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| Blaise Pascal 17th C |
Our American values are
reflected in the basic rights which we hold dear: Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness. These values are
not equal. The right to life is
fundamental in a way that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not. Even at that whales seem to have a
clearer right to life than unborn babies.
We consider liberty to be
a guardian of life. We might formulate
it this way: we have the liberty to preserve life, and we believe that all
should have the basic right to life and liberty. Slowly the rest of the world is coming around
to our way of thinking, even to the extent of some sacrificing their lives so
that other may have both life and liberty.
In these days this pursuit of liberty and life is being propelled
forward by social media and we see uprisings in many parts of the world. But please remember the difference between
whales and unborn babies.
The pursuit of happiness
is another matter. The right to pursue
happiness presupposes that we are fundamentally unhappy and that much of our
life is spent in the pursuit of happiness.
Even having life and liberty does not guarantee happiness. That popular contemporary philosopher Mick
Jagger is correct when he tells us, “You can’t always get what you want,” and “I
can’t get no satisfaction.” That is a
profound truth, not just a wail of unhappiness.
What the right to the
pursuit of happiness declares is that we have the right to pursue it, not a
guarantee that by pursuing we can find it.
The underlying premise is
that “We do not know our place is the cosmos,”[i] We don’t
really know who or what we are and in our pursuit of happiness we pursue
creation instead of the Creator. People are
unaware that the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of God. Some people are so bent on pursuing happiness
in the world, and in themselves, that they become angry at the suggestion that
the pursuit of happiness just might turn out to be the pursuit of God. Somehow we think that’s not fair, after all
we want to find what we want to find, not what is actually there.
Blaise Pascal argues that
man is like a complicated lock with all kinds of crevices and slots and only
Christianity is the key that can fit the lock.[ii] In short what
creates and drives the pursuit of happiness is that man is incomplete in
himself. He has a hole in the middle of
his being that can’t be filled with material things, or even with the people we
treasure. Kreeft says, “To place divine
expectations on human shoulders is an infallible recipe for ruin and bitter
disappointment.”[iii] Others can’t
make you happy, and you aren’t responsible for the happiness of others. You don’t have that kind of power. You do have responsibility not to willfully add
to the unhappiness of others by thoughtless or loveless behaviour. Knowing the difference is part of knowing our
place in the cosmos.
You know, as you have been
so often been told before, that there is hole in the human heart, a God shaped
hole that only God can fill. While that
truth is so commonplace as to be almost trite, it happens to be true.
According to Pascal there
are two basic truths. Man without God is
wretched. Man with God is happy.[iv] St. Augustine
had it right when he said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are
restless until they rest in thee.”[v]
Out discussion of this meditation at our Chapter meeting
this afternoon brought several things to light:
For the Christian there is a tremendous joy of knowing
Christ an in knowing that through his sacrifice we are actually forgiven and
accepted. That itself can be
breathtaking.
There is also a joy in the world around us, a joy that is
experienced more richly through grace and the understanding of the
self-revealing love of the Creator. Let
me give you an analogy. When I was very
young I had taken several lessons in oil painting under a professional artist
of some repute. One of my assignments
was painting a scene with autumn leaves.
There came a time after my encounter with Christ and my surrender to the
infilling of the Holy Spirit that something new began to happen. Shortly after that discovery of the
overwhelming love of God I walked out in the yard between my parent’s house and
a neighbour’s. It was a beautiful fall
Canadian day and I saw the autumn leaves in full colour for the first time. I had seen that display of autumn leaves many
times before, but now I was amazed by the gorgeous radiant colours, the shades
of red, orange, and yellow resplendent before me. It was as though I had never seen autumn
leaves before. It was not the leaves
that were different, but it was me. “My
eyes were different because my eyes had been opened to beauty. O, Worship the Lord in the beauty of
holiness.”
When a child of the world
encounters Christ for himself all his perceptions of joy are heightened and
deepened, and even in the midst of difficult circumstances that joy begins to
creep on silent feet into our consciousness.
Under grace there is an enriched grasp of the joys that come through
beauty, knowledge, and relationships.
The Christian experiences joy rather than mere
happiness. The children of the world
also experience joy although they may not realize its source in the
Creator. When you seek Truth, you seek
Christ, and in seeking Christ you discover joy.
There is a certain joy that comes through the very process of
seeking. One of our Benedictines, who in
his youth held a number of weight lifting world records in his weight class,
likened it to the excitement of preparing for a competition, but when the
competition was over there was no abiding experience of joy, until the next
time of preparation. The joy was in the
pursuit. So also there is joy in the
pursuit of God. In the seeking is the
leading edge of the fulfillment.
[i] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for
Modern Pagans, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 53
[ii] Ibid. p. 47
[iii] Ibid. p. 48
[iv] Ibid. p. 25
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