THE SPIRITUAL TOURIST

Happiness cannot be pursued. You do not find happiness; happiness finds you. It is not an end itself, but a by-product of other activities, often arriving when it is least expected. You can be sitting in the best restaurant, wearing the finest clothes, surrounded by the most dazzling company, safe in the knowledge all your bills are paid, and you may still not be happy. And you can be standing at the kitchen sink, hands in washing-up water, with nowhere to go, and suddenly realize that you feel as happy as you’ve ever felt in your life. What Connoly calls Angst are the small, incremental uncertainties about our place in the scheme of things, the nagging sense that life could somehow be better, if only, if only… what? It is the restlessness of self. And yet the very word – happiness – suggests something ephemeral, caught on the wing, no sooner ensnared than it slips from our grasp. To try to make happiness our property, to own it, is to lost it.

So what, then, is permanent?

I am at a funeral of a good man, a Roman Catholic, loved by his family and friends, who has lived a life of demonstrable kindness and virtue, who has lived by the tenets of his faith. Amid the displays of grief around me, one person alone is not crying. It is the man’s wife, whose face is graced with a look of perfect serenity, of acceptance of the fact of her husband’s death, and of certainty that he has taken his place in heaven and that, in the fullness of time, she will be reunited with him there. Blessed assurance. I am in awe of her faith. How do you explain such faith; how do you find it?

By: Mick Brown