IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

Catholics have traditionally learned to wait for their rewards in the next life, prompting the question, "Are we really supposed to be happy?"

These are the first two questions and answers in the old Baltimore Catechism:

"Who made you?" "God made me."

"Why did God make you?" "God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this life and to be happy with him forever in the next."

The juxtaposition of "this life" and "the next," taken literally, says that this life has certain obligations: knowledge, love, and service. No rewards mentioned here. They come in the next life--after you're dead.

That mentality, which seems strange to many today, is rooted in a spirituality that relentlessly emphasizes pain, agony, and patient endurance in this vale of tears as the one-way ticket to the happiness of heaven.

Benedictine Sister Macrina Wiederkehr, who gives retreats and has written several books on spirituality, remembers her very early encounter with the gloomier side of Catholicism. She had learned to recite the Memorare prayer but was immediately troubled by such expressions as "Before thee I stand sinful and sorrowful." She was a tiny girl who didn't feel either particularly sinful or sorrowful. Then there was "despise not my petitions." If "I'm flying to my mother Mary," she wondered, "why would I fear that she would despise my prayer?"

"People have been given very negative messages in some theological approaches," Wiederkehr says. "They come to believe the world is bad, that it's supposed to be an unhappy place. They think that the greater the pain and guilt they inflict on themselves, the closer to God they are."

"It's not just a Catholic problem," says theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. Lingering in the depths of human consciousness is a latent sense that God (or the gods) are jealous of our joy, that they resent it, that cosmic forces are out there intent on bringing down those who seem to be getting all the breaks. In many cultures, she notes, these ideas manifest themselves in practices like giving the evil eye or putting curses on people.

It has even been observed that there's something in the human heart that is not always distressed about another's misfortune. It's not that we are gladdened about our neighbor's trouble; rather, we feel a tinge of irrational though palpable relief that we have been spared--that we've dodged the cosmic bullet at least this time.

That's a strange distortion of the Judeo-Christian faith, says Ruether--a faith that proclaims good news and joy to the world and urges people to seek happiness.

A tale of two Thomases

Thomas Jefferson is hunched over his desk, quill in hand, struggling to get the words just right. He suspects they may be quoted long after he, Ben, George, and the others are gone. He likes the sound of "inalienable rights," which he has just written. It has an almost musical quality. The next part is coming harder. "Among these are life, liberty, and happiness," he writes after a long pause. No, that's wrong, he decides. So he crosses the words out and thinks to himself, life and liberty are truly rights, but do we have a right to happiness?

He dips the quill in ink and tries again. "Among these are life, liberty, and the search for happiness." That's better, he thinks, but does it hit the nail on the head? No, search suggests happiness is sitting out there, hidden perhaps, but accessible to the diligent. His brow furrows, and he musses his red hair, seeking immortal words. Then they come and the quill moves swiftly over the parchment. "Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Pursuit says it all. Happiness, Jefferson realizes, is not a right, and it's not just waiting to be discovered. It's more like a fox--sly, elusive, and very fast. You have to chase after it without any guarantees of success. Just when you think you've got it trapped, it slips away, disappears in the underbrush, and your hunting party rides home empty-handed.

Thomas Jefferson may have been subconsciously assisted in his word choice by his familiarity with the writings of another Thomas who lived 500 years before him. Saint Thomas Aquinas firmly believed that happiness is elusive, so elusive in fact that it can be attained only partially and imperfectly in this life.

All people seek after the good, he taught. We can't help it; it's part of human nature. But the absolute good is beyond mortal creatures. It's God. So we're destined to pursue happiness through a partial knowledge of God on this earth, while hoping for our full share on the other side.

Meanwhile, said Aquinas, we pursue the good here in all kinds of other ways that may be reflections of the great good--relationships, security, achievement, possessions--many worthy to an extent but all elusive, partial, temporary, never absolutely satisfying. We're addicted to happiness, made for happiness, like a ship is made for water. Still, it's a fragile, leaky kind of happiness. That's what the 13th-century Thomas believed. The 18th-century Thomas thought so too, adjusting the idea for his more modern, worldly audience.

The history of happiness

Harvie Ferguson, a renowned sociologist, tries to explain the evolution of happiness in Western society over the past 2,000 years. A university professor in Scotland, he has been long fascinated by the ability of religion, especially Christianity, to give meaning and purpose to human existence.

The appearance of Christianity, he says, inaugurated a new era in which men and women came to believe that in Christ they had special access to God. Through faith in Jesus they saw God's kingdom already coming into being on this earth and foreshadowing the great kingdom that was to come. This faith provided a high level of happiness and confidence--a confidence so strong that great numbers of these Christians were willing to go to their death as martyrs rather than deny Christ. It was a contagious kind of happiness, and so the community of believers gradually grew.

But, notes Ferguson, the institutionalization of this movement as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century complicated this simple faith. As the church developed a hierarchical structure and an ordained priesthood, as it began working hand in glove with civil governments, as creeds and doctrines were set in stone, simple faith evolved into "belief." Through the acceptance of certain truths guaranteed by church authorities, through obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, the faithful attained happiness (or assurance) in a new, but more obscure, mediated way.

Later in the medieval period, the emphasis shifted again. Belief in the great panoply of church dogma became less important than the acceptance of moral regulations.

But with the Enlightenment and the dawning era of capitalism, the system fell apart. Reason seemed to do away with a need for the old crutches of faith and belief. It promised to explain everything and solve every human problem. Individuals could seek their bliss in whatever way they wanted. Humankind looked to a new age of unsurpassed satisfaction and happiness.

Of course, it didn't turn out that way, as Ferguson is quick to acknowledge. Unlimited self-seeking has been accompanied by soaring increases in loneliness, depression, social upheaval, and the most atrocious, bloody century in the history of civilization.

Thus, concludes Ferguson, modern, secular humans are seeking better ways to find happiness. They sense something was lost a long time ago, yet there's no way to go back to a pre-industrial world. As a result, he says, they're becoming more "sensuous." By that, he doesn't mean more selfish exactly--but more meditative, more introspective, more aware of how body and mind interact. They're searching for the insights that will provide happiness.

Read all about it

It is a Saturday afternoon at a large Barnes & Noble bookstore, and here on the second floor is the self-help section. It is quite extensive--rows and rows of books covering more than 130 square feet of floor space. So extensive, in fact, that it almost collides with the expansive New Age section. Nearby are the inspirational and religion sections. It's hard to browse because a great aggregation of citizens are already here bobbing up and down as they pluck books off the lower rows like pigeons pecking in the park.

One of the most prominently displayed volumes this month is called 14,000 Things to Be Happy About. Author-compiler Barbara Ann Kipfer presents in no particular order and with no explanation a list of, well, things--like "sliced bread" and "Visa and MasterCard" and "Pepsi commercials" and "green Jell-O" and "fire engines." The idea is to provide quick fixes in moments of incipient depression, though some of the entries--like "cesspools" and "digging a moat"--seem more likely to only bring on disorientation. For the little ones, Kipfer has provided a companion volume, 1,400 Things for Kids to Be Happy About.

Happiness and joy are unquestionably major themes here (as they are at Amazon.com, which lists some 6,500 available books under the "happiness" and "joy" banners). The occasional browser could get the impression that success is readily available for anyone willing to learn a few simple rules. The 15 Second Principle promises the speediest route to long-term goals, while slower learners may prefer 30 Days to Happiness. And don't forget Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die.

You could spend a lifetime sorting through all this, and judging by the size of the crowd, some may be doing just that. Only with great concentration can the seasoned browser spy some titles that have endured: The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore, even Thomas A. Harris' I'm OK-You're OK. But how is the less experienced searcher to know--when Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation is sitting right next to Suzanne Somers' book of happiness?

Servite Sister Joyce Rupp, author of books on practical spirituality, says all this material proves how "attentive to their inner journey people are today." Yet she believes much of it is like junk food: There's some nourishment there, but a steady diet is unhealthy. It gives the impression that happiness can be attained too easily, she says, and is "just a matter of doing the right thing and you'll be fine."

"Achieving happiness requires transformation," says Rupp. "You can't reduce stress without a foundation, without grounding and discipline."

Go with the flow

"Flow" is an important concept in the modern happiness movement. Flow happens when a person is so caught up in an activity or cause that the person is totally and unself-consciously absorbed. Flow occurs when a child gets so wrapped (or rapt) up in a game that she hears and sees nothing else; she is, in a sense, outside herself.

Flow can happen to painters, dancers, mountain climbers, and bricklayers. Flow can even become a permanent theme of one's whole life if challenges and available skills mesh. A dedicated lawyer, a nurturing parent, a truth-seeking philosopher, a competent auto mechanic can all experience flow.

Flow creates harmony, and harmony leads to happiness. To achieve flow, you only have to focus total physical and psychic energy on your goals. You will encounter the flow concept regularly in self-help books.

The problem is that the father of the noble idea of flow is a University of Chicago psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Besides having a nearly unpronounceable name (chik-SENT-mi-he), he is convinced that the universe is essentially hostile and that life has no meaning except whatever subjective meaning you choose to put into it. He is a postmodern scientist who insists that in our postmodern, "sensuous" world, faith and belief are antiquated delusions.

"Religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers," he says in his seminal book on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (HarperCollins, 1991). Though it is true that "life has no meaning if by that we mean a supreme goal that is valid for every individual," he writes, "it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning ... it does not matter what the ultimate goal is--provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime's worth of psychic energy." Each person, he insists, must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own.

Csikszentmihalyi recognizes that some may find flow pursuing bizarre enterprises. "Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who calmly shipped tens of thousands to the gas chambers, was a man for whom the rules of the bureaucracy were sacred," he writes. "He probably experienced flow as he shuffled the intricate schedules of trains, making certain that the scarce rolling stock was available where needed, and that the bodies were transported at the least expense.... As long as he followed orders, his consciousness was in harmony."

Of course, the professor doesn't necessarily applaud Eichmann's apparently happy blend of challenge and skill. However, in a hostile and meaningless universe, according to Csikszentmihalyi, it's up to each of us to create whatever subjective purpose provides coherence and vitality to life. You know: Whatever floats your boat!

Happiness by the Book

Sister Dianne Bergant, C.S.A., an Old Testament professor at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, will quickly unearth for you the biblical roots of happiness. "Read the Wisdom books," she says. "It's all there in the Wisdom tradition." She suggests starting with Psalm 1: "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked ... but their delight is in the law of the Lord ... they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season."

The world works according to certain laws, Bergant says, "and God doesn't interfere with those laws. We learn them from life experience. If you live appropriately, if you plant yourself by the water, you will find fulfillment, and you will be protected from misfortune. You'll have a full life, good health, and riches."

The message, she says, is there in Proverbs too: "Honor Yahweh with the goods you have ... then your barns will be filled with wheat, your vats overflowing with new wine." And don't forget Ecclesiastes, which asserts people are to find happiness in their work because work is "a gift from God."

"There are laws for the body, laws for society, laws for the environment," Bergant explains. Follow them and live; ignore them and expect misfortune. The Wisdom books, she says, oppose any suggestion of meaninglessness in the universe, any suspicion that there may be shortcuts to happiness.

Obviously, Bergant cannot carry on in this vein indefinitely because it's pretty obvious that the law keepers are not always rewarded in this life and the law flaunters aren't always punished.

So Bergant patiently explains a few complications and provisos. First, there's a "class bias" in Ecclesiastes, she says. The book supposes that its readers have control over their lives, that they are free to follow the laws of the universe and are not somehow controlled by outside social or cultural forces, as is often the case with the poor and marginalized.

Second, she notes, it's not always easy to determine what these life-enhancing laws are. Study Ecclesiastes 3:11, she suggests by way of illustration: "He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."

The law isn't always that clear. What everyone may have assumed to be the way of God's law, we may later discover to be harmful and contrary to that law. For centuries we assumed the environment was our plaything, she notes. Now we realize humankind was trampling on creation, and we're paying the price.

Third, there's the mystery of innocent suffering. It's something that would stop us in our tracks--except for Jesus. The New Testament says yes, Jesus kept all the rules, and yes, Jesus was innocent, but still, Jesus endured unspeakable suffering. So the bottom line of the New Testament is that ultimately God can and does bring good out of evil.

In a way, notes Bergant, Jesus even turns the conventional Old Testament's cause-and-effect teaching on its head in his Beatitudes: "How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.... Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right; they shall be satisfied.... Happy are those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

There is mystery beyond us, explains Bergant, but she sees Jesus' declaration validated often among people who live in poverty but are not crushed by it and in those who suffer oppression and rise above it.

Ode to joy

Robert Wicks looks out the window of his faculty office at Maryland's Loyola University and marvels at the beauty of the rolling hills beyond, alive with woodchucks, green-banded geese, and deer. He needs these moments of serenity because much of his professional life as a psychologist is spent healing healers--the doctors, nurses, ministers, and teachers trying to relieve others' pain. He has worked extensively with relief workers in Cambodia and Rwanda who often become as stressed out as the survivors of atrocity they sought to help.

"People who deal with pain often tend to concentrate on their mistakes and failures," Wicks says. "They feel guilty; they're agitated about all the evil in the world and their inability to stop it." So Wicks tries to shift their focus by getting them to quiet down and listen. "When we stop for quiet reflection," he says, "we begin to see that the world's anxious noises have drowned out the little voice of God that speaks of peace."

Faith is extremely important in this process, he believes. "It's not that faith kills pain," he says, "but it quiets the heart and provides greater clarity about life. The Sanskrit word for faith, visas, has the right idea. Literally, it means 'breathing easily.' So pain and happiness are not mutually exclusive."

In fact, he notes in Living a Gentle, Passionate Life (Paulist Press, 2000), "Feeling both joy and pain fully is essential if we are to be truly alive. When we experience pain, doubt, and fear, we must not run from it. We must feel it and then let it flow away from us when it is possible. This 'then,' this moment of release ... cannot be rushed. It may take years to come, but, pray God, it doesn't take one second longer than needed."

Can one achieve happiness without faith, perhaps just by achieving maximum flow in life? His experience says that without some kind of faith, happiness falters. Wondrous cores of understanding exist in the traditions of the great religions, he says, and those who tap these cores have better access to self-understanding and a full life.

That full life, in Wicks' view, is a balance between inner peace on the one hand and compassion toward the world on the other. Overconcentration on the former can lead to a passive quietism, he contends, while excessive compassion spawns the heresy of activism.

Jesuit Father Walter Burghardt looks back on his 85 years with cheerful serenity--but he doesn't look for long. Despite his "failing flesh" and the arthritis jabbing at his joints, he is still touring the country giving workshops to clergy on "preaching the just word." Preaching is his specialty as a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, and a major message of the faith he preaches is happiness. It's all over scripture, he says, citing Luke's gospel, which mentions joy four times in the first chapter alone. "Jesus gives the joy no one will take from you," he says. "Christians have every reason to live joyful lives."

Burghardt finds especially intriguing the gospel connection between joy and discovery. Joy is the immediate reaction of the person who finds a treasure buried in a field, of the shepherd who searches out the stray sheep, of the woman who finds her misplaced coin. People find happiness, he explains, because they are looking for something, and, he adds, this search often involves suffering.

"To be a Christian is to be forever discovering," he writes in The Living Pulpit magazine. "But what is it that the Christian should be discovering, appreciating? Simply: life. It is not that we blind ourselves to sin and war and disease and death. These touch us as cruelly as they touch the unbeliever." But the believer knows the secret that "in the very midst of death life exists."

So Burghardt goes on discovering Christ in his "own insufficiency," in the liturgy, in the living and dying of those around him, in Christian communities beyond his own, even "in a rat-plagued tenement in D.C., in a decaying schoolhouse in Appalachia.... Always, everywhere," he says, "the Christ I discover is not a thing but a person thrillingly alive."

Happily ever after 

Judi McArdle is a happy person. Every evening she sets the table in the dining room of her modest home in a Chicago suburb and prepares for a meal with her family. Someone picks the music that will play softly during dinner, someone lights the candle, and they always pray--for the sick, for the dying, for their ancestors, for the poor and the troubled. The spirit of the prayer, says McArdle, is always gratitude for all they've been given. "How could we be anything if not grateful?"

From her earliest years, McArdle seemed destined for a happy, secure life. The only child of active, Catholic parents, she was the primordial extrovert, cheerful and upbeat, a listener, a fixer eager to help. She earned a sociology degree at a Catholic college and married at 21 to a Catholic man of similar background who was working on his Ph.D.

Ten years later, with six children and a host of friends, she began to experience some situations she could not fix. Her oldest son had severe neurological complications that resisted treatment; three of the younger ones developed vision problems requiring extended medical attention. As a faithful Catholic, McArdle coped with this by reflecting on the mystery of suffering.

Then the marriage fell apart and she was devastated. "I kept looking for whys," she says, "and I couldn't find any." The process of separation and divorce was long and painful. She found herself asking the questions anyone in her situation would ask: Is this the way life goes? Are we really supposed to be happy?

With support from her friends and counseling from a sensitive priest, she gradually recovered her old sense of self and began to pursue the happiness that had departed. "There are times when a human being cracks open like an egg," she says, "and you make do with what you're left with."

McArdle read voraciously (philosophy and theology, no self-help material) and got involved--in the anti-Vietnam War movement, in a project to help ex-cons, in a program to improve health services. She volunteered in a church-sponsored program for the divorced and quickly developed a genuine passion for helping them face harsh realities. McArdle got so good at this that she was hired by the diocese to work full time with singles and the divorced and separated. She was clearly in "flow," though the pain of rejection still stung.

One day she suddenly realized she was no longer angry about the divorce. "The work and grace did it," she says. "It was as if a fever had broken. I could forgive and go on with life." For four years McArdle relished her job, consistently receiving ratings of "very effective" from her superiors.

Then in 1982, she was fired without explanation. "This time I was totally traumatized," she says. "I took it harder than the divorce. I was mad and I was hurt and I blamed the church." For a while she couldn't even go to Mass.

But the pursuit of happiness could not be long denied. This latest blow, she came to realize, was another, deeper plunge into the mystery--a mystery that made no sense except for her faith in a God who resurrects, who brings good out of evil. So she got a new job, became involved in her parish, and revived her old, infectiously joyful spirit.

The years passed, the children grew up, and the unsinkable McArdle found fulfillment in new work and friendship. "Happiness is balance," she says. "It's being reflective about how God is present--and always was--in your own life and then putting yourself out there for others."

What conclusions can I draw from all this probing into the mysteries and vagaries of happiness? Just two:

First, it cannot be defined. Call it happiness, call it joy or contentment or whatever; it eludes us fox-like, as Jefferson knew so well. Yet on occasion--sometimes when least expected or in unlikely circumstances--it dazzles us with its simplicity. And the words of an old children's song ring true: "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." Perhaps it is best approached (as Jesus suggested) as something you "enter into" rather than grasp as a possession.

Second, happiness even in its less dramatic manifestations carries some echoes or sparks or glimmerings of transcendence. Happiness, Vaclav Havel has said, connects us with something beyond our immediate self, "with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, with what ... seems distant from us in time and space--but with which we are nevertheless linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world."

Could it be, I wonder, that the joylessness that pervades so much of modern life stems from a loss of wholeness, from the ceaseless dividing of the world (not to mention our days and hours) into usable parts? And in the busyness of changing and exchanging and trading and positioning, the transcendence just leaks out like water from a rusty pail.

The New World Order, says Havel, will fail unless the human family strives for transcendence "as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony" with what is present to us and what is beyond. Indeed, with the instruments of mass destruction in the world, such a joyous sense of transcendence may be in the long run the only alternative to extinction.

THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH (HINT: IT'S NOT DISNEYLAND)

WELCOME TO ICELAND. It's that little spit of land out in the North Atlantic, slightly smaller than the state of Kentucky and with a population the size of Erie, Pennsylvania. The mean temperature all year round in the capital, Reykjavik (where Bobby Fischer once played chess), is 41 degrees, snow falls 100 days a year in the northwest, and on other days the island is subject to torrential gales and blinding fog. Much of Iceland is covered with glaciers, and its great profusion of volcanoes have produced 33 percent of the world's lava in the past 500 years. One eruption in 1973 destroyed most of a midsize city.

So why is Iceland the happiest country on earth? That remains one of the mysteries of the modern world. According to the researchers at the World Database of Happiness, headquartered at Erasmus University in Holland, Icelanders regularly express higher rates of satisfaction and contentment than do citizens of other countries, including the U.S. Yet the people on this remote, unstable piece of real estate are not particularly affluent and experience a considerable measure of social as well as geological instability. Some 61 percent of the children are born out of wedlock The island is 95 percent Protestant, mostly Lutheran, and only 1 percent Catholic.

Iceland seems to illustrate the absence of a correlation between happiness and characteristics such as wealth, education, and a pleasant climate. Since 1946 the Dutch pollsters at Erasmus have been asking representative samples in dozens of countries, "Taking all things together, would you say you are ,very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy? Scores ranging from 4 for "very happy" to 1 for "not at all happy" are assigned to each participant.

The mean score in Iceland has been 3.4 in recent years, placing it a tad above other happy places like Ireland, Australia, and the Netherlands. The relatively wealthy United States comes in at a respectable 3.3, in a virtual tie with Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium.

More intriguing are the unexpected disparities elsewhere. Nigerians are happier than Germans, those in Ghana are happier than Italians, and the swarming populations of India rate higher on the scale than those in Israel, Hungary, or Russia. Near the bottom are countries like Estonia, Armenia, and Belarus, where the average citizen rates life just above "not very happy."

The Gallup organization takes the happiness poll of Americans on an almost monthly basis, with very little change reported. On a three-tiered scale (very happy, fairly happy, and not too happy), 89 to 95 percent of the population habitually place themselves in the top two tiers. The highest "not too happy" score (12 percent) came in 1990. The responses change only slightly when the question is asked, "In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in your own personal life?" Satisfied respondents have very gradually increased from 76 percent in 1979 to 86 percent in 1998.

How important is religious belief to happiness? A lot apparently depends on how the question is put, who is asking it, and who is answering. A major survey in the late 1970s, which elicited more than 100,000 replies from readers of Psychology Today and Good Housekeeping, indicated little or no relationship.

MORE RECENT studies come to diametrically opposite conclusions. A Gallup study in the 1980s found that people who agree that "God loves me" and that "Religion is the most important influence in my life" are twice as likely to say they are "very happy" than those who disagree with the above statements. A 1988 National Opinion Research Center study found a very direct connection between religious faith and the maintenance of joy among people who had experienced divorce, unemployment, or loss of a loved one.

Meanwhile, researchers find less and less correlation between acquired wealth and happiness. According to one study, the Forbes 100 richest people plus a group of recent lottery winners are only a tiny fraction happier than the average American. In fact, psychologists recently reported that young millionaires in the technology industry are experiencing something called "Sudden Wealth Syndrome," a condition of restlessness and worry bordering on paranoia.

ROBERT MCCLORY is a journalism professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and author of Faithful Dissenters: Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church, to be published in September by Orbis Books.