The Secrets of HAPPINESS Pt. 1

If happiness requires gratitude to create it, then a heart filled with thanksgiving is required to contain it and sustain it! I want to build on the previous message, "The Way of Gratitude," to reveal “The Secrets of HAPPINESS,” beginning with some critical insights of G. K. Chesterton.

G. K. Chesterton, (born 1874, London, England—died 1936), English critic and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder and known for his exuberant personality. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.

Chesterton believed it’s a paradox in history that in every generation the Lord sends “saints” to restore the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects. The generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. Chesterton contradicts us most by being a happy man. The happiness that exudes from every word Chesterton writes is prompted by both things and people. As paint in the hands of an artist, Chesterton’s thoughts and words transform the ordinary world and enable the viewer to see its landscape and people anew. He believed the purpose of artistic and spiritual life is to dig for forgotten astonishment and wonder, so the man sitting in a chair might suddenly realize he is truly alive and be happy. Chesterton retained an innocent, original delight in things and people, instead of succumbing to the monotony that assails most of us as we grow older. He concluded it is adults who become bored with life, whereas children approach the world with excitement and wonder. Jesus taught that unless we are converted and become as little children, we won’t enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt.18:3). Chesterton showed us that regardless of age, we must remain childlike, seeing the Lord and His creation through eyes of awe and wonder. On every encounter, at every turn, with every person, we have been given a world crammed with a million means to happiness.

In light of this, one might think that happiness should be among mankind’s easier achievements. Chesterton does believe that “all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the purpose of hitting the mark of happiness.” But something went awry and a world that should make us happy can make us unhappy, because we don’t do the world the way it was meant to be done.

Though we often speak of unhappiness as a sort of pain, Chesterton rejects that notion because pain makes us aware when we have it. Instead, he sees unhappiness as a sort of unhealth because one can be in it without realizing it. Then the help we all need is to become aware of unhappiness when we are in it. Chesterton saw two ways to do this:

The first is when unhappiness begins to erupt into noticeable suffering or sorrow. Since our generation has a low tolerance for suffering and sorrow, we have devised infinite resources for anesthetizing ourselves. When this is our only way of treatment—a way of negation—in which we only dull and suppress these unpleasant feelings, then the majority are at risk of never recovering.

A second way to become aware of unhappiness—a way of affirmation—where one comes in contact with someone who is genuinely happy, someone who is so glad to be alive.

Disappointing the psychologist, Chesterton does not mainly attribute his happiness to nature or nurture, but attributes happiness to the will. Happiness is not bestowed, it is accomplished. It is gleaned. “In everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy.”

To say that man was created for happiness, as well as that man must achieve happiness, does not make a contradiction, it makes for drama. The question of whether an individual will achieve happiness is still open. Although our happiness may be natural, it is neither guaranteed nor easy. There remains some suspense over whether a person will achieve the fullness of his nature.

The test of all happiness is gratitude,” Chesterton wrote, and many of us have flunked that test. “Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?” We feel no wonder at ordinary things; it is no wonder that ordinary things disappoint us.

Chesterton could be made happy by the sudden yellowness of a dandelion, but we do not find dandelions delightful if we are constantly comparing them to orchids. “It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious [fault-finding] comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all.” The twin brother of this presumptive attitude is despair, and the two make us sick and tired. “Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.”

Until we are grateful, we will not find the world miraculous; until we find the world miraculous, we will not find it important; until we find the world important, we will not be happy here. The difference between ourselves and Chesterton is that we don’t think our world important because it seems ordinary, while he thinks his world is important because he is ordinary. “I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; (I am ordinary because I see the importance of the order of) a Creator and the Creation, (because I possess) the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion.”

This ordinary happiness makes up the essence of Chesterton, and, woven into all his writings, clearly expressed and easily understood on whatever page one opens, it is his gift to those who suffer boredom. A happy saint is just the contradiction we need.

Some of the thoughts and information in this message were inspired or quoted from an essay: “The Essential Chesterton,” by David W. Fagerberg, Professor of Religion at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, March 2000.