Lent day five: beatitude

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Here's a clip from John Paul II addressing World Youth Day on August 19, 2000.

It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

There's a lot of confusion these days about what is meant by "happiness." Is it a feeling? Is it a state of mind? Or is it an objective state of being?

I can say confidently that happiness in the sense that John Paul II spoke about it is what happens to us when the deepest desires of our hearts are satisfied. One is happy not necessarily when one feels warm and fuzzy. In fact, happiness that comes with the satisfaction of our deepest, most powerful appetites can coincide with suffering that comes with the dissatisfaction of our lesser ones.

This kind of happiness, which overcomes any suffering we may face, is what Jesus calls being "blessed." The classical term for it is "beatitude."

That's what I'll be looking at for the next few days.