Jonathan Morris - God Wants You Happy: From Self-Help to God’s Help

Spirit-Filled Living

Junior Partners of the Holy Spirit

Making Straight the Path

Getting Unstuck

Introduction to the Divine Cure

Living Faith

Living Hope

Living Love

Living Saints: Bringing it Home

Spirit-Filled Living

M y new butcher friend, Moe, looked at me, first with surprise, then with a broad smile. Dont I wish! he said, raising his thinning gray eyebrows while shuffling backward and successfully catching my freshly ground beef from his 1950s-style meat grinder without ever taking his eyes off me. The tone and mannerisms of this streetwise octogenarian from Brooklyn couldnt have expressed more skepticism over my suggestion, made to him just seconds before, that he might be on the road to becoming a saint, not altogether unlike the Italian namesake of whom he was so proud.

My sense was that this gentleman was on such a path; his smile was pure and real. He was spirit-filled.

Living saints were on my mind that Saturday morning as I did my neighborhood errands, because they were the topic of the scripture readings for the next days services. During my own prayer time that morning, I had been just as surprised as Moe by the ideaso clearly expressed in the Biblethat we are all called to be saints and that being saints has less to do with halos and folded hands and more to do with living life to the fullbecoming everything God created us to be. The message of the various readings was summed up for me in Jesuss words in the Gospel of John: I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (John 10:10, NIV ).

In an epiphany explicable only by divine intervention, on that day, when I had first meditated on scripture and then encountered Moe, this very familiar passageone I had read or heard hundreds of times beforejolted me to the core. God wants me and everyone around me to be profoundly happy! Becoming holy and becoming happy are interconnected, I realized. And God must have a planand a few backup plans too, for when we mess upoutlining how we are to get there!

The moment was more than an intellectual realization. In an immeasurably short flash of reason and spiritual emotion, I knew experientially what before I had known mostly in the head: God is on my side, and his invitations, his commands, and even the bumps and bruises he permits along the way must be signposts pointing toward personal fulfillment life to the full waiting to be claimed by me and every one of Gods children.

This discovery (something so obvious and simple it can hardly be called a discovery outside my own subjective experience) most likely made such a deep impression on me on that day because it contrasted so starkly with what I had been experiencing the previous week. I had been through some particularly rough days. I was dealing with my own issues of adjusting to living in New York City and serving in a Manhattan parish after many years in the more subdued and controlled environment of a seminary in Rome, Italy. My impression was that everyone around me also seemed to be going through tough times, and they werent making much sense of their struggles. I was hurting a bit, yes, but these people were miserable. I recall the young, fearful, and inconsolable mother in the hospital with late-stage ovarian cancer; another dear friend of mine at her wits end, frustrated and angry that she was reaching forty and still hadnt found a decent guy; an usher in my church laid off from his job one week before his wedding; a Protestant pastor and friend whose wife was leaving him for her wealthy boss; a father of three young children, suffering from debilitating and humiliating depression; and finally, the ninety-eight-year-old man at whose funeral service I presided that was attended by nobody not a single person!

Over the years of my pastoral ministry Ive unconsciously formed an ultrathin but steely guard that allows me to be interested in, and even immersed in, others problems without being overwhelmed emotionally. That week, however, just beneath my serene exterior floated major doubts about Gods questionable strategy of care for some of his children: Are there real, true, positive solutions for their predicaments, for every predicament? I wondered.

The very simple, unexceptional flash of spiritual enlightenment I experienced on that Saturday morning immediately put these concernssummarized in my question to God about real solutions for everyoneback into lifes big picture. It is a context where spiritual realities (including heaven, grace, and redemption) are taken into account. True, the previous week I had encountered a group of people who were in agony, tragically stuck in their misery, but here, through Moes indomitable joy (even as his local butcher shop was teetering on extinction on account of new, corporate giants in the neighborhood) and through scripture, I was being reminded by grace of Gods promise to us: he will bring out of every bad situation, out of every single instance of pain and suffering in our lives, a greater goodyes, an even greater good than the goodness we are missing nowif we let him! This promise covers every stripe and strand of our seemingly limitless human capacity for physical, emotional, and spiritual agony. Yes, there are real, true, positive solutions for you and for me, right now, no matter whats going on. These solutions feel like joy, peace, and profound meaning when we find them, based on hope in a God who knows us, loves us, and has great things in store for us and for the ones we love.

Ive seen this promise fulfilled in the most unlikely of cases. Ive witnessed people with every reason to give up, with no solution (imagined or real) in sight, reject the lie that sometimes hope is stupid and irrational, and jump up instead and move on to wonderful new chapters in their lives. Ive witnessed people stuck in bad relationships and weighed down by self-destructive habits decide that today they have the grace to overcome what has beaten them for many years. In fact, whenever I am paying attention, I see myriads of everyday saintsspirit-filled peopleclaiming this happiness at every perilous and thorny twist and turn. The difference between these people with the ultimate success stories (overcoming difficulty and achieving happy, holy lives) and the ones who plod on in self-absorbed misery is miniscule. The divine promise of goodness is within our reach, today.

So how do we grasp it? How do we recover or acquire for the first time a heart that wakes up peacefully and goes to bed smiling?

Surely happy people can teach us something. Why is Moe still smiling, inside and out, while his little butcher shop is hanging on for dear life? Why isnt he bitter that Whole Foods and Dean & DeLuca (those impersonal grocery hawks that have landed on his turf!) are making him more irrelevant every day? What has kept him from going sour, as so many others would have in his shoes?

We would perhaps all agree that happiness is more about being than about having; we might say its about the heart resting in the right place. We know too that theres more to being happy than the mere rejection of its many impostors, such as materialism or hedonism. The path to happiness is quite mysterious. It is found by some and it completely escapes other very good people. This is problematic. If God exists and wants happiness for all of us, there must be good reason why his design, or formula, seems to fail so frequently.