Happiness

As a bachelor, C.S. Lewis gave some of the best advice on marriage and love in his book Mere Christianity.  I think I have read this passage at least fifty times, and I often wonder why Lewis didn't just stop there and write an entire book on that passage.  He writes:

"People get from ooks the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever ...the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one.  In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.  The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly.  Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly...?  By no means.  If you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest."

I love that.  I love it because it reminds me that my thrills and expectations cannot be so juvenile that I can expect to be amused by them forever.  It reminds me that the greatest things come when I give up my giddiness and my amusements and love something whether it makes me feel good or not.  Disenchantment is the midwife of love.   

I was on youtube a few days ago watching a video blogger who was also a self-help psychologist.  Believe it or not, I was actually quite amused by the lady.  After listening for several minutes after listening to her go on about self-acualization, she told her listeners she vowed not to do anything that did not make her happy.  If she didn't feel like getting up and going to work, she didn't.  If she didn't feel like being in a relationship, she'd drop out.  If she didn't feel like eating right, she'd sit around and eat junk food.  I don't think I have seen anyone so enslaved to her own happiness.  Watching it made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

The problem with people like that is simply that they see life as a series of thrills.  As if the whole purpose of life is merely to amuse their mind and let them be excited and giddy over every little thing.  If there is not a new partner, job opportunity, or hobby for them to get giddy over, there is no purpose at all to their lives.  After some age, they are worn trying to make their life a thrill ride, and they sink into cynicism.

Lewis reminds me that my character is more important than merely being happy.  And that if I ever want to find true love, true joy, true patience, true beauty, I have to let their young glory die.  If I am merely concerned with how thrilling I feel, I will be like a child who only dreams of flying, instead of a grown soul that has done something to reach the skies.  And in the end, my life will be nothing because I would have spent it amusing myself with my own thrills.  

The greatest secret I have learned about joy is that you cannot obtain it until you become disenchanted with your own happiness.  The secret to real love is becoming disenchanted with yourself and the other person so you can arrive at the place where you love them for who they are actually and not potentially.

This principle applies not only to love and happiness, but also to beauty.  I remember coming to a point in my life where I threw out all my magazines and unsubscribed to all marketing emails trying to sell me a beauty product that I don't need.  I'm tired of looking through my mail looking at a standard of beauty I'm never going to meet.  Words of encouragement from well-meaning friends will never make me reach that standard.  

The only way to truly become beautiful is to fall out of love with yourself.  The most beautiful people in the world are the people who look out at the world with grace, and kindness, and freedom, and gentleness and compassion.  Beautiful people are the ones who finally come to terms with the fact that their own beauty is not what matters.  And perhaps that means that if I am ever going to be beautiful, beauty has to die and be resurrected into something new.  

Ceasing to sacrifice your heart to those things is really what it means to be free.  It means that my identity and the state of my soul is not conditioned by my circumstances.  It's not dependent on people, jobs, grades, material things, false happiness or the bathroom scale.  It means that my soul can truly rejoice because it belongs to God.

Love, happiness, beauty, peace are all things that have to die before they come alive.  Just as one day I will die and be resurrected in Christ, so my desires have to undergo the same process.  Perhaps that is what Christ meant when he said that nothing will ever live until it first dies.