This is an excerpt from a homily given New Year’s Eve at the Rise Up Conference in Vancouver.
God does want us to be happy in this life. But many people make the mistake of identifying happiness with pleasure. Happiness and pleasure are not the same things. In fact, pleasure can be the cause of very great unhappiness.
How much unhappiness has been caused by the temporary pleasure found in alcohol or drugs, or sex outside of marriage? Few things have caused as much unhappiness to as many people as these so-called pleasures. Not only are they fleeting, they are harmful to oneself and to others.
It would also be a mistake to think happiness consists in amassing possessions. If things could make people happy, Canadians would be just about the happiest people in the world. We have more possessions than any other generation in human history. But we are not the happiest.
Perhaps it is because we let things possess us. What happens all too often instead in our affluent society is we love things and use people to get the things we desire. In the words of Pope Francis, ours is a “society based on profit and possession and on consumerism which deceives young people.”
Still, it is a struggle. How easy it is to be content with the superficial pleasures daily life offers us; how easy it is to live only for oneself, apparently enjoying life! But sooner or later we realize this is not true happiness, because true happiness comes from a much deeper source. The happiness we are seeking, the happiness we have a right to enjoy, has a name and a face: it is Jesus of Nazareth.
I therefore invite you every day to seek the Lord, who wants nothing more than for you to be truly happy. Foster an intense and constant relationship with him in prayer and, when possible, find suitable moments in your day to be alone in his company. If you do not know how to pray, ask him to teach you, and ask your heavenly Mother to pray with you and for you.
Happiness, while deeply desired, is not to be pursued for its own sake. It is always a by-product of something else. But what is it that has happiness as its side effect or by-product? The answer, I think is found in Bethlehem.
Let us go with the shepherds to Bethlehem to see what it is. Look into the manger – and I suggest you do this as the New Year begins, even if it is just by looking at a Christmas card you received.
See the Child wrapped in swaddling clothes and then look around. None of the things in which we so often seek happiness can be seen. There are no signs of pleasure or possessions or fame – nothing but an empty cave on the outskirts of a small town in the hills of an outpost of the Roman Empire.
Now look at Mary and Joseph kneeling before the Child lying in the manger. They must be tired. They have travelled more than 150 kilometres from Nazareth to Bethlehem with Joseph on foot and Mary on the jolting back of a donkey. They must be cold in this damp cave in the middle of winter. Think how humiliating it must have been for them to discover no room among their relatives in their ancestral home or at the village inn.
Yet, in the midst of all of this, Mary and Joseph are the happiest people on the face of the earth. Here in Bethlehem they are teaching us the amazing paradox that it is only when we lose ourselves in the love and service of Jesus that we find happiness – a happiness this world can never give, and happiness that no one can take from us.
Happiness comes from God’s closeness to us, from his presence in our life. But we must desire that closeness, to go forward to an encounter with Jesus, who is our joy. I urge you not to dampen the deepest desires of your yearning heart. Uncover them, and discover your restlessness can only be calmed by the Lord himself.
Jesus entered into history with his birth in Bethlehem, to bring, as Pope Francis said, “a joy already real and tangible now, because Jesus himself is our joy.”
Your vocation is to bring joy to the world, a happiness that is authentic and enduring, the joy proclaimed by the angels to the shepherds on the night Jesus was born. Not only has God spoken to us through the prophets, not only has he accomplished great signs and wonders throughout human history, but he has drawn so near to us that he became one of us and lived our life to the full. In these difficult times, so many young people all around you need to hear that the Christian message is a message of joy and hope!
