Are you Happy?

 

Apparently being grateful adds years to our lives! University research has shown that a group of participants who were asked to write down five things for which they were thankful once a week tended to feel more optimistic and more satisfied with their lives than the control group. Other studies show that on days when people express their thankfulness, their blessedness, they experience more positive emotions, helping people cope with stress, inhibiting invidious comparisons with others and making them more likely to help others. In this last year we may have sometimes found gratitude difficult, but in these challenging times there remains so much to be thankful for, and faith in God offers positive hope even in the hardest times.

In material terms we are better off, better informed, usually freer, and live longer lives than in the past  and yet somehow because we now think of happiness solely in terms of self gratification we feel less good about ourselves because we live in such a consumer driven society that encourages our discontent, making us compare what we have with others, suggesting that we are somehow less if we don’t have X or look like Y or do Z.

Happiness and blessedness are  almost synonymous in the Bible and they are understood as living in relationship with God and others. It means doing well, living in harmony with all of creation. Only in the last couple of centuries has happiness been seen in terms of feelings or private experience. When Thomas Jefferson included the word happiness in the American Declaration of Independence he took it for granted that happiness was in relation with others, doing good for others. Happiness that focusses only on ourselves would be in classical and Biblical terms, a contradiction. So it should be no surprise that Jesus links love of God, our main priority, with the command to love others as ourselves.

Accept O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendour of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.

We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side. We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us. We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of his word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying, through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.

Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know Christ and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen