Highlights: A Happiness Prayer Episode 58 (Ps. 90)

Is there any hope for happiness that lasts?

Level One: Happiness in the Present Tense

What are realistic expectations for the present life? A counter-intuitive answer: Happiness is not something we find by looking for it. It’s a by-product of other pursuits. Ultimately, happiness is a by-product of our walk with God.

Level Two: Happiness in the Future Tense

The answer to this prayer (Ps. 90) cannot be in the world today as we know it. Gandalf replies: “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path…one that we all must take. The gray rain-curtain of this world rolls back and all changes to silver glass… and then you see it.” “What, Gandalf, see what?” asks Pippin. “White shores…and beyond. The far green country under a swift sunrise.” (Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien)

The widespread belief and practice of the early Christians is only explicable if we assume that they all believed that Jesus was bodily raised, in an Easter event. The reason they believed…is because the tomb was empty and, over a short period thereafter, they encountered Jesus himself, giving every appearance of being bodily alive once more…I regard this conclusion as coming in the category of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain. (The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright)

During World War 2, pioneer pain researcher Henry Beecher found that soldiers wounded during the bloody battle at Anzio needed far less morphine than did civilians with similar wounds. The reason, now known as the “Anzio effect,” was that for civilians the wounds were a source of anxiety: for soldiers they meant going home.

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage…that in the world’s finale… something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)