Happiness, Health, and Beauty

The Christian Life in Everyday Terms

Murphy

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879358
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What are human beings created for? How can we experience the well-being made possible in Christ? What does it mean to love God and our neighbor wholly? These questions go to the heart of what it means to live the Christian life. Happiness, Health, and Beauty explores these questions by putting Wesleyan doctrine in conversation with voices from the wider Christian tradition: theologians, philosophers, social critics, scientists, and poets. The guiding themes for this inquiry into the nature of the Christian life are happiness--how we flourish together in the goodness of God; health--the intrinsic connection between bread and bodies in the Eucharist; and beauty--the disposition to benevolence that is the hallmark of our being fully human.

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Happiness: The Christian Life and the Human Calling

Happiness is fundamentally an activity; it is the state of the person who is living without hindrance the life that becomes a human being.

—Herbert McCabe, The Good Life

The sum of all true religion is laid down in eight particulars . . .

—John Wesley, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse I”

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

—Matt 5:3–10

Being Human, Being Happy

Popular advertising slogans could lead a person to think that happiness is what human beings are made for. Coca-Cola invites us to “open happiness.” At the International House of Pancakes it is “come hungry, leave happy,” while the all-you-can-eat restaurant chain Golden Corral entreats, “help yourself to happiness.” Disneyland, since the mid-1960s, boasts that it is “the happiest place on earth.” We feed children “happy meals,” strive for a “happy medium,” admire the “happy-go-lucky” (who seem to live by the mantra “don’t worry, be happy”)—all while trying to find our own private “happy place.” Even one of our nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, asserts that human beings have an “unalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness.” Happiness, it seems, is ever on our minds (and on our stomachs, if the corporate restaurateurs are to be believed). We want desperately to be happy.

But what counts as genuine happiness? If, as corporations like Coca-Cola and Disney would have us believe, happiness can be had in the products and experiences we consume, why are we—the savviest shoppers in the history of modern advertising—notoriously unhappy?1 At least one answer to this question can be found in poet John Ciardi’s observation, made half a century ago, that advertising and the whole of our economy are based on “dedicated insatiability.”2 It isn’t that consumerism makes us happy by satisfying our desires for material goods or attractively packaged experiences; rather, our consumer culture trains us to be perpetually dissatisfied. As theologian William Cavanaugh has observed, consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else.3 So the happiness I might feel at acquiring a new pair of shoes or a luxury vacation (increased, perhaps, if I believe I got a good deal on the purchase) is not only a kind of temporary pleasure since soon enough the newness of the product or the experience will fade and my euphoria with it. Rather, American consumer culture teaches me that the pleasure of consumption is itself in the very process of acquiring my good deal: advertisers want me, want all of us, to be addicted not to things but to the endless pursuit of things. And most of us seem all too happy to oblige.

Yet even if we concede that the happiness held out by marketing campaigns is fleeting if not false, shallow, and ultimately unsatisfying, why do we still find ourselves seduced by the promise that happiness can be ours if only we secure the ideal job or find the perfect mate, if we just lose those excess pounds or raise successful children or earn the respect of our peers? Perhaps this promise lures us because a hunger for happiness is at the heart of what it means to be human. As theologian Paul Wadell observes, “The story of our lives can be read as one unfolding search for happiness because we relentlessly pursue whatever we think will be good for us; whatever we suspect will fulfill us, delight us, bring us peace, and deepen the meaning of our lives.”4

The Christian tradition has always held that human beings are created for happiness, but it has defined ultimate happiness as knowing, loving, and enjoying God. We are created in the image of God, bearing something of the divine within us, and thus communion with our Creator—and with all of creation—is central to what it means to be fully human. Famously, St. Augustine declared that our hearts are restless till they find rest in God. The Westminster Catechism opens by asking what is the purpose of our lives as human beings, and answering with this: to love God and to enjoy God forever. And St. Thomas Aquinas, in perhaps one of the most thorough treatments of the subject, observed that happiness is intimately linked with goodness. In this he was following Aristotle, who believed that only goodness can make us happy. And while there are many goods intrinsic to a life of happiness—food, shelter, satisfying work to do, enough money to live on, art and music and beauty of all kinds to stir our imaginations, friends and loved ones to enjoy all of these things with—the highest good and our ultimate happiness can be found, Aquinas believed, only in God.

Happiness as Gift-in-Community

But how does that work exactly? What would it look like to discover and experience complete happiness in God? For Aquinas, attaining ultimate happiness is a matter of our becoming like God in goodness. But this, too, sounds far-fetched—impossible, even (and perhaps not a little presumptuous). How can we become like God in anything?

In contrast to a culture that trains us to view happiness as something we buy or take or make, something we earn or deserve or accomplish, the Christian tradition has insisted that a life of genuine happiness is beyond our own powers and capacities. It is not, as much talk-show psychology would have it, something available within us if only we would reach down deep enough to find it. Rather, genuine happiness comes to us through grace; it is a gift. “The God who wants our good,” Wadell says, “gifts us with the happiness we seek.”5 Our lifelong task, then, to repurpose a beautiful phrase from novelist Marilynne Robinson, is to put ourselves in the way of the gift.6

The happiness we were made for, that comes to us as gift to be received rather than goal to be achieved (or interior state to be accessed), is, as Scripture makes clear, relentlessly social. This is at least one reason why seeking happiness through the exercise of individual choice in a market economy is a futile quest. In the opening chapters of Genesis we learn that God created human beings for friendship with one another and with God, and the book of Revelation describes powerfully the heavenly communion that characterizes the ultimate happiness—the beatific vision—for which all of creation is destined. Thus the Bible reveals, from beginning to end, that the gift of happiness is deeply social, “ineluctably political.”7 “Political,” in this sense, has to do with how human beings are constituted by community and how we might flourish in it—how it is that we are go...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Happiness: The Christian Life and the Human Calling
• Chapter 2: Health: The Christian Life and the Shalom of God
• Chapter 3: Beauty: The Christian Life and the Pursuit of Perfection
• Afterword
• Bibliography