This postThe other day I came across a quote about happiness that I can’t get out of my head:
It has given me much of trouble, and a great amount of perseverance, to be happy under all circumstances. I have learned not to fret myself. It has taken me a great while to arrive at this point … I want the Saints to live in a way that they can feel happy all the time, and then we shall enjoy the Holy Spirit. (Jedediah M. Grant, Journal of Discourses, 3:11-12.)
Happy under all circumstances? Isn’t that a little too idealistic?
I don’t think that’s what Jedediah meant, though. Sure, there’s a time to mourn. A time to cry. A time for sorrow. He doesn’t mean we have to be bubbly and chipper every moment of every day. There are limits. ;)
But that’s not really the point. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like the happiness he’s talking about is the soul-deep joy that encompasses even our sorrows, infusing us with the strength we need to get through whatever trials come our way. It’s a quiet happiness. It’s soothing. It’s mature. It’s real. And it’s even realistic — it doesn’t ignore the bad things in life, but it shines its light upon them and transforms them from bogeymen into something we can deal with. It’s beautiful and poignant.
Too many of us, however, live far beneath our privileges too much of the time. One of those privileges is happiness. After all, men are, that they might have joy. Why are we settling for anything less? Sometimes I think our “thy will be done” attitude renders us a little too complacent, to the point where we completely deflate ourselves and think that whatever happens to us must be the will of God, of course.
But that’s not the case.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not denying that God is omnipotent. He is. And he wants the best for us, even when that means sending us through the refiner’s fire.
And yet as far as I can tell, the last thing he wants us to do is just slouch back and let life happen to us. Ours is a God of activity, not passivity. Act, not acted upon.
Now, things do happen to us, of course. We can only control external events to a very limited degree; the rest is beyond our sphere of action, and every day of our lives we’ll have things happen that weren’t in our plan.
But just because we can’t control externalities doesn’t mean that the state of our heart and mind has to succumb to outside pressures. Each of us has a will. And that will, that self, is a whole lot more powerful than we realize. And God is okay with that.
That’s the point, after all: to become like him. Gods and goddesses and angels are beings of power and glory who move mountains and shake the heavens. Apathy just isn’t going to get us there, I’m afraid. God doesn’t want to remove our will — he wants to train it into a mighty force for good. He wants us to burn with that same power and glory that cloaks the celestials, because there’s a kingdom of God to build here on earth and a kingdom of heaven to populate when we pass on to better things.
A huge part of the training is, of course, learning to want the things that God wants. And God wants us to be happy. Do we?
Of course we do. We may cover it up with self-deceptions, we may try to bury it in the backyard of our mind, but deep down inside we all want to be happy. It’s part of who we are as humans and as children of God. It’s okay to want to be happy. We don’t need to apologize for it.
And, like Jedediah says, we really can be happy under all circumstances. It’s up to us. We do need the Lord’s help, yes. There’s no way that we can do it without his love and light pouring into us. It’s impossible without him.
But he’s not going to just give it to us. It’s part of that training, where we learn what it really means to be kings and queens, princes and princesses in the palaces of the Most High. If it only took a casual request in passing to get true happiness, we’d all end up brats. :P
No, we have to want it bad. We have to be willing to sweat for it, to sacrifice, to work our tails off until we come off conqueror. Joy comes at a price. In fact, I don’t think it could come any other way — part of the richness of happiness comes from the tears that precede it. The Himalayas of happiness are mere foothills unless you have a Mariana Trench (of misery? I don’t want to stretch this alliterative taffy so far that it breaks :)) to give you a point of comparison. Happiness only has meaning when there’s something out there that isn’t happiness.
Anyway, I know that I for one could stand to be happier. It’s not like I’m moping around the apartment in a cloud of depression all the time, but too often I settle for a pallid middle ground that isn’t bad but it really isn’t all that good, either. Happiness is a choice. Am I choosing?
