What Do Homesickness And Happiness Have In Common?

What do homesickness and happiness have in common?

Happy are the people who know the joyful shout; Yahweh, they walk in the light of Your presence. Psalm 89:15, HCSB

Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness. G. K. CHESTERTON

PSYCHOTHERAPIST LYNNE ROSEN and motivational speaker John Littig cohosted an hour-long radio show on WBAI in New York called The Pursuit of Happiness. But this Brooklyn couple’s final act was putting plastic bags over each other’s heads and committing suicide.^a

Rosen and Littig were experts in promoting and pursuing happiness yet failures in finding it. This tragic couple epitomizes the irony that the more we advertise and purchase products, events, and books intended to make us happy, the unhappier we may become.

In 1997, thirty-nine members of the cult Heaven’s Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite, participated in a mass suicide. They’d been taught that once they exited their earthly bodies, they would land on a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. At the time of their death, each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters. Why? To pay an interplanetary toll.

We may shake our heads in amazement at this kind of gullibility. Yet we fail to see the futility of our own misguided attempts to find happiness. Many people try the age-old practices of turning to money, sex, power, beauty, sports, nature, music, art, alcohol, drugs, education, work, or celebrity for happiness. In the end, each of these proves as big a lie as a spaceship on a comet’s tail.^b

The problem for the Heaven’s Gate followers wasn’t that they trusted too much; it was that they trusted the wrong person. Only Jesus was worthy of their trust. Only he could have granted them, in this life and for eternity, the deep and lasting happiness they sought.

Aren’t we all weary of the onslaught of politicians, psychologists, physicians, religious leaders, diet plans, and TV commercials promising more than they can deliver? We have our expectations raised only to be crushed time and time again. Yet we continue to hope for better things, for greater happiness than life’s track record suggests is possible.

A. A. Milne (1882–1956), creator of Winnie the Pooh, conveyed the joy of anticipation:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best—” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.^c

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) called this anticipation Sehnsucht, a German word for “yearning.”^d Sehnsucht is used to describe a longing for a far-off country that’s, for now at least, unreachable. Lewis connected the yearning itself and the foretastes of it with the joy that is longed for.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve undoubtedly anticipated good food, but instead of falling short of expectations, the food in Eden likely tasted better than imagined. After the Fall, however, the opposite is true. We expect something more of food, entertainment, and relationships, which are all secondary things compared to primary happiness in God, and we are inevitably disappointed. Though we live in a fallen world, we still retain the expectations and hopes of a better one. Our discontent is healthy, provided it leads us to look to God for what can’t be found elsewhere.

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis references a vivid simile in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” The knight describes the human journey this way: “All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but, for the most part, by wrong routes—like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home.”^e

The human race is homesick for Eden, which only two humans have ever known. We know intuitively that we’ve wandered. What we don’t know is how to return. We spend our lives chasing delight, following dead ends or cul-de-sacs in our attempts to get home to Happiness with a capital H—God himself.

A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) wrote, “For whatever else the Fall may have been, it was most certainly a sharp change in man’s relation to his Creator. He . . . destroyed the proper Creator-creature relation in which, unknown to him, his true happiness lay.”^f

The quest for happiness transcends gender, age, and life circumstances. Holocaust victim Anne Frank (1929–1945) wrote as a teenager, “We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.”^g

In an 1898 article arguing against religion, L. K. Washburn said, “There is a constant mental pilgrimage towards that Mecca of the human heart—happiness. . . . Everybody wants to be happy, and thinks, strives, wishes, and lives to that end.”^h

How many subjects do Puritans, philosophers, atheists, and agnostics categorically agree on? One of the few is our innate longing for happiness.

Lord, since we were made in your image, we want to be happy as you are happy. Help us look for, and find, happiness only in the things that please you and that we can enjoy together with you. Thank you that you alone can satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts and that you graciously and regularly use secondary things to bring us happiness from you, the primary source of happiness.