successful business.

Later on I went to study clothing design in Christchurch, but I kept walking past the chefs' block and thinking, "maybe I should be in there instead". Continue reading

Source and Image:

• Radio New Zealand

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived.

In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life.

When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for.

"In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic, article by Emily Esfahani Smith, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
• Image: Care2

As Christopher Kaczor notes in the Introduction to The Gospel of Happiness, these are questions that every thoughtful person asks. Where, however, might a thoughtful person go for help in answering these questions?

Thoughtful Christians, of course, go to the Bible, the lives of the saints, and the teachings of the Church.

They might supplement what they learn there with the works of the philosophers: Plato and Aristotle from the ancients, Augustine and Aquinas, the Christian theologians. But they won't typically go to the discipline of psychology.

For one thing, traditional psychology has focused less on a positive path to happiness than on addressing the serious negatives that afflict many people's lives: depression and other mental disorders.

For another, psychology has been—although with exceptions—a largely secular and sometimes even anti-religious academic domain.

Yet Kaczor noticed that in recent years many psychologists had embraced the positive: "Positive psychology" is the name given to a new approach that Martin Seligman initiated and that an increasing number of practitioners have pursued since the late 1990s.

Positive psychology has attempted to find empirical answers to the question of what makes people happier and more resilient, and by what methods individuals can move in more positive directions.

To be sure, even the practitioners of this new form of psychology are generally not also practicing Christians; Seligman himself doubts the existence of God.

But Kaczor was struck by the ways in which the new positive approach tended both to converge with traditional Christian practice and to provide empirical evidence that traditional Christian practice works.

Moreover, to judge from the findings Kaczor reports, positive psychology offers the kind of concrete practical advice that is often missing from Christian moral theology (although such advice has been found to a greater extent in the last century in the writings of leaders of Catholic lay movements such as Opus Dei and Communion and Liberation). Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet, an article by Christopher O. Tollefsen, Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Carolina.
• Image: Mind and Spirit

Francis gave his list in an interview with an old acquaintance Pablo Calvo, which formed part of a feature article in the Argentine magazine Viva.

The interview was given to mark the first 500 days of Francis's pontificate.

The 10 tips for happiness as recommended by Pope Francis were:

1. "Live and let live." Everyone should be guided by this principle, he said, which has a similar expression in Rome with the saying, "Move forward and let others do the same".

2. "Be giving of yourself to others." People need to be open and generous toward others, Francis said, because "if you withdraw into yourself, you run the risk of becoming egocentric. And stagnant water becomes putrid."

3. "Proceed calmly" in life with kindness and humility.

4. "A healthy sense of leisure." The pleasures of art, literature and playing together with children have been lost, he said.

5. Sundays should be holidays. Workers should have Sundays off because "Sunday is for family," he said.

6. Find innovative ways to create dignified jobs for young people. "We need to be creative with young people. If they have no opportunities they will get into drugs" and be more vulnerable to suicide, he said.

7. Respect and take care of nature. Environmental degradation "is one of the biggest challenges we have," he said. "I think a question that we're not asking ourselves is: 'Isn't humanity committing suicide with this indiscriminate and tyrannical use of nature?' "

8. Stop being negative. "Needing to talk badly about others indicates low self-esteem. That means, 'I feel so low that instead of picking myself up I have to cut others down'," the Pope said. "Letting go of negative things quickly is healthy."

9. Don't proselytize; respect others' beliefs. "We can inspire others through witness so that one grows together in communicating. But the worst thing of all is religious proselytism, which paralyses".

10. Work for peace. "We are living in a time of many wars," he said, and "the call for peace must be shouted".

Calvo noted that Francis only mentioned God three times in their 77-minute conversation, twice in reference to protecting nature and once in mentioning a book title.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• National Catholic Register
• Image: Daily Mail

So many of the rich images, words, and themes that will recur at the Easter Vigil are hinted in the day's readings and prayers — the anointing of David with oil, the enlightening of the man born blind in John, and the Letter to the Ephesians' call to "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light."

Like the paschal exsultet in the middle of the darkness of the Easter Vigil, Laetare Sunday is a bright little burst of light and joy in the midst of Lent.

And, not coincidentally, it coincides with these first uncertain, hesitant bursts of springtime found in European and North American climates at this time of year.

Here in Washington, D.C., where I live, we have had 70-degree days followed by snow in the past week, and very confused crocuses attempting to push their way towards the sun.

The name "Laetare Sunday" comes from the introit text -

"Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam"

"Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her" Continue reading.

Brian Flanagan, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Theology at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia.

Source: Daily Theology

Image: Marymount University

Many have chosen to avoid romantic relationships during college entirely in favour of "hooking up," no strings attached.

As they (and their male partners) describe it, money and status matter; but they don't just happen-they are the result of hard work.

If you want to become the head of the World Bank, you have to put in the hours. Relationships, therefore, become an afterthought at best.

The theory is that anyone can find a partner later in life and have a couple of kids.

This situation is troubling-but not because these women want to "put themselves first." It is important to have a good sense of one's identity and needs before giving that self to another.

The problem is that they seem so miserable while doing it.

Much like the sex had by the characters on Lena Dunham's HBO series, "Girls," the sex described by the Penn undergrads in the story sounds sort of grim; less like sex and more like work.

One woman describes the man she regularly sleeps with this way: "We don't really like each other in person, sober. We literally can't sit down and have coffee." Talking about their hookup she sounds bored, like the oldest 19 year old in the world: "[W]e watched TV, had sex, and went to sleep."

One woman said, "I have to be drunk in order to enjoy it" and reported being barked at to "get down on [her] knees" and thinking, "I'll just do it...it will be over soon enough."

Because the sex occurs outside of committed relationships and alcohol is involved, hookup culture can quickly lead to a culture of sexual assault.

Without love or friendship we are left with the language of an economic exchange, the sexual partner as service provider.

The women in the story speak of the "cost-benefit" analyses of having a relationship, and the "low risks and low investment costs" of hooking up versus putting the time and energy into a real friendship, which, they argue, may not lead to anything long term. Continue reading

Source: America Magazine

Image: Brennan Boom

Anna Nussbaum Keating is the co-owner of Keating Woodworks in Colorado Springs, Colo, and is co-writing The Catholic Catalogue, a field guide to Catholic practice and culture.

Television advertising shows people becoming happier with every new acquisition, alongside national campaigns promoting a take-no-prisoner's approach to encouraging happiness. Barbara Ehrenreich captures this fixation well in her recent book simply titled "Smile or Die".

Of course, feeling happy is a good thing. But happiness is only one aspect of the full range of human emotions. People also regularly feel gloomy, anxious and stressed. Despite the commonality of these negative emotional states, they are generally regarded in a quite a different light to happiness. Read more

Sources

• Brock Bastian in The Conversation
• Image: 1funny

Brock Bastian is a Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Psychology at University of Queensland.

"Frequency of attendance at services is likewise positively correlated with happiness: those who attend religious services every day say they are happier than those who never attend," they add. "Frequency of prayer is positively correlated with happiness, with those who pray every day reporting higher levels of happiness than those who never pray."

However, "frequency of attendance in services is a more relevant variable than frequency of prayer."