Feeling Good vs Living Well (Part 2): The Desire for Happiness and the Home We Were Made For
- Bobby Jakucs, Psy.D.
- 7 days ago
- 11 min read
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world.”
– C.S. Lewis
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In Part I of this series, we looked at all the ways we seek happiness – often by trying to mitigate suffering.
And, in doing so we often add to our suffering. We looked at how trying to control the way we feel, by eliminating negative emotions, is doomed to failure. It does not eliminate them, in fact, it often brings on more suffering.
But the question remains: why are so we so obsessed with happiness in the first place? For that answer, we need to go all the way back to the beginning.
Desire Before Control: What Eden Reveals About Happiness
The Book of Genesis outlines that our first parents, Adam and Eve, quite literally walked with God in the Garden of Eden. Not an abstraction, not theories, not questions, but a very real presence. They spoke with Him without fear or distance, like beloved children do with their parents. They were, “both naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2: 25) before their Creator.
The Creation story emphasizes that we were built out of love for the purpose of love. All of the trees, plants, animals, everything in Creation itself was given over to human beings. For our enjoyment. Is it any wonder than that we are awe-filled during a sunset? Or marvel at the Grand Canyon? Or try to name the stars in the sky?
Like a kindly parent gifting their inheritance to their children, God gave us everything we could have possibly wanted. Everything, in fact, our hearts could desire. Because most importantly, we had Him.
The remarkable truth is we desire happiness not because our desire is wrong, but because we were made for it—and we keep mistaking the signposts for the destination.
Why? Because something went terribly wrong.
Chasing Mirages: Why Finite Things Can’t Satisfy Infinite Longing
Nearly every fairy tale ends with, “and they lived happily ever after.” You would think that with how good our first parents had it in Eden, we all would be there today. What more could we possibly want?
The answer is one simple word–more. Because the Serpent, the Enemy, used that very powerful tool of language against us. Sure, we could just walk with God; but wouldn’t it be better to be gods? To be in control. The seed was planted and we “languaged” our way to wanting more.
It’s the same language problem we have now. Theologically it is called Original Sin. It didn’t remove our desire for happiness. How could it since God was the one who put it there in the first place? But it certainly redirected it.
Josef Pieper in Happiness and Contemplation describes happiness as a desire that demands satiation–like thirst or hunger–but that we seek to satiate it in all the wrong ways. He writes, “Man as he is constituted, endowed as he is with a thirst for happiness, cannot have his thirst quenched in the finite realm; and if he thinks or behaves as if that were possible, he is misunderstanding himself...if the whole world were given to him, he would have to say: it is too little...”
What both our desire for happiness, and all the misguided ways we seek, it really speak to is our deepest desire–once again being in the presence of God. Or, as St. Augustine so succinctly put it: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, oh Lord.” (Confessions). No other "more" will suffice. Anything we would think of as more on in this life is really far less than what we lost. C.S. Lewis puts it best when he writes, “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity).
It’s like trying to escape a hall of mirrors. We see distorted images of sunlight, the way out, in endless mirages. Possibilities that look like the exit but are really just pale shadows–a new car, losing ten pounds, that next high, and so on. We run forever, in an exhausting pursuit looking for the escape from a sickening, cosmic carnival ride.
The fact is, none of these are the real door we are seeking. But they do point to a great truth:
We pursue those mirages because, deep down, we know we were made for the light.
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Homesick for Eden: Why Joy Often Feels Like Longing
I love to surf. It’s one of the great pleasures of my life. On a good day I feel like I’m on top of the world. It’s why I keep coming back. It’s why all surfers keep coming back. But the problem is, no matter how much we surf, no matter how good the day is, we will ALWAYS keep coming back.
Part of the reason surfers surf is not just to have fun, but to have the kind of day they had on the best day. Since that day, every subsequent day the ride we have is two parts–the wave we are riding now and the wave we remember then. It is a kind of ever-present memory. A lived reminiscence that serves as both yardstick and goal post for every action we subsequently undertake.
You may not be a surfer. But you’ve certainly had moments like that. And they are no doubt more profound. Seeing your wife walk down the aisle, holding your child for the first time in the delivery room, connecting with a long-lost friend at a chance meeting. And perhaps most of all, when the forlorn situation you thought lost beyond hope, turned out better than you ever dreamed.
These are the moments C.S. Lewis so accurately describes in Surprised by Joy where he writes, “it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.”
It’s why poets write, philosophers ponder, and theologians contemplate. It's not happiness, but we feel happier than we have ever felt. And it’s not sadness, though tears stream down our faces like a dam that’s burst. It’s something far greater–it’s joy.
The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has spent much of his life and career plumbing the depths of this great mystery. Kreeft, echoing Augustine and Lewis, recognizes joy as a kind of spiritual homesickness. He writes, “Joy is the serious business of Heaven, but on earth it often comes to us mixed with sadness. We sometimes even weep for joy—not because joy is sorrowful, but because it is too great for our hearts to contain. The ache of joy comes from the fact that we do not yet possess what we were made for.” (Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven).
We weep not because it hurts, but because it is so good. It is good beyond anything we have felt–or are capable of explaining. In these moments, we see a living portrait of the home we had, and the one, by Grace, we will return to. That eternal yardstick and goal post: our Heavenly home.
And yet, we know these moments too are but reflections. Which is why we ache. But unlike the hall of mirrors with its distorted mirages, these reflections reflect what is real. Like a placid lake reflects that distant snowy mountain we are ever climbing towards. They are not warped illusions–but a reflection of all that is true, good and beautiful.
Augustine was right, our restless hearts yearn for the fresh air our souls truly need–a joy beyond words and a love without end. After all, moments of true joy are always moments of great love. Kreeft puts it best in The Mystery of Joy where he writes, “like love, joy is not a feeling. Like love, joy is the very life of God.”
Outside of Heaven, our joy here will inevitably be mixed with a kind of yearning. We long for that day Our Lord promises where, “I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” (John 16:22).
The Peace the World Cannot Give
I recently had dinner with a man who’s had a profound influence on my life–one of my High School religious education teachers. For decades, he has led retreats for countless young people. Our conversation flowed around this topic, and some of the profound experiences he’s been privy to.
He shared with me story after story of students pained by deep insecurities and tragedies–loss of parents or loved ones, life-long bullying, and dream-shattering injuries. And in each, over the course of these retreats they discovered a way to let go of their burdens. They learned to laugh again, to dream again, to hope again–and most of all–to live again. Like sailors lost on a battered sea, they had landed safely on the shore, and found the peace that only solid ground can give. It was always accompanied by tears.
At the close of each retreat, he would tell his students, “people will tell you that ‘out there’, when you go back to school and your lives beyond this place that that is the real world. But they are dead wrong. What you have experienced here–THIS is what is real.”
Moments like these are more real than reality itself. We cannot rightly put them in words because they are in a language to beautiful to comprehend–the language of eternity.
They are echoes of the far-off songs of the “peace that the world cannot give.” (John 14:27). They are windows into the love and joy “which surpasseth all knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19, Douay-Reims). And, they are the closest things we have to photographs of what awaits us in Heaven. Where, we are told, “he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Rev. 21:4).
The Other Side of Discomfort: Meaning in the Mess
Often, by pursuing methods to alleviate distress we miss out on something greater: meaning itself. By seeking our earthly happiness and avoiding discomfort we tend to sacrifice what is most meaningful.
And yet, Christ’s life speaks to a profound truth: what is most meaningful is often on the other side of discomfort. After all, the same Christ who speaks of giving us joy is also the same Christ who Isaiah writes, “was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).
If we want to truly love, we have to be open to the possibility of a broken heart. If we want lasting joy, we have to be open to real sadness. And if we want to live meaningfully, we have to pick up our crosses–including our painful emotions –and follow Him.
Christ did not “feel good” on the Cross. But His suffering was saturated with meaning. In the Garden of Gethsemane, racked with anxiety and fear, He says, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt 26: 39). Despite knowing the torture and agonizing death that was to come He shows us something beyond psychological willingness–spiritual surrender.
In that moment, Our Lord made space for those all-too-human emotions we so often feel. He showed us that by making space for them, we can then offer them up for a Greater Glory.
John Paul II reminds us that Christ did not merely endure suffering in order to remove it from our lives. Rather, in the Cross, human suffering itself is redeemed. When our wounds are united to His, they are no longer meaningless interruptions to life, but become places of communion. The very things we would most like to avoid can, when offered with Him, participate in that greater glory.
But we in our Humanity, marked by the Fall, so often can’t see that. Like those students on retreat–and like you and I–the scars on our hearts are real. Many times, all we see is our pain. We are, like Thomas after the Resurrection, doubtful. How, with the scars we carry, can we ever hope to find peace? How, with so much pain, can there be anything like joy?
Christ answers our dark nights of doubt and disillusionment in the same way he answered Thomas. He comes not with judgement, nor with a theory, but an invitation–and an encounter, “put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not be faithless, but believing.” (John 20:27).
What was lost at Eden–and the pain of that loss–was forever made right by the wounds of Christ. He enters into our broken hearts to restore us to the joy we thought was lost.
And He has the scars to prove it.
Desire Fulfilled, Not Erased
Ask anyone on the street what they want out of life and most people will say, “I just want to be happy!” The fact is we all desire happiness. But the ways that we pursue it, trying to rid ourselves of unpleasant emotions, is a hopeless task. So is trying to find something that will actually make us happy here on Earth.
Christ never promised us happiness here. He does promise us something far greater. He does promises us the only thing that will ever fill the God-sized hole in our hearts–Himself.
Lewis again puts it best when he writes, " I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity. If you want truth, you may get comfort in the end; if you want comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth–only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair" (Mere Christianity)
So what will you choose? Only in truth we can find the way forward, despite the way we feel. Because the fact is, pursuing a meaningful life feels terrifying. It often IS terrifying. And it will be uncomfortable. But all that is worth living for–and dying for–is outside the realm of comfort. After all, rocks are comfortable–but they are not alive.
We may not be able to control the weather of our interior life. Tempests are as much a part of the sea as pain is part of the human heart. But with practice, patience, and grace, we can learn to sail to the harbors that matter, regardless of the conditions.
Before us we have a few choices. We can either use our hands to push the unpleasant feelings away and seek comfort. We can use them to grab at the mirages we know won’t fill our restless hearts. Or, we can wrap our arms around our daily crosses and embrace the messiness of living.
So the challenge becomes this–what if we focused less on the way we felt and more on the way we live?
Here's what that might look like:
We can make space for negative feelings.
We can recognize that nothing, this side of Heaven, can ever really fill us up.
We can allow for discomfort in pursuit of what matters.
All the while, we can stay present to the moments of life that matter–remembering they are real reflections of the joy we were made for all along.
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