Climbing the Ladder

I'm working on a book about happiness and God.

I’m currently working on a book about God and happiness. It’s a frightening project because it is, by far, the most personal thing I’ve attempted to write. I’m publishing it here as an exercise in transparency (and to force myself to keep working).

For me, writing can be delightful and painful and easy and frustrating from day to day or even moment to moment. It is a strange combination of inspiration and perspiration. The inspiration sometimes comes after just sitting down and typing, typing, typing.

Currently, I’m in the “pre-writing” stage. The passage below will probably not end up in the book. It’s far too abstract. But, you might find it interesting nevertheless.

---

Take a second and remember one of the happiest moments of your life. Really pause. Reflect. Remember. What did it feel like? What were you doing? What were you thinking about? Were other people there? What was going on in your life at the time?

Deep down, everyone wants to experience happiness. While it’s not easy to give a definition of exactly what happiness is, we know we want it, right? Something happens when we’re truly happy. We feel lighter. We feel fully alive without being at all self-conscious. We feel connected to the moment that we’re in, not hung up in the past or stressed out about the future.

Happiness is a fundamental driving force in human experience, like the laws of physics in the universe. It is irresistible, moving our actions, thoughts and feelings, even when we don’t realize it.

But unlike the stars or planets, we’re not passive objects, moved by unseen forces. We are thinking, feeling, acting agents who actually have control over our direction and destiny. In other words, while we’re all driven to pursue happiness, we are also able to choose the route we take to find it.

One of the really dangerous things we humans sometimes do is to deny what’s really driving us. We push it down, pretend it’s not there. Sometimes, it’s because we don’t want to be reduced to a “formula” or simplistic description. For instance, I hate it when people say things like, “You just say that because you’re over forty… boomer” (I’m not a boomer, by the way… not even close).

In saying that happiness is a fundamental driver of human experience, I want to assure you I’m not attempting to simplify your personality or get inside your head. I’m simply observing something that people a lot smarter than me have been discussing for centuries. They put it in different ways, but they all are getting at the same idea.

When we really dig down and see how many of our decisions are made on the basis of experiencing happiness and avoiding pain, we don’t feel like life is less wonderful and mysterious. We actually are able to begin navigating our way into the wild territory of existence with a sense of adventure and direction. It’s an important early step in the move towards enlightenment. Like the vastness of the Milky Way invites endless opportunities for discovery, the human heart invites us into a quest for understanding. 

And understanding our drive to seek happiness is like grasping a basic reality like the speed of light, the rotation of the planets, the interlocking forces of the solar system.

So, let’s come back to earth. We all want to be happy. We want to experience it so much that we make most of our decisions with this pursuit somewhere below the surface of our conscious thoughts. That leads us to ask the really important question: Then how can we be happy?

The way you answer that question will very much depend on how you understand the world and where it came from. If, for instance, we are the product of a natural process that began with a fortuitous big bang, then we need to search for happiness in the physical world (i.e., the philosophy of materialism). As products of a physical nature, the quest is as simple as discovering the right formula, compound, physical state or activity that will produce the chemical response that bubbles up to our consciousness as “happiness.” 

For example, look at your pet dog. The process of keeping her happy is relatively simple. Feed and water. Walk. Pet. Scratch the belly. Speak in a cutesy voice, expressing approval. If the dog has a chemical imbalance leading to a nervous personality, treat it with medicine.

But I think we all know, even if it’s a deeply buried knowledge, that we are much more than advanced animals. Our desires can’t be satisfied with the right physical conditions (though they can certainly help). We humans need things like goodness, beauty and truth. We deeply need connection with at least one other person that transcends a chemical exchange. We want to understand and be understood. We want to trust. We want to delight and be delighted in.

Bottom Line: The very nature of our deepest desires lead us to believe that the universe must be bigger than atoms and asteroids. The chemistry of our bodies may play a factor in happiness, but no single cellular state can bring the true, deep happiness we all crave. At least, it can’t do that for more than a few minutes or hours at most.

Which leads us to another explanation for the world and where it came from. This is, of course, the God-option. Behind the universe is a Person. This Person created the physical world as a place capable of supporting experiences of happiness. He designed it to be a place not only with the potential of trouble and pain, but also of great pleasure. Yet, these pleasures (food, drink, sex) always point to a higher form of happiness we know they alone cannot produce.

According to the Christian view, God created us to climb up the ladder from the physical, to the mental, to the spiritual. Someone who loves a good hamburger probably realizes that listening to a beautiful song creates a satisfaction that the burger can’t give. Someone who has heard a moving piece of music has probably been floored by the way a baby’s smile beats any symphony. Anyone who has experienced the unity of spirit that can happen in a deep personal relationship has experienced a more profound happiness still.

Up the ladder we climb. The further up we go, the closer we get to the heart of things. Each joy and pleasure can either become a dead end, where we stop searching, camp out and eventually realize our own unhappiness. Or, it can become the new waypoint on the journey to true happiness. the happiness that comes from encountering the ultimate Person, God himself.

This is a book about happiness, the thing we all want. In it, I am making a very basic point: If the source of happiness is Someone who isn’t himself happy, then we are all in trouble. In other words, God’s own disposition has ultimate consequences for ours. 

In my personal experience, I have had an experience of really encountering God. When I did, I realized something I might have believed conceptually, but had not truly experienced personally until middle age. I discovered that God is wearing a smile. This single moment of enlightenment changed my life.