Transcendent Hope

We’ve gotten pretty confident, as a culture, about what we think we need and don’t need for free, happy, fulfilling lives. This piece in First Things, for instance, flags a habit of intentional estrangement that has come into vogue as a way of handling relationships that start to feel “toxic” or “unsafe.” Insisting on “no contact” – with family members who disapprove of one’s sexuality or gender identification, for example – has become one more “empowering act of boundary-setting and self-care,” allowing the boundary-setter to self-select a “found family” who celebrates them. And this, the narrative goes, will prove itself to be key to finding greater happiness in life. Relatedly, this recent Public Discourse piece considers the fallout for women of the sexual revolution, with it, too, promoting a kind of intentional estrangement – from the relationships and children one might have had. The piece notes that women have been sold the promise that there’s more fulfilment to be found in self-selecting, indeed, whether in relation to a career or a personal goal or in pursuing the intimate partners one wants or doesn’t, on any given day.

But, both pieces suggest, the results are in: we’re actually not so good at knowing how to find happiness, and these attempts to find it haven’t worked very well. “Found families,” being definitionally un-obligatory, dissolve as easily as they crystallize, and the specter of loneliness has tended to haunt those who were once “empowered” by their no-contact decision. And for women, contentment has also lingered just out of reach: about half of the adult women the Public Discourse piece interviewed had experienced anxiety or depression at some point in their lives, and far fewer than that identified themselves as “very happy.”

Both pieces recognize lots of reasons for our discontent. Loneliness is one. A lack of clear purpose is another. Insecurity and instability are ingredients, too. But there’s another reason that might be even more foundational than each of these: the fact that we expect to find definitive happiness, at all.

Something that has changed a great deal as our modern world has progressed is our perspective on what we should expect from life. Given that the doctrine of the Fall has more or less disappeared from our common understanding of who and what we are, we’re inclined to think that things should generally go pretty well, for us. A good and contented life should come fairly easily, and if it doesn’t, something’s clearly gone very wrong: a bad relationship has gotten too prominent in one’s life; one hasn’t pursued a career or life goal that one should have.

Those little fixes, though, miss the reality of what’s actually gone wrong, and it’s this: the human race has come under a curse, such that ultimate happiness can’t ever be found in this life. It can’t be found in the best family, or in a great job, or in enjoyable children. Our experience of this life just is and will be an experience of “this valley of tears,” and that’s not a description reserved for those who have come from difficult families, or those who have suffered thwarted dreams. It’s the sad state of a race that has lost its only true source of happiness: loving union with God.

The Good News of course is that we need not despair; God has done marvelous things to break the curse, and to set us on the road to happiness. But Christians know that this gift of happiness does not come in this life. We are filled with hope because we know the promises of God, and we are given a foretaste of the joy and peace of the Kingdom to come. As a result, we don’t need to be disappointed when we find the promises of this life to be empty ones, and we also know not to expect love, friendship, and peace to come without a fight. Indeed we have to fight, for it’s in our fight for love and self-forgetfulness that we receive that foretaste of joy. But still our happiness will not be absolute. That good is coming, and our present contentment will come not from trying to get everything into order, but from being united with the One who is joy itself.

All of which perhaps sounds like pretty bad news – like we’re raining on everybody’s parade. But it’s actually quite the opposite. Those who know what this world can and cannot give are the ones most positioned to enjoy the world’s good things; they’re also the ones least likely to be discouraged by its darknesses. For their hope transcends all of that. It’s clear: marriage won’t make people happy; friends won’t make people happy; good health won’t make people happy. Only God can do that. And apart from him, all the other things are of little use, no matter how tempting their promises of contenting us may be.