Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world
-C.S. Lewis
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
-St. Augustine
Two weeks ago I began a five day silent retreat to prepare for my ordination to the diaconate (stay tuned for the exact date). I stayed at the Companions of the Cross’ formation house nestled in the wilderness of Combermere, Ontario. Having completed twenty-one days of silent retreat last year, I expected this retreat to be relatively low-key and uneventful. But, once again confirming the lessons I learned in that retreat, these five days were just as, if not more impactful than the twenty-one days.
The bottom line is that God works with what he is given. What I experienced in the silence of retreat has changed my outlook on life and on God. It was as if he were teaching me how to be happy. Below are four of my main takeaways. I pray that they bless you in your spiritual walk.
Speaking of Deacons, please say a prayer for my brother seminarians who will be ordained to the priesthood tomorrow (Saturday May 24th) at 10am in Ottawa. The livestream link can be found here.
1. Never look to the world for what only God can give you
It’s said that happiness is reality minus expectations.
You could easily poke holes in this saying if you’re picky. I think it’s probably not even cognitively possible to have no expectations. Even if it were, that wouldn’t be a good thing. The very ideas of goodness, justice, and value seem to call out for preference and expectation. Happiness wouldn’t be worth much if it meant being apathetic to evil and suffering. It wouldn’t be worth anything without love.
Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that unhappiness comes from unmet expectations. We become distressed and agitated because we perceive a gap between the way things are and how we believe they ought to be.
If we want to be happy, we need to get our expectations in line with reality.
The most important thing we can know about reality is that we were made for God. We all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Only he can satisfy our longings. Only he can truly make us happy. St. Augustine wrote of God, “…our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
We can see the practical reality behind this poetic language by looking at how other drives are satisfied:
We all have a ‘food shaped hole’ in our stomachs. Our hunger will not be satisfied until we consume nutrients. If we try to ignore our hunger, or cover it over by drinking water, we will grow weak, sick, and miserable.
Similarly, our fatigue will not go away until we get good sleep. If we try to cover over our tiredness with stimulants or distractions, we might feel temporary relief, but our minds and bodies will steadily deteriorate until we can’t function.
You can’t cheat reality.
In the same way that we should not try to satisfy our hunger with something that isn’t food, we should not try to satisfy our hearts with something that isn’t God.
As eating is our attempt to satisfy our hunger, so worship is our attempt to satisfy our desire for God. Everyone worships. The question is not whether we worship, but who or what we worship.
Who or what do you worship? Where do you get your sense of security, identity, and self-esteem? Who or what takes priority in your life, especially in times of crisis, temptation, and hardship? This is who or what you worship.
If we do not worship God, someone, or something will take his place. Our world is rife with idol worship. Whether it’s money, power, beauty, pleasure, entertainment, health, the approval and affection of others, knowledge, nationality etc., there’s almost no limit to the things we humans have set up in place of God.
Don’t misunderstand me: there is nothing wrong with money, health, pleasure, etc. But these things aren’t God. There is nothing wrong with a bag of marbles. But marbles aren’t food. If we let them take the place of food, they will make us sick.
We have become sick because we have allowed people and things to take the place of God.
It gets worse. When we worship something other than God, we ultimately worship ourselves. Like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, we try to take God’s place as the one who knows good from evil, and holds power over life and death. We try to decide for ourselves the terms of our lives, and what is right and wrong. A priest friend of mine put it this way:
We have let others play God for us, and we have played God ourselves.
Returning to the idea of expectations and reality, is it any wonder that this extraordinary hubris has put us at odds with reality, and what we actually need to be happy?
What I’ve been trying to say can be summed up with words I overheard from my friend Dustin . Working as a campus missionary in Calgary, I sat next to him as a student was asking for advice about a relationship. Dustin told him, “never look to a girl for what only God can give you.”
Never look to the world for what only God can give you.
Do not look to things for what only God can give you.
Do not look to others for what only God can give you.
Do not look to yourself for what only God can give you.
When we truly worship God, and truly understand that he is the source of our happiness, we will not look for it in other places.
We will not lose hope or peace when our plans are dashed, or our resources come up short.
We will not despair when we fall again and again into our own foibles and character flaws.
We will not be surprised, discouraged, or resentful when the people in our lives inevitably hurt and let us down through their weaknesses and character flaws.
We will be able to accept our circumstances and other people because we will have freed them and ourselves from the burden of being God.
2. Ditch Self-Reliance
If the above sounds unrealistic, that’s because it is. Humanly speaking it’s impossible. You’ve more than halfway understood Christianity when you realize that Jesus became man and died on the cross because no one could offer satisfactory worship to the Father but him. We can only properly worship in and through Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “…without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
You don’t have to be a Christian to accept the fact that the things of this world can’t bring you happiness. This truth drives some to despair. Others to cynicism. Still others embrace stoicism. For a Christian, it should lead to surrender.
I cannot. But God can.
Is Jesus your Lord and Savior or your assistant and consultant? Too often Jesus is viewed as a mere role model. A cheerleader. Someone who can give us advice and push us over the finish line. The reality is that we really and truly and desperately need God for everything whether we realize it or not.
If you’re not sure about this, you’re arriving nearly two thousand years late to the party. St Augustine engaged in an epic, religion-defining dispute with the heretic Pelagius over this very topic. Pelagius believed that we could follow God’s commandments and achieve salvation through our strength of will. Adam and Eve did not wound human nature by their sin, they merely set a bad example. Jesus did not atone for our sins and redeem our nature, he merely set a better example.
Pelagius’ misguided optimism sets people up for despair, because it means that your faults are always your fault. An attitude that constantly says “I should be better” is a recipe for perpetual frustration and self-loathing.
While Pelagius was right to decry the complacency of people who simply accepted their faults without making any effort to improve, he ended up turning into the opposite side of the same coin. Both Pelagius and the apathetic hedonists he was reacting against overlooked the need for God’s grace. The latter despaired of any effort at self improvement, the former created an illusion riddled path that made despair inevitable.
Christianity by contrast is pessimistic on the surface, but profoundly encouraging and compassionate at its core. Our faults are still our responsibility, but they aren’t our fault. God understands our brokenness and works with unfathomable patience and tenderness to help us overcome them and lead us to happiness.
If you want a good example of someone who achieved happiness and liberation from self-loathing through acceptance and surrender to God, check out the short pamphlet: The Practice of the Presence of God:
Brother Lawrence was aware of his sins and was not at all surprised by them. “That is my nature,” he would say, “the only thing I know how to do.” He simply confessed his sins to God, without pleading with Him or making excuses. After this, he was able to peacefully resume his regular activity of love and adoration.
If you find yourself unable to peacefully resume your regular activity of love and adoration after falling into a sin or experiencing a setback, it may be because you’ve overestimated your abilities, or it may be that you’ve under estimated God’s love and mercy. In either case, you have a perfect opportunity to surrender once again and experience his loving acceptance.
3. Take things one day at a time
Pelagius thought we could achieve salvation on our own because he sorely overestimated our abilities, and the magnitude of the task at hand. Before we get too carried away with dunking on Pelagius, we should consider how pervasive his way of thinking is in the world and in our lives.
We so easily succumb to the illusion of self-reliance because we so badly want to get out of the messes we find ourselves in. We fall for fad diets and get-rich-quick schemes because our hearts yearn for ‘happily ever after.’ The stories and testimonials that get our attention and shape our expectations are the ones where the problem is suddenly and permanently fixed.
We will be continually frustrated and disappointed until we recognize that the battle against our fallen human nature is a daily and lifelong struggle.
Our faith repeatedly identifies a day as the proper frame of reference for approaching this struggle.
Jesus instructs us to pray: “Give us this day our daily bread - (not ‘give us this day a lifetime supply of bread so that we will never be hungry again’).
In Matthew he says, “…do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34).
In the St. Michael prayer we pray, “St Michael the archangel, defend us in this day of battle - (not defend us for the rest of our lives).
In the book of Exodus, God feeds the Israelites with bread from heaven, but stipulates that this is to be a daily portion. We read:
Then the LORD said to Moses: I am going to rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion…” (Exodus 16:4).
In spite of clear direction from Moses, greed, and the drive for self-preservation gets the better of some of the Israelites:
Moses said to them, “Let no one leave any of it over until morning.” But they did not listen to Moses, and some kept a part of it over until morning, and it became wormy and stank (Exodus 16:18-20).
God’s grace works the same way. It will become wormy and stink if we do not use it for today.
Taking things one day at a time is psychologically and practically necessary for happiness. We have been shipwrecked miles away from shore. If we focus on how far we have to swim, we will give up in despair. If we try to swim the whole way all at once, we will drown. Most importantly, if we spend all of our time looking at the shore and thinking about how far it is, we will miss the life preservers floating next to us.
If you own a pair of binoculars, take a look through them, and imagine trying to walk through your house. If you’re not litigious and aren’t next to a staircase, maybe give it a try. When we don’t take things one day at a time, we will make the exact same sorts of mistakes: We will either completely miss the problems and solutions that are right in front of us, or they will be completely distorted and blown out of proportion by our long range view.
Don’t worry about making it to the shore. Focus on getting to the lifeboat.
4. Have an attitude of gratitude
Imagine you are at a coffee shop with your friend. They look at their phone and discover they’ve won a hundred million dollars in the lottery. Beside themselves with excitement, they jump around screaming for joy. They pay for everyone’s drink, and leave a $500 tip for the barista. They are ecstatic, and for good reason: They’re currently working a job they hate because they’re up to their eyeballs in credit card debt. But now neither they, nor their children, nor their grandchildren will have to work a day in their lives.
The next day you go to their house and you find them on the couch with a sullen, vacant look on their face. When you ask what’s wrong, they tell you that they got a $90 parking ticket while you two were at the coffee shop. They then explain that they will no longer be going to coffee with you, because they can’t risk this happening in the future.
This dynamic plays out in our lives every day. We wouldn’t bat an eye at the vast majority of the things that bother us if we truly appreciated how much God has blessed us.
At your next meal, take a moment to look at the food on your plate. Try to picture in your mind everything it took for the food to get there. Watch the vegetables sprout from the ground, then get harvested by workers, loaded onto trucks, placed in the grocery store aisle, selected by the cook, chopped and seasoned etc. Think of the systems and networks that needed to be in place for its distribution. Consider also that it’s more than likely that many in that system were not treated fairly.
Something as simple as having a well lit room helped me feel gratitude. If I were stranded on a desert island, how long would it take me to get lights in my hut? How many lifetimes would it take me to figure out how to reverse engineer the lightbulb? To make facilities and generate enough heat to smelt the metal and blow the glass? What about a working generator and wiring system?
The tiniest conveniences in our lives are the result of a staggering amount of time, labor, intention, sacrifice, and investment. This abundance and bounty finds its source in God, the giver of all good gifts.
There is a place for sadness, longing and mourning as we make our way through this valley of tears. Gratitude should never be used to invalidate or shame sadness and outrage - only to prevent them from turning into despair. No matter what has happened to you, it does not change the fact that God loves you and has unimaginably blessed you
You are thought of.
You are wanted.
You are delighted in.
You are provided for.
You are looked after.
Sometimes this can be difficult if not impossible to believe. If you don’t believe it, or don’t truly appreciate it, ask God for the gift of faith. As Christians we are not supposed to resign ourselves to suffering and stoically will ourselves forward. We are spurred on by gratitude for what God has given us, and anticipation for what he has in store for us.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:1-3).
I am encouraged, John. Next time I experience a suffering, I’ll say to myself, “Not God.” I’ll remind myself that only He can give me that which truly satisfies.