by Betsy Clark

Created on: February 19, 2009

The pursuit of happiness is our God-given right, is it not? It's in the Declaration of Independence, one of our three inalienable rights. Fr. John Powell, in his book Happiness is an Inside Job asserts that happiness is our natural condition, that God created us to be happy beings. Certainly when you consider the Bible's description of the Garden of Eden you would have to agree. God's intent is to provide us with everything we need to be happy. Happiness is the natural and spontaneous response to God's free and gracious gift of salvation. And yet all you have to do is turn on the TV or read a newspaper or magazine to realize that we are clearly not happy people. You can go on any number of Internet sites, especially political ones and find people spewing all kinds of bitterness and hateful talk. It even seems that we enjoy wallowing in not only our own unhappiness but also the unhappiness of others. That is the only explanation I can think of for the popularity of television shows like Jerry Springer or magazines like the National Enquirer. Now most of us here would not relate to that kind of miserable existence. But I wonder if some of us might not share this point of view. In the movie The Waitress, the main character asks Cal, the short order cook if he is happy, would he consider himself a happy man. He responds saying, "I'm happy enough. Don't expect much, don't give much, don't get much" I wonder if we sometimes become resigned to Cal's type of happiness. He's happy enough. Do we settle for just being "happy enough?" I don't think being happy enough is God's intention for us. Fr. Powell writes that our true state of happiness, God's desire for us, is to have joyful satisfaction in who we are. I don't think Cal's "happy enough" is anywhere close to having joyful satisfaction, do you? Why would we settle for Cal's version of happiness when God's version is clearly, vastly better? And yet we do. We settle.

Negativity may appear to be a great defense mechanism: If you keep your expectations low enough, you won't be crushed when things don't work out. But new research has revealed that the tendency to be a wet blanket doesn't merely ruin a good time and prevent you from making friends. It seems that it's a bad strategy by about every measure. Optimists, it turns out, do better in almost all measurable areas of life and there's evidence that optimists live longer, too. A 9-year study of cardiovascular health in more than 900 men and women in the Netherlands

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