The Joy of Belief

My daughter, Maureen, has a Puggle named Lola. I’m undoubtedly biased about my “grandog,” but she’s a wonderful little creature, and there’s nothing more marvelous than seeing her performances when Maureen arrives home each day. Lola goes crazy with what can only be described as pure joy. You dog owners have undoubtedly seen something similar: Lola jumps, runs in circles, cries with happiness.

You can only watch it with envy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to feel and express only a fraction of that kind of joy?

And that brings me in a roundabout way to this question: Why should you embrace faith when it appears to provide so little happiness or joy?

The exhaustive study of attitudes toward faith and religion among people 18-29 years old, “Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults,” by sociologist Christian Smith, found that many young people are turned off by the gloominess of religion. Religious people are perceived as grim and bereft of fun. Religious services are seen as joyless affairs in which preachers drone on and on like the church music.

It’s true, religious people haven’t done a great job of showing the joy that comes from faith. We are too tempted to be judgmental; too quick to see the bad in people and events; too eager to contrast our “goodness” with the world’s “evil.”

Believers are happier

Belief should not be somber and negative, and I believe it isn’t for most believers. Study after study shows believers are happier than non-believers. We just have a hard time showing it.

“Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” by British economist Richard Layard, is among the most interesting books I’ve read on happiness. The science in his book is basically his and others’ surveys, and among other questions, he asked people what makes them happy or unhappy. In a list of 15 activities, praying/worshipping/meditating” came in fourth behind “relaxing,” “socializing” and “sex” in making people happy.

That belief in God makes people happier is "one of the most robust findings of happiness research," says Layard. "…At the individual level one cannot be sure whether belief causes happiness or happiness (resulting from genes, our family and financial situation, etc.) causes belief. But since the relation also exists at the national level, we can be sure that to some extent belief causes happiness.”

 (Youth has no monopoly on happiness, by the way. I heard on National Public Radio the other day that surveys show that the happiest ages are 26 and 69.)

For most of us, happiness comes and goes, and people who aren’t sad at times wouldn’t be human. However, joy, in the Christian tradition, is permanent and comes from discovering the good news of the gospel, “the pearl of great price.” This kind of joy is exemplified in Pope Francis. The recent Time Magazine article on the pope, the magazine’s Person of the Year, says he is “like a man who has found something wondrous and wants nothing more than to share it.”

James Martin, the Jesuit priest who wrote a recent book on joy called “Between God and Mirth,” had a recent article in America magazine called “Have Faith in Joy.”

It’s about a relationship

“Unlike happiness,” he says, “joy is not simply a fleeting feeling or an evanescent emotion. It is a permanent result of one’s connection to God. While the more secular definition of joy may be simply an intense form of happiness, religious joy is always about a relationship.”   

Is it possible that Christians don’t show that joy because we take our beliefs for granted and no longer find the “wondrous” in our faith? Some atheists and cynics mock the notion that God became man in the form of Jesus; they scoff at the idea of the resurrection; they scratch their heads in disbelief that Christians believe that God, if he/she exists, could allow his/her son to be executed in such a horrible way in a backwater country 2,000 years ago. They are incredulous that Christians can feel close to God, their mother/father.

But for many Christians, all this is ho-hum. Maybe we don’t show joy because we don’t feel it, and we don’t feel it because we fail to see the incredible wonder in it all.

We can all learn from Pope Francis, and Lola.