Happiness Is an Inside Job
“Now that you have given yourself to God your happiness cannot be taken away. But you must feel a great concern and desire for everyone to share in your joy!”
ST. JOSEMARIA ESCRIVA
Furrow, no. 88
Anyone who has ever tried to be happy by changing their mailing address or some other merely cosmetic, outward change, has discovered the truth of the saying: Happiness is an inside job.
Location, circumstances, and environment all bear on our happiness, to be sure, but are not and cannot be decisive in true happiness. The culture in which we live, the micro-culture of our work environment, the dynamics of family and home life, can obviously facilitate or obstruct human happiness. But again, the real thing goes deeper than any combination of these things being right and good.
“What we are looking for,” St Josemaría says, “is happiness; not a momentary happiness, but one that is deep and lasting and both human and supernatural” (Friends of God, no. 292). Momentary happiness is something we are all experts at. We know what to eat, drink, or do to create a moment’s pleasure. The deep, lasting, human, and supernatural qualities are not always so obvious. Pleasures that are sought frequently and repetitively become habits whose enjoyment gradually decreases in intensity, requiring more and more to provide the same effect. Pleasure dies, and along with it, the happiness we thought we could count on.
Getting happiness right has implications that exceed even our inner life, and St Josemaría indicates just how urgent it is:
“If your prayers, your sacrifices and your actions do not show a constant concern for the apostolate, it is a sure sign that you are not happy…. The man who possesses happiness, and the good, will always seek to give it to others” (The Forge, no. 914).
When we are happy we look for ways to share our happiness, because spiritual goods increase when they are shared, unlike material things that diminish when divided. Each slice of a pie diminishes the whole, but each person who hears your good news increases your joy: “And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost’” (Luke 15:9).
However, our happiness needs to be more than theoretical, more than a conclusion drawn from the fact that God is the supreme Good and only by possession of Him are humans happy, imperfectly in this life and supremely in the next. That might be the sticking point for those who feel no urgency to share the gift of faith they have received. It might be that they have yet to receive it fully.
Fully comes from conviction.
Convictions are revealed truths that have been welcomed by the rich soil of our faith and love—and made a way of life. It is another way of saying that faith without works is dead (see James 2:17). Correct belief without practice deadens the vitality of what we claim to believe. Jesus indicates that the seeds He casts into our lives are not all received with equally receptive soil. There is a battle between seed and soil, where the latter is shallow, choked by thorns, or just plain rocky (see Matthew 13:1-8).
Our capacity for God runs deep and wide. Sometimes it takes saints like Josemaría Escrivá to alert us to our depth potential deeper union with God. Sayings like this might make us smile, but they should also make us reassess our receptivity:
“[S]weet Lord, … after Mary and Joseph, there never has been nor will there ever be a mortal soul — and there have been some who have been really crazy — who loves you as much as I love you” (The Forge, no. 346).
If Christian happiness is shared only by happy Christians, then our level of happiness is not only critical to what we do in the world to share our faith in Jesus, but if we do it at all.
Those whose personalities tend to run high in negative emotion as their emotional default setting, shouldn’t pretend to be happy if they are not. They shouldn’t fear to admit their unhappiness, but always before God, bringing sadness, anxiety, and disappointments before Him. Maybe you struggle with depression or anxiety, which effectively block life’s enjoyment. Maybe you are burned out from work and need the spiritual refreshment of a retreat. Maybe you need something that you’re not currently getting, and it is up to you to discern that before the Lord. However ugly or messy such prayer might seem, yet it is prayer; it is the authentic you before the living God. It is the Psalms come to life: “Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distresses” (Ps 25:17).
Happiness, after all, isn’t a choice: it is a series of choices we make of true goods, as we bond more deeply with our God. If dissatisfaction and frustration have come because of our misguided attempts at happiness, turning to the Lord in our troubles and distresses heals and redirects our wayward will back onto the path of life and joy. If joy is said to radiate from the saints, it is because God has been permitted to fill every part of them. The shadows have been dispersed, the unspoken resentments have been exposed, reconciliation has been accomplished.
A passage from my upcoming book, The Fire and the Silence, develops this thought more completely:
The Carmelite mystic St. Elizabeth of the Trinity speaks of the need for God’s love to consume “all our hostility to Him.” That is a stunning word: “hostility.” More than resistance it conveys antagonism, even resentment, and opposition. Saints are realists. God, moreover, is not shocked to find hostility in us, any more than He was surprised at Jonah’s rage (see Jon. 4:8-9). Reflecting honestly on ourselves, by the light of grace, we discern areas in our soul where we harbor bitterness toward the Lord, perhaps owing to missed opportunities, frustrations, loss of advantages that others have received, the defects of our character, inability to do all the things we would like, etc. Do we think these will not return and darken our moments of prayer? Can we appreciate how they might prevent us from going deeper in our relationship with God? [1]
A mature interior life of prayer is the hothouse in which divine seeds grow. Our happiness will come from no other source than the secure possession of God in that place. Perfect happiness, called beatitude, is “man’s supreme good, because it is the attainment or enjoyment of the supreme good,” [2] which is God. In heaven, it cannot be taken away or corrupted, and the fear that it could be is entirely absent. This tells us that the extent to which we possess God in a stable way in this life, we will be happy.
We might go many places in life, or stay mostly in the same place. Neither mobility nor stability necessarily secures our happiness. But God, who is happiness itself, if He abides freely at our core, will bless us with an unshakeable happiness so compelling that we will instinctively summon our friends and neighbors to share in the Master’s joy, and our own.
[1] The Fire and the Silence: Prayer, Thought, and the Battle for Inner Stillness; (Scepter Publishers, 2026).
[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 3, a. 1, ad 2.
Cover Image: The Sermon on the Mount (1904) Thomas Nelson and Sons. Public Domain.
Rev. John Henry Hanson, O. Praem.
Father John Henry Hanson, O. Praem., is a Norbertine priest of St Michael’s Abbey in Silverado, California. He earned his STB and Masters in Theology at the Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome, and was ordained to the priesthood in 2006. He holds a Masters in Psychology from Divine Mercy University, is a formator in his community's seminary, and serves Armenian Catholics at the Cathedral of St Gregory the Illuminator in Glendale, California. He is author of several books, including Praying from the Depths of the Psalms, Coached by Josemaría Escrivá, and his upcoming The Fire and the Silence: Prayer, Thought, and the Battle for Inner Stillness. He and his community are cooperators of Opus Dei.
