By Daxx Bondoc
We live in a time where “personal happiness” is the ultimate good. It has stepped over all other goods, even Good Himself, God. And the media is doing a really good job promoting this new god.
There is nothing wrong about personal happiness, it its right context. God commands us to be a cheerful giver, so we know He is not a kill joy. But when personal happiness becomes king, here is where the problem starts.
When our personal happiness goes before love and before God, it now becomes “personal selfishness”. People have sacrificed everything and even everyone for the sake of finding personal happiness (even though he himself does not know what it is).
The personal happiness gospel is often promoted by T.V shows and movies. We watch an unhappy woman leaving everything behind to eat, pray and love. So she ate. She prayed. She loved.
But did she?
I will not go to the eating part, nothing to explain there.
But did she really prayed? One aspect of prayer is losing oneself. For Christians, praying is more about God than ourselves. But her prayers were self-centered. She was not reaching up to God. She was grasping herself, hoping to find herself.
Did she really loved? Love as St Thomas Aquinas puts it is “to will the good of the other as other”. How about her definition? She wanted to love the man on her own terms, and she wanted the man to love her on her own terms. There was no “other” on the equation. Just her.
These kinds of movie and show reinforce our selfishness, all under the banner of “personal happiness”. A mother leaves her family to “find herself”. A father goes off with another woman because she “gives him what he is looking for”. Children abandon their parents to “explore the world”. Mother’s murder their own unborn child so that her “life won’t be disturbed”.
So what happen to these people who have gone off to leave everyone behind to find themselves?
They find the same self they supposedly left behind. Just more selfish.
The paradox of personal happiness is that it can only happen when you forget yourself in love. It is in loving Jesus first, Others second and Yourself last, that you will find J-O-Y.
There is no joy apart from love. And real love is always joyful.
Love (God) created us for love. Love is the air we breathe. And love is not selfish.
If you want to find personal happiness, then don’t take it personal. Be a person for all. Then, true happiness, real joy will happen behind your back.
“For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.” Matthew 16:25
|
|
