Love: What is Happiness?

"For love to be real, it must cost - it must hurt - it must empty us of self." - Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta


It's been a month and a day since the last post; please forgive me! It's also unfortunately been a month or so since I've been to Confession; please, please, please pray for me!

I haven't written anything in so long because I haven't known what to write about. Obviously this might be a little strange, especially since we're in the season of Advent, we're in a new liturgical year on marriage which I'm sure you all know by now that I love to write about. But up until now I didn't know what to write about. I asked in prayer, I thought constantly for a while about things I could write about, I racked my brain countless times, and still nothing came... But!

Today has been both a very difficult and a very blessed day for me.It's been difficult because of a situation I found myself in, and even though it's mostly resolved now I still don't quite know what to do except pray about it and offer it up at Mass. However, that's exactly the same reason I'm incredibly blessed today! I was allowed by the grace of God our Lord to love someone today, someone who was very upset and confused, and I'm hoping in God that I helped them somehow, that I loved them properly. Even though I still don't know what's going to happen regarding the situation, I know a few things that make me amazingly happy; First, I know there's nothing to worry about, because God has it all handled. Second, I know that prayer is always 100+% effective! Third, I know that I should always continue to be happy because, as goes my username on here, I have hope in Christ. The One Lord Jesus Christ, God become Man, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords Who died for each and every one of us, loves me even as I am a sinner, even as I can't seem to love Him, the Father, the Holy Spirit, or people around me properly, and really... God is the only One I can get that love from, the only One Who can make me happy, because He wants me to be happy. So I have hope in Christ because He's the only one I can have hope in, in the glory of God the Father and in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

I don't know how to love others properly, I really don't. I don't know if anyone does except for God, Who is Love. In fact, any love that we can give for others is only possible by His grace, by His love flowing through us! This is what He wants, that we "love our neighbor as ourselves"(Mk. 12:31), because only in His love can we be ever happy. We can often think, "I don't know if I love this person anymore, what do I do?" But this thinking is ignorant of what love is; the willing of the good of the other for the sake of the other. This is Who God is (it's a Mystery, I wouldn't try to understand it), and it's who He calls us to be for Him and each other. This is where our earthly happiness may be found; in loving God, in loving others, and, necessarily, knowing that we are loved. "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

I remember a great quote from the movie "Karol" about Pope Saint John Paul the Great, where he's speaking to his ethics class about happiness. One boy asks, "Why do some men act like wild beasts, while others sacrifice their lives for those they don't even know?" and a girl in the class replies to him saying, "People are bad because they are scared and unhappy." Wojtyla tells the class, "Now, there's an interesting subject; happiness and unhappiness, deep down inside each one of us. Descartes: 'Man is in the middle between God and nothingness... And he must choose.'" I feel like the point of this is to show that God is the only source of happiness, God Who is Love. We need to love God and be loved by God, we need to love man and be loved by man, accepting the love of God and the love of man which comes straight from God, or else we will never be happy. God wants us to be happy!

Please pray for the writers of this blog, and please pray for each other!

All of you holy men and women, and all of you angelic hosts, with the intercession of Mary the Mother of God, and St. Joseph her most chaste spouse, please pray for us and for the whole world! Amen.