by loving God we get eternal happiness write a story on the statement
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title of the story : A CHRISTIAN ACCOUNT OF HAPPINESS
Could the doctor's question be pertinent, even insightful? Could he be right to suggest that happiness can coexist with suffering? It all depends on what we think happiness is.
If we identify happiness with pleasure, then obviously illness diminishes happiness because illness results in pain, whether it is physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual pain.
If we equate happiness with always being in control and getting our way, then surely suffering jeopardizes happiness because nothing strips us of control and reminds us of our vulnerability more than suffering, perhaps especially the suffering associated with serious illness and loss. Suffering discloses the fragility of our lives, the undeniable limits of our powers and particularly our inevitable decline and inescapable mortality.
As moral theologian Fr. Sebastian MacDonald notes, "Suffering is undesirable, and one seeks to avoid it, if possible, or else eliminate or diminish it. It is negativity, involving absence, loss, limitation, restriction."2
That is true, but the question persists: Must suffering, even terrible suffering, obliterate happiness? When faced with hardship, adversity, struggles, hurts and deep disappointments, must we also be robbed of joy? When the wounds of life accumulate, must they also finally defeat us by stripping us of the confidence and peace that are sure signs of hope?
Here, a Christian account of happiness can help us, because Christianity maintains that genuine happiness is not a weak and fleeting emotion that shrivels at the first hint of hardship, but, rather, something much more resilient, unshakable and deeply rooted in us. As the theologian Philip Kenneson writes, "One of the hallmarks of Christian joy is that it can be experienced in the midst of immense sorrow and loss."3 And that is because happiness, from a Christian perspective, is not "the absence of something undesirable, such as pain, suffering, or disappointment," but rather "the presence of something desirable: God."4
The early Christian theologian St. Augustine can help us understand why this is true. Augustine did not become a Christian until 387, when he was 33 years old. A year later, he wrote The Way of Life of the Catholic Church. In that treatise, Augustine makes an unremarkable claim: "Certainly, we all wish to live happily." But he went on to say that we will not be happy if we lack what we love, if we possess what we love but it is harmful, or if we have not learned to love what is best.5
Augustine knew from the meandering odyssey of his life's first 33 years that somehow happiness is connected to loving, because we naturally love what we think will fulfill us and bring us joy. But from the mistakes and mishaps of those years, he also learned that loving, alone, will not make us happy. Rather, we are happy only when we love, seek and ultimately possess what is best for us. For Augustine, that is God. Happiness is becoming one with and being transformed by the unsurpassable love and goodness that is found only in God. Happiness is holiness.
This discovery inspired what are perhaps the most heartfelt and memorable words Augustine ever wrote. At the beginning of the Confessions, the story of Augustine's conversion, which is a book that is meant to be read as an unfolding prayer to God, he says: "You … have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you."6
Augustine claimed that happiness is inseparable from goodness, specifically the absolutely captivating and incomparably beautiful goodness that is found in God. Loving God wholeheartedly and faithfully is happiness, because God is the supreme and most excellent good in whose image we are made and in whose love we are completed. Even more, loving God wholeheartedly and faithfully is happiness, because we become what we love and gradually are made one with what we love. This is why suffering does not have to imperil happiness. If God is our good, and we become one with God through love, then the spiritual communion we have with God that is happiness abides at the very center of our lives and is deeper and stronger than any sorrow that may visit us or any affliction that may come upon us.
plz refer to the attachment for the other part plz...
