A few days ago I happened to read an interview to a scientist. Shall we end like the dinosaurs?, the journalist asks? It may be, but we can be serene: if it happens, it will surely not be before one hundred millions of years. What will happen meanwhile? Let us not be afraid. Two precautions will suffice to increase the possibility of a long and healthy life: to stop smoking and to fasten our seatbelts.

However, a long and healthy life is not sufficient for us. You, all of us and I want a happy life. The young man whom the Gospel speaks of asked the little formula to earn no less than "eternal live", an intact and boundless happiness, and at the end. he went away sadly. Sadness: this is what mostly horrifies you youths; so much as you are ready for any acrobatics in order to avoid it Then, what can we do to avoid the end of the rich and unhappy young man?

Time passes, everything changes, except one thing: at all costs, from the time he appeared on the face of the earth, the homo sapiens is inhabited by a dream that will no longer vanish. It is the dream of happiness, and even when we think that it is not plausible or realisable, with all our strength we want it to come true. In the olden days, happiness consisted in self-knowledge, in the dominion of instincts, in not feeling any need. Someone, like many of us today, identify it with psychophysical well-being. The difficulties to attain happiness are so many as spontaneously we ask ourselves whether it is an illusion or such an ephemeral and frail state of soul as it consumes inexorably in an instant, leaving us in melancholy and in a bitter regret.

However, humanity has not given up to the idea that life is a cynical, cruel mockery and that sorrow is a blind fatality impossible to avoid and useless to rebel against it.

Can a desire become a right? The desire of happiness can. The American Constitution has gone on proclaiming For more than two centuries, and still proclaims, happiness as one of the individual’s fundamental rights. Today we witness a new phenomenon: the mentioned right has become a duty. We live in a society of the must: one must be happy. It is not an opportunity: it is an obligation.

Happiness is entirely in your hands, and if you flop it is your fault.

Where does the very much dreamt and longed for happiness live? It lives in ….via Success. The recipe is in this spot: "if you are clever, you will succeed; if you succeed, you will be happy. In the name of success, they impose a practically unreachable perspective on each individual: the maximum success in all fields: professional and family life, business and love. We cannot do without it any longer. The weak and the frail persons, wounded by life, are only objects of commiseration. The worse fear is that of being "nobody", of not emerging, of not keeping everything under control and the impossibility of having all the possibilities that life offers us.

The questions here are dense: Is it true that the clever man succeeds? Are there not many clever men who have no success and many who succeed without being clever? Moreover, is it true that he who succeeds is happy? What would we say if the mirage of success changed into a nightmare and the person finished from happiness to stress or depression? On the way to success one must run, compete and fight: who remains behind? Who will think to consider the dropouts? Since there is only one place in the point of the pyramid, what is the sustainable weight to reach up there and to stay there as long as possible? The candidates to success must have the minimum equipment: money, talent, fortune. Now, what is the indispensable minimum and the maximum necessary to succeed? What would the conclusion be if one fell down, if everything collapsed without any possibility of re-fishing? Is it true that only the result matters?

The basic question is another. What are we speaking of? Which idea do we have of "happiness"?

For many people happiness, today, has a magic name: emotion. Somebody says that ours is an "emo-cratic" society, because it is founded on strong emotions, on the hard sensations: risky sports, oceanic sailing by sailboats, jumps into the void guaranteed by an elastic chord, survival camps …Just as if the human being existed, not according to Descartes, "I think, therefore I am", but "I feel, therefore I am". The addiction to felt emotions causes the tiny column of our emotive barometer to rise: more drug, and ever-stronger drug; ever more exiting drink, increasingly driven shows … is there a roof for the emotive escalation?

The question is upstream: seen that, in the running of life, one eventually finishes by banging against the barrier of suffering, how do we understand "the duty of happiness"? Though no right of citizenship is recognised to suffering, is there any homo sapiens exempted from dealing with the burden of life, with the affliction that accompany it, with the failures, the accidents, disappointments, in a word with the human misery?

If happiness were only absence of worries or suffering, then we would truly be deluded persons. If happiness limited itself to the vibration of our senses, the satisfaction of our desires, we would be condemned to a constant frustration. Thus, the question returns: What do we seek when we aspire to happiness? Is this a possible landing also amidst -and despite- the difficulties of life? What is the way we must follow so that the tree of happiness may cast stable roots in us?

Judging from the many times in which Jesus, in the Gospels, alludes to happiness, we should consider these booklets authentic maps for hunting the treasure of happiness. From the first to the last page: from the "Rejoice" of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, up to the "great joy" exploding from the apostles on seeing the Risen Lord. After designing his teaching on the notes of true beatitude, even at the eve of the hardest trial, a little before his being arrested, the Master has no doubt, "You will be in sadness, but your sadness will change into joy". It seems that the motive of His coming to the world is just our happiness. "..so that my joy be in you and your joy may be full". Jesus shows the way to happiness to the young man who seeks eternal happiness. Jesus shows the way to move along, but he asks us to do it with Him. "Come and follow me" The theologian von Balthasar comments, "Only a person who is able to make us happy can speak this way".

Therefore, what has the Christian faith to say on the question of happiness? A very simple announcement, which the Bishop Tonino Bello summed up like this: "We are made up to be happy. Joy is our vocation. It is the unique project that God has designed with the clearest contours, and has designed it for man".

God is in love with the life of His children, or he would not have created them. God loves every many gratuitously. Behind the love of God there is nothing, no need for the determination of his will. There is no interest in God to provoke his initiative, no merit in man to solicit the answer. God does not love you because he needs you: he needs you because He loves you. In short, God loves us, that is all: before any presumed merit of ours, before any our possible invocation. Loved, that is all, because God is only Love, who loves at lost bottom, without any advantage. He does not love us in order to have something, but to enjoy the possibility of giving to us all that He is, to taste the joy of giving all that He has. It would suffice to have a deep awareness of this to chase away for ever every residual of fear or anguish.

At this point we face the question: If God has loved us like this, what are we expected to do? We would promptly say: we are expected to love Him in return! John the evangelist, instead, makes a different conclusion, "If God has loved us, we, too, must love one another". However, the same apostle reminds us that before this and just for this, we must "believe in the love that God has for us". The work that is faith itself comes before the works of faith, "This is the work of God: to believe in the One whom He has sent". If we do not believe of having been loved first by God, it is not possible to love Him in return".

Do we truly believe –without any mental reserve-, that God has loved us, that He still loves us and that He will always love us? I wish we truly believed it! It is easier to believe in a far off God, a God to be feared and to be kept at a respectful distance, so that we may say, "I have dutifully served you". However, who can say, before Love, that he has loved enough. It is easier to make efforts in order to love than to believe of being loved and to allow God to love us. Yet, the secret of happiness is just here, the remaining comes after.

We find joy in the Gospel because in it we find freedom from fear, from desperation, from egoism. We find the freedom to make of ourselves a gift. The selfish illusion is inexorable. We say: to be happier than others I must reach before them, but to reach first I must fight against them. In reality, the more we think of ourselves, the sadder we feel; the more we have and the more we want; we always are thirst of something more. However, we are not happy with something, but with somebody. Happiness is not to possess, but to love and to feel loved. It is not a thing, but a relation. We cannot forget the testimony of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, "Joy is love, joy is prayer, joy is strength. God loves him who gives with joy. To live with joy is to give more. A joyful heart is the result of a heart burning with love; the works of love are always works of joy. We do not need to look for happiness because the Lord will give it to us when we possess love for others. It is a gift of God".

However, there is the most powerful menace against joy: suffering. How can they know Christianity as the religion of joy, when a cross is at its centre? It is the Cross that proves how our God "loves life" and never disturbs the joy of his children, if not to prepare a surer and greater one." In fact, the cross tells us how much the Father of Jesus has compromised himself with our suffering, namely up to giving for us his dearest good, the life of his Son. This Son has not come to deliver a course of philosophy on suffering, but to change suffering into a course of love.. From his cross, Christ tells us that God does not always free us from evil, but that he always frees us in the evil. When he cannot grant our desires, He never ends to realise his promises.

Etty Hillesum, a Dutch young Hebrew woman who died at Auschwitz in 1943, offers us a splendid testimony of how this is possible. In the midst of the growing tragedy, she does not fail to jot down in her diary, "I am a happy person and praise this life just in the year of the Lord 1942, the nth year of war". Again, "I find life beautiful and feel free. The heavens stretch within me just as they do over me. I believe in God and in men and dare say it without false modesty".

We are very far from believing in the terrestrial paradises of publicity built up to measure for the homo tecnologicus of the third millennium. Yet, even without forgetting the huge qualitative difference between the present and the future life, we are convinced that joy, for the Christian, is not only beyond suffering, beyond this valley of tears. We believe that it is already possible down here, when everything, including suffering, is lived in faith and in trusting the love of God, as well as in sharing the pains of those who suffer more than we do.

Christian hope is much more than desiring an immense happiness placed in an indefinite "beyond". To hope is to wait with boundless trust for something that we do not fully understand, but in which we participate through Him from whom we have known Love.

We Christians believe that only the divine ocean is huge enough to quench our thirsty of love and to satisfy it beyond any expectation of ours and beyond our dreams.

Heaven has already begun. If God is with us, His happiness is already among us.

Francesco Lambiasi
Bishop of Rimini
Via IV Novembre 35 – 47921 Rimini