We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (United States Declaration of Independence)
Whatever the authors of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they used the phrase “pursuit of happiness”, Americans through the years having so totally embraced the absolute value of the individual over and against society or any institution have come to think of the phrase as a guarantee that each individual should be able to pursue personal pleasure without any constraints whatsoever being placed on them. That attitude often finds itself at odds with traditional Christian or other religious thinking and occasionally at odds with the law.
Many Americans consider our nation to be a Christian one, but sometimes find traditional Christian attitudes to be in opposition to American values. Sometimes this has to do with changing values and definitions. So Roman Catholic scholar Peter Kreeft points out that the understanding of “happiness” has changed greatly through time. For example the 17th Century “mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian” Blaise Pascal held to what was then the traditional understanding of happiness – a definition closer to what America’s founding fathers had in mind than is the current idea of happiness. Kreeft writes:
Pascal uses “wretchedness (unhappiness) and “happiness” here in their deep, ancient meanings. There are three important differences:
- To us moderns, “happiness” connotes a subjective feeling, not an objective state, like health. To the ancients, happiness was to the soul what health was to the body. The test case is suffering: if happiness is objective, it can include suffering, as in Job and Greek tragedy; if it is merely subjective, then by definition it cannot.
Our word “happiness” comes from the Old English “hap” (chance, luck, fortune: it “happens”). It comes from without and from the material world rather than from within our own souls. It comes from what used to be called “the gifts of Fortune”, who was traditionally pictured as a whore and a cheat (see, for example, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy). Thus happiness is not under our own control – a terrifying and pessimistic conclusion indeed, as it is in Freud. - To us, happiness is present and transitory rather than permanent: a momentary “high” rather than the quality of a whole life, as Aristotle defines it.
Like the ancients, Pascal means by “happiness” (I) a state of real perfection (2) of soul (3) in a complete life, including eternity. Aristotle’s word for this was eudaimonia: the lasting state (-id) of true goodness (eu-) of soul (daimon). That is why Pascal offers religion instead of psychology as the way to happiness; for psychology can make us feel good, but religion can make us be good.
(Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans, p. 27)
Many of the Church Fathers and Mothers thought emotions are fleeting and thus not a dependable way for making decisions. If happiness is merely an emotion, than it too is fleeting and not worth pursuing. However, if happiness is a state of being, not dependent on our moods or circumstances, then it is a good worth pursuing. It is happiness as a state of being that helps us understand the martyrs and some of our hymns dedicated to the saints. For example, the hymn for the Beheading of St. John the Baptist contains the phrase, “Therefore, having suffered for the truth with joy...” One can suffer with joy only when happiness is a state of being rather than a fleeting emotion.
SPOILER ALERT: Before reading any further I want to be fair to all and warn everyone that this is an anti-consumerist, anti-commercial Christmas rant. So if you love mounds of Christmas presents and wrapping paper, you’ve been warned about the risks of reading on.
A number of years ago, an aged former home builder told me that in the 1920’s when he started building homes, the houses had lots of bedrooms and no closets because everyone had lots of kids but owned very little. But by the late 1950’s the trend had switched to homes with fewer bedrooms and lots of closets, he told me, as we came to love things rather than people. He sighed, and said, “We used to love people and use things, and now it is the reverse.”
“So keep in mind that we generate about 25 percent more waste during the holiday season, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s — that’s a million tons a week of extra stuff. What do I mean by that? I mean about 125,000 tons of plastic packaging; what I mean is about 744 million holiday cards that are sent; what I mean are about 8,000 tons of wrapping paper used on presents. That’s the equivalent of about 50,000 trees.”
YOU TOOK MY FLESH AND WERE FED AT YOUR MOTHER’S BREAST;
Christmas from God’s point of view really is about your happiness. AND you don’t have to buy anything. It is God’s free gift to you.
“The love of beautiful objects must not become purely selfish. If it does, we shall end up not knowing what the true beauty is like. It would be sad indeed if people were to say of us:
And the Lord called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
“‘Dying to self’ is spiritual shorthand for rooting out all manner of exaggerated self-interest, characteristics of ourselves that constrict us in narcissism and blind self-centeredness. This is the self within us, while all too real, is what nonetheless must die, the ‘false self,’ which must give way to the new life we are called to attain. The false self embodies the very characteristics we loathe in our better moments. Were we to look at ourselves honestly, we would see how petty, thoughtless, and loveless we can be at any given moment. We might have an occasional, fleeting insight that we will never attain any real happiness unless we come to terms with what really counts in life. One doesn’t have to search far to find pathetic example of individuals who struck it rich by the standards of ‘the world,’ yet whose personal lives were utterly miserable. Wealth, fame, and talent alone are not good enough to make us happy. When they occur independently of genuine spiritual values, they only throw into greater relief the true poverty and slavery of our lives.” (The Monks of New Skete, 
“… her Fondness for Conquest as a Warlike Nation, her Lust of Dominion as an Ambitious one, and her Thirst for a gainful Monopoly as a Commercial one.” (p 166)
Among the peoples of the world only Americans of the early republic, as their great observer Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, celebrated work as ‘the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men.’ What most astonished Tocqueville was that Americans thought not only that work itself was ‘honorable,’ but that ‘work specifically to gain money’ was ‘honorable.’” (p 243-244)
Fraternized 