Happiness

‘How happy are you who are poor: yours is the kingdom of God.

Happy you who are hungry now: you shall be satisfied.

Happy you who weep now: you shall laugh.

Luke 6:20

For those of us of a certain age, Gregory Norbert OSB's Happiness of 1972 was sung with gusto. I remember the words with confidence and as a then 18 year old those words really spoke to me.

Happiness is where you are and what you want to be.

If you look you’re sure to find the rainbow of your dreams.

Tomorrow’s fuller than a thousand yesterdays


with the vision of a new day in your heart. 
 

Nevertheless, Happiness would not make the shortlist for a Sunday Mass in 2019. It would be considered too theologically thin, lacking substance, and somewhat obtuse. Few today would suggest that 'happiness is where you are and what you want to be.' Just what does that mean? How serious are we when we tell others to do whatever they want - as long as it makes them happy? And how so different is this 70's view of happiness when we compare it to Luke's recollection of the Beatitudes.

Dr Acacia Parks (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Hiram College, Ohio), a happiness scientist (yes, really) tells us: 'Our happiness level is a result of a complex interaction of genes, behaviours, and what's going on in our lives at a specific moment in time. And while each of us has a genetic set point for happiness in the way we do for weight, we have the ability to offset it, which brings us to the most important takeaway from the scientific research: You have the power to take control of your happiness by choosing your thoughts, behaviours, and actions... Over time, we can build lasting habits that increase our resilience and improve our happiness levels.'

Quite clearly God desires for us to be happy. It is expressed as joy, a joy that not surprisingly can only be found in God. It begins with God loving us and the open invitation he offers us to respond in love. The scriptures record such invitations with various covenants, commandments, proverbs, moral imperatives, ethical dilemmas and, of course, Beatitudes. The Beatitudes (whether Luke's four or Matthew's eight) are, of course, about true happiness. What is extraordinary about the Beatitudes is that real happiness is juxtaposed with what in our lives would be anything but happiness! Who chooses poverty, or hunger, or grief?

Yet, if we are unable to choose poverty, hunger or grief we may find happiness at a psychological level, or even rationalise poverty, hunger and grief into metaphors. But it's hard to see how Luke did not intend for us to read and understand exactly how he recorded it.

It is God who sets the desire for true happiness in our hearts, and if we are indeed seeking true happiness then living and owning the Beatitudes is our only possible response.

Welcome back to a new school year, I wish you many blessings, much joy and true happiness.

Peter Douglas

Rebekah Domer's blog series on Living the Beatitudes

I recommend Rebekah's blogs on the Beatitudes as they may lived out in the world.

The Catholic past of Hercule Poirot

by John Anderson

There is a mystery at the heart of the new “The ABC Murders.” And not just the one about serial killers in merry old Depression-era England.

Who, exactly, was the fastidious, mustachioed Hercule Poirot? There is a solution to that question (and a spoiler below) in the adaptation that recently materialized on Amazon Prime and stars an unlikely John Malkovich as Agatha Christie’s persnickety Belgian sleuth. It comes courtesy of a BBC team that included Sarah Phelps, the writer of such Christie adaptations as “Ordeal by Innocence,” “And Then There Were None” and “Witness for the Prosecution,” as well as 50-odd episodes of “EastEnders” and last year’s “The White Princess.”

Taking on Poirot means taking on a character who has been played by everyone from Orson Welles to Albert Finney to Peter Ustinov to David Suchet. He has been ubiquitous, and caricatured, seemingly forever. “Even Christie got sick of him,” Ms. Phelps said in an interview with America. “He’d become a series of tics and affectations.” But even a lot of devoted fans would have to confess to not being quite encyclopedic on Poirot.

 “Neither am I,” said Ms. Phelps. “I’ll be really honest: Till I started working on them, I’d never read a Christie. I thought, ‘Oh they’re going to be really safe, really cozy,’ which is how Christie’s been sold in the U.K.—murder as cozy entertainment. But it shocked me! It was like the Greeks, like Aeschylus, really remorseless, really savage; and I really enjoyed it.”

At the same time, she wanted to get at who Poirot was, besides (as Christie implied) a devout Catholic, a refugee from 1914 Belgium and a walking catalogue of mannerisms and trademark haberdashery. Why, she wanted to know, was he so relentless in his pursuit of the guilty? Why did he “honor the body on the floor,” and so compulsively move from one murder to the next, through 33 novels and dozens of short stories?

There are, she said, inconsistencies in the backstory. “Some people got mad at me,” Ms. Phelps said. “They said, ‘He was the head of the Belgian police!’ and I said, ‘Yes, well, the thing is...he’s a refugee. And refugees are civilians. In an invasion by a foreign power, the police aren’t going to have civilian status. I think he’s been lying.”

Look at his silhouette, she said, the way he wears his clothes. “That brimmed homburg, that hard, unfashionable collar he always wears under his chin; that particular gray overcoat, the way it drapes his body, the watch chain across his chest,,,,

“And I kept thinking, ‘You know what? I think that brimmed hat is a saturno. And that gray overcoat is his soutane. I think that watch chain is a rosary. And that hard collar that he habitually wears—turn it around. What is it?”

More evidence: “In some of the books,” Phelps said, “he refers to himself as Papa Poirot. He habitually addresses groups of adults as mes enfants. I thought, well, who does that? A man who addresses groups of adults as ‘my children’ has been addressed himself as ‘father.’ So I said, ‘I know what you are and I know why you lied.’”

In brief flashbacks that appear in each of the three installments of “ABC Murders,” Poirot re-experiences his final days in Belgium, as a country priest who is beaten unconscious while his church full of parishioners is set ablaze by invading German troops. Only in the last moments of the series is Poirot’s tragedy revealed, though there are clues along the way—the prie-dieu he keeps in his bedroom, for instance, along with a Marian shrine.

Ms. Phelps said she is a big fan of Malkovich’s interpretation, which was a 180-degree “spin on the character.”

“The denouement, of course, was exciting for him,” she said. “That anguishing little aspect of Poirot not having been enough to save his flock, and not being able to forgive himself, and being compelled to seek justice. It is a deep, deep dive into what it meant to be Hercule Poirot, a refugee who made his home in England, who was celebrated and famous but who I imagined as having been the most humble of things. And a good one. And brave.”

John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times. This article was published in America, 6 February 2019.