My non-Christian friends often wonder if they will lose happiness if they adopt Christian ideas. Let’s not kid anyone: there are things Christians don’t do. Some of those things are pleasurable and nobody likes to lose pleasures!
So yes, becoming a Christian costs happiness and promises pain. We are not the religion of the Cross for nothing.
In fact, since God made everything that is, many people have found some virtue that remains in their vice and have built their life around in it. Strangely their vice is good for them (in some ways) and not obviously bad for them. To give a simple example, a member of a gang is doing evil things, but the brotherhood he finds in the gang might be the most loving and virtuous part of his life.
To give up the gang seems like giving up his virtue!
Christianity promises long term happiness, but to obtain it requires giving up short-term joys. Now in a culture where almost nobody can even work up the discipline to save for their own retirement (where the benefit is obvious, fairly certain, and not that far off!) this is a hard sell.
Christians don’t make it any easier by our failure to model the benefits before a watching world.
Saint Augustine (354-430 AD) was a man of rare insight into the nature of this struggle. He loved pleasure, all sorts of pleasure, but wanted more. Every time he reached for “more” he discovered that it did not fill the heart ache he had. Finally, he found what he was looking for in Christianity.
Christianity, when it is really accepted, results in a change in the believer. The believer is “born again” and can begin to desire new things. The old quest for meaning and true happiness is fulfilled, at least in part, even in this life. The things he has to “give up” do not seem like “giving up” compared to what he has gained!
The master work in the West on this discovery that Jesus Christ fills all the heart’s longings . . . that He is enough . . . is Augustine’s Confessions. I read it (or listen to it) every other year or so. It is worth that time.
Saint Augustine says:
“You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love, and we carried your words transfixing my innermost being.” (Augustine, Confessions IX. iii)
Love best describes God’s essence. God is love.
This love is not sterile, but fecund. It pierces and reaches out to us. Any passion I have ever felt is nothing compared to the passion that God pours out toward me and which I can experience if I will just give up these lesser “loves” and turn my heart to Him.
We give up nothing to receive everything.
The fact that humanity still exists, despite our folly and evil, is a sign of this divine love. We can choose to reject Him and receive this out pouring of love as judgment, but that is not what He wishes. He loves every human being and does not desire anyone’s spiritual death. We are miserable, because we reject Him and choose misery.
All our love begins with God’s Word to us as revealed in the pages of Sacred Scripture and, less plainly, in the lives of His children. Once we hear it, really hear it, and see God in it, then it is amazing to us that we took so long to do it!
All our love must end in God. To love even the good things He has made creates an idol and causes love to stagnate far from its source. And yet many of us are afraid to give up our little, unsatisfying passions, because they are ours, seem certain, and are all we have.
Any time modern media writes about Augustine, they are determined to picture him as a puritan who hated sex and passion.
Instead, Augustine was a man of such great passion that he loathed his failed attempts to find a proper end for those passions. He tried many places to direct his love including philosophy, sexual relationships, and friends. All of them failed. It was not that he hated study, marriage, or friendships, but that such things could never satisfy him as ends.
Instead of allowing them to be means to the true resting place of his heart, God, Augustine tried to rest in them. When he finally gave up, he discovered that all his pleasures were doubled in God. Like any convert, he began to shout this truth . . . and we miss his point if we do not understand his writing in ALL CAPS TO TRY TO GET THROUGH to us what we are missing.
Augustine continues:
“The examples given by your servants whom you had transformed from black to shining white and from death to life, crowded in upon my thoughts.”
I have noticed lately a strange disappearance of “lives of the saints.” Augustine found these examples (especially of intellectually gifted martyrs) encouraging. We have quit reading them, because we find them discouraging.
We read of Holy Martyrs, Missionaries, and Ascetics and can only think how rigorous their lives were. We see only what they have lost and ignore what they claim they have gained. Is this because we have not tasted enough of divine love?
Reading of champions need not make us feel inadequate, but can spur us on in our own pilgrim’s progress. The great saints triumphed by God’s grace, power, and love. That same possibility is open to us!
God help us to want pleasure enough to find it in You!
The holy bishop says of these examples:
“They burnt away and destroyed my heavy sluggishness, preventing me from being dragged down to low things.”
I have been praying every day this Lent against sluggishness in my life. It is a disease of our wealth age. We all have spiritual gout and we need to burn it off by emulating better examples.
Can anyone hear the words of Paul about his life in II Corinthians and not want more?
When we are fat, then we feel like giving up and enjoying our food as best we can. It is almost loathsome to us, but not quite. As we exercise and the pounds drop away so does our sluggishness. Even resting is more vibrant as we gain a higher metabolism.
In the same way, spiritual exercise (especially prayer and reading God’s Holy Word) begins to strip away the desire for anything for its own sake.
Just as fasting helps us enjoy feasting, so spiritual exercise gives up back the pleasure in created things (food, wine, sex), because they are restored to their right place.
Augustine can no longer be deterred by evil talk:
“They set me on fire with such force that every breath of opposition from any ‘deceitful tongue had the power not to dampen my zeal but to inflame it more.”
Compared to the joys of the martyrs and other great saints, no opposition matters. The temptation of respectability in this life seems hollow when we can gain the favor of the High King of Heaven. The endless attempt to find pleasure and rest in earthly things seem almost funny, when we see that loving God has given us a keener appreciation for the goods He returns to us in super-abundance.
God help me to burn off sluggishness, be pierced in the heart with the arrows of your love, and find rest (sweet holiday!) in You.