My Sister-In-Law Gave Me A Book By Fulton Sheen for Christmas...

...and now I'm thinking about the nature of happiness.

True happiness is always interior. Pleasures can be pursued and enjoyed by the arrangement of circumstances, but this enjoyment is fleeting. We cannot trust circumstances to give us joy, for our ideal of what those circumstances will win for us is never entirely fulfilled. We grasp at shadows. Joy can only be experienced in view of the eternal. Only eternity can give us the perspective with which to view our yearnings, our desires. Only with timelessness giving us pause can we expect rightly the measure of joy that earthly Goods can give. Without this perspective, our expectations grow ravenous and no pleasure can satiate. Happiness finds us in our right responses to circumstances. Happiness appears when we recognize that nothing on earth can wholly satisfy, when we realize that we are unable to love wholeheartedly anyone but God. As Sheen imagines it, God has held a fragment of our heart since creation, and whatever we love on earth will feel the lack of the fragment God possesses.

I sit here reminded.