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Q: Many years ago in your God Squad column you wrote that Catholics weren’t meant to be happy. Your reasoning made sense to me then but now I can’t remember what it was. Can you please explain that to me because a friend of mine recently brought the subject to my attention. Thank you. – (From J in New York)

A: When Father Tom came back from one of his trips to visit Mother Teresa he showed me her business card. It had her name on it but no phone number and no email. In addition to her name there was this message, “Happiness is the natural fruit of duty.” Whatever other achievements she accomplished, I think anyone who could write such a briefly eloquent summation of what brings us happiness deserves to be a saint.

What she understood and what I remember writing some time ago is that happiness is not the result of wealth or self-adornment. Happiness is the result of serving others. Helen Keller could not see but she could understand, “Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

Another way that religion makes you happy in an unconventional way is by creating communities of meaning and service. Most of the good things we do require a team effort. Tommy and I were active in the food bank and soup kitchen communities on Long Island and the teams of volunteers who helped every day to prepare food for our guests were extraordinary people. However, if you asked them about the effort it took to make time in their busy days to get to the soup kitchen they would often tell you honestly that it was a joyous burden. It produced for all of them a humble happiness, not a selfish happiness. Happiness is not a spa day. It is more like the day when a little girl who had to sleep in her mom’s car with her brother came through the line in the interfaith nutrition network in Hempstead. As she passed the desserts, she saw a birthday cake that had been donated by the Black Forest bakery in Lindenhurst. It just had Happy Birthday written on the top in red icing. She looked up with tears in her eyes and said, “How did you know that today was my birthday?” Our tears matched hers. We were happy in a very sad way. That is what religion does for us. It binds us together in communities of goodness to mend the cracks in our broken world.

The greatest philosophers and poets understood that happiness is not the goal of faith.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Albert Schweitzer wrote, “The interior joy we feel when we have done a good deed, when we feel we have been needed somewhere and have lent a helping hand, is the nourishment the soul requires. Without those times when a man feels himself to be part of the spiritual world by his actions, his soul decays.”

Primo Levi in his book, "Survival In Auschwitz," remembers Lorenzo, an Italian civilian worker who brought him a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months in the concentration camp. Levi wrote "I believe it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still exists a world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage … something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good but for which it was worth surviving. Thanks to Lorenzo I managed not to forget that I myself was a man."

So if happiness is not the goal of faith, what is it? I would say it is a kind of spiritual transference. Dostoevsky understood this in a perfectly eloquent way, “In scattering the seed, scattering your ‘charity’, your kind deed, you are giving away in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another. He who has received them from you will hand them to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?”

The 18th-century English philosopher Samuel Johnson got it, “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling."

So travel well, dear J. Travel well and may a deep and distant happiness travel with you.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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