The Saints' Guide to Happiness

I must confess that the idea for my prior post, “The Saints’ Guide to Anxiety,” was not wholly original. It was somewhat borrowed from the title of one of my very favorite books, "The Saints’ Guide to Happiness" by my friend, Robert Ellsberg.

It was difficult to find one excerpt to share, because there are so many, but here’s a piece that really struck me (since I feel like a moral failure so much of the time):

I have spent much of my life reading books about saints: medieval legends, spiritual memoirs, martyrologies, and manuals of devotion. If that is all it takes to be happy then, as Thomas Merton says, "I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now." Yet with happiness, as with holiness, it is not what we read but what we practice that makes the difference.

Each day brings new failures. I become impatient; I worry about small things and take other people for granted; I give in to distractions and remain inattentive to signs of grace; I daydream about heroic deeds, while neglecting countless opportunities for charity.

And yet, like everyone else, I yearn to be happy. This desire is one of the marks of being human, a sign that we are called to a more abundant life. No less than others, I have looked for happiness is one place or another, imagining it would follow once I had realized some ambition or had resolved a looming crisis. But experience has only confirmed the wisdom of the saints, both those I have studied and those I have known, whose happiness did not hinge on passing feelings or outward circumstances. They have shown that the true happiness we all desire is the other side of the holiness to which we are called. The two proceed from the same practice and converge on the same goal.

If holiness were the same as genius or moral perfection, then this goal would concern only a very few. But holiness is not about possessing "the right stuff." Nor is it a code or prescription we must follow. It is more like the habit of being, a certain fullness of life, or "loveliness of the spirit." It is a name for that quality by virtue of which all things or persons fulfill their purpose and reason for being. . . .

On this path we are never finished. We remain always and only on the way. For that reason, instead of talking about “saints” as if they represented some kind of different creature, we might prefer to speak of “those who walk the paths of holiness.” At once we have a sense of what unites us with the saints, our fellow travelers, much deeper than all that sets us apart. We are all saints "in progress," to the extent that we desire to be. Some, to be sure, progress farther than others. But St. Paul made no distinctions when he addressed his readers as saints. They were saints by virtue of their calling to be saints.

By the same token there is no way to happiness. But there is a way of happiness, a way of lightness and balance, a way that allows us to take in experience and give it back with humanity and forgiveness, a way that awakens us to the particularity of each moment as well as its sacred depths. So often we proceed as though looking through a "mental telescope," trained above the heads of our fellow humans, and what we see seems petty, commonplace, and meaningless. But then comes a moment when our yearning for happiness joins paths with the call to holiness. In the focus that ensues, we see the world in a new light. And in that light ordinary life becomes not only infinitely valuable but radiant and engrossing.

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