We live in a society that claims that the "real world" is confined to its material elements, and that the ultimate arbiter of rational human interest is empirical science.
Everything that appears to be outside of these confines belongs to the realm of dreams or delusions, or at best to matters undefinable, or completely relative to the psychological needs, personal “goals,” desires, wishes, and fantasies of different people.
Of course, we want to affirm the value of ideals like “happiness” (as well as “goodness,” “honor,” “fidelity,” and the other words we use to signify the aspirations we seem to “care about” most in life). Isn’t this what “freedom” is all about? Aren’t we “free to choose” what makes up our happiness? And then, aren’t we “free to choose” different (even opposing) ways of happiness tomorrow, without answering to any authority beyond our own judgment? “I do me” and “you do you” and everything’s fine… as long as you don’t break the law….
So why are we all so anxious, overwhelmed, and… unhappy?
If happiness is confined materialistic laws and subjective experiments in self-identification, irrational urges, or the whims of the moment, then life is very burdensome indeed for most of us. Human freedom, it turns out, is a very fragile thing in this world. The chance for happiness seems reserved to those who have power - while the rest of us just have to shuffle along as best we can in this limited existence.
Wait, that can’t be right! The human heart cries out against this ultimate cynicism and discouragement. There must be something “more”… but where can we find it? Must we depend on the scraps that fall from the tables of the powerful?
Here, serious attention to the real human question "what is happiness?" becomes almost “subversive.” The need for happiness, if we confront it truly, will take us beyond this world, beyond everything, toward an Infinite Mystery which is the only reality that truly corresponds to our hearts. It is a religious question, and human cultures throughout history - regardless of how they have attempted to answer it - have always recognized its religious nature.
But if we really believe that there is nothing meaningful for human life beyond this world and our capacity to manipulate it, then the need for ultimate happiness is desperate, unsettling, even pathological.
It is therefore something to be suppressed. We must not ask this question. We must distract ourselves from it, even though it permeates our being. We must live our lives on the shallow surface of every experience.
The truly religious person, however, is someone who is at least seeking the answer. And the Christian claims that the Answer has come into the world, and is seeking us.
This is a basic reason why Christian faith doesn't make any sense to people in our society. This is why people can't understand why it matters to believers. Indeed, this is why many Christians themselves don't understand the place of faith in their own lives.
We have been conditioned to evade ourselves, to suffocate our hearts, to flee from the deep cry within us that cannot be satisfied by anything in this finite world. And this evasion has become a forgetfulness. We have cheapened and falsified all the terms associated with the question of happiness: love, justice, goodness, truth, beauty, freedom. We no longer remember how to ask the question.
No wonder the Christian proposal makes no sense. Luigi Giussani often cites Reinhold Niebuhr's insight: “Nothing is more incomprehensible than the answer to a question that has never been asked.”
There is, of course, still another possibility. There is the possibility of meeting some real people who have actually begun to be happy. The human person might wake up, remember their heart, and discover that they have been controlled by lies.
