What Should We Do To Be Happy?

“Is not the happy life the thing that all desire, and is there anyone who does not desire it at all?” – St. Augustine

Have you ever wondered why it seems so hard to be happy? We try to focus on positive thoughts. We give in to buying the things we want. We pursue relationships that promise to give us happiness. But after everything we have ever done, we still find that happiness eludes our grasp.

What should we do so that we can finally be happy? Are we doing something that takes away happiness from our hearts? Or should we be doing something that can help us draw nearer to happiness?

Fleeting Happiness

Perhaps what we complain about is not the lack of happy moments but the fleetingness of it all.

For instance, we may find ourselves quite happy as we start the day. We eat our favorite meal, we drink the coffee we like and we look forward to all the wonderful things we expect to experience for the rest of the day.

However, as we go on with our day, we find more and more disappointments. The promotion we thought would be ours had been given to someone else. The call we expected never came. Even the weather turned from brightness to gloom.

We thought we could be happy the entire day, but we soon forgot the happiness we felt at the start.

The same goes for the many pleasures we try to have in life. We buy this and that only to discover we wouldn’t be happy with the things we bought. We pursue a new relationship only to have our hearts broken again.

The Bottomless Hole In Our Hearts

Our endless search for happiness seems to point us to that bottomless hole in our hearts.

Why is this hole so huge and deep that no matter how much we try to fill it, it remains ever-aching in emptiness? Could it be that we are somehow trying to fill it the wrong way?

Saint Augustine has this to say about trying to search for happiness in similar things:

“For my sin was that I sought out pleasures, grandeurs, and truths not in him but in his creatures, in myself and in others, and thus fell headlong into sorrows, confusion, and errors.”

He tells us that unless God Himself fills that void in our hearts, the end will always be sorrow and confusion.

The Answer To Our Search For Happiness

Saint Faustina couldn’t have said it any better when she pointed out the reason for the lack of happiness in our lives:

“I listened to people pour out their grievances, and I saw that no heart was joyful, because no heart truly loved God…” (Divine Mercy In My Soul, 401)

Here is something from “The Baltimore Catechism” that can help us understand this better:

Question: Why did God make you?
Answer: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

Following is an excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“‘Let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice.’ Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness.” (CCC 30)

God has made us for happiness. But we were meant to find that happiness in God.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” – St. Augustine

An Invitation

It isn’t wrong to desire happiness. We were meant to search for it and to find it! But we have often searched for it in all the wrong places. We tried to fill the emptiness in our hearts with things that could never fill it.

God reaches out to us to remind us that He is waiting for us. He wants us to be happy forever with Him! Would you accept His invitation to you today? Are you ready to do that one thing you need to do so you can find the kind of happiness that lasts and fully satisfies your heart?

“This is the happy life and this alone: to rejoice in you, about you and because of you. This is the life of happiness, and it is not to be found anywhere else. Whoever thinks there can be some other is chasing a joy that is not the true one…” – St. Augustine

“You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
-Psalm 16:11 (NRSVCE)

Jocelyn Soriano is the author of To Love an Invisible God. “Is it really possible to love a God we cannot even see?”