By Judie Brown
We see unhappiness around us in many forms. For example, in an intro to a recent episode of his podcast, Straight Talk host Brad Mattes wrote, “Abortion leaves a wake of death and sorrow.” And in that particular episode, he spoke with two men who shared their abortion regret. We have also learned that the taxpayer-funded Department of Health and Human Services recently celebrated “Pansexual and Panromantic Pride Day”—terms unfamiliar even to the author of the article discussing the topic.
While we could add more and more to this list, the real challenge is to sort through the reasons why people are so unhappy today and to realize that their unhappiness stems from actions such as the abortion of their own child and conflicts about gender questions once thought to be non sequiturs. It would seem that people are genuinely unhappy with themselves and their decisions.
The truth is that denying or abusing the gifts given to us by God leads to the sad situations mentioned above and to much worse.
As if underscoring that point, anti-Catholic “Catholic” Nancy Pelosi is skiing on her own neurotic hill saying that if Archbishop Cordileone wants to deny her the body of Christ, that is “his problem, not mine.” In a most arrogant statement, Pelosi decreed, “My Catholic faith has nothing to do with bishops.”
We are not sure what her Catholic faith has to do with, but we do know that, in truth, one’s Catholic faith must be grounded in respect for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which in turn calls the soul to repent of such sin as obstinate support for abortion.
Pelosi must have missed that in her Catholic education!
We wonder if any of these unhappy people today even know what normal means. Is actual reality complicated by the use of false propositions and inane ideas parading around as national standards? Since we can see that the answer is in the affirmative, then it is quite understandable that so many people are sad.
How do we repair such sorrow?
The answer may be simple, but achieving it is more challenging than we can possibly know because human beings are prone to selfishness, as Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen taught:
As self-love or egotism is the root of all unhappiness, so the elimination of it is the beginning of joy. Because ego-centrism isolates one from society, the discipline of the ego restores fellowship. To associate with our fellows, we must accept the conditions friendship lays down—and the first of these is that we cease to live solely for our own selfish pleasures. Nothing in the natural order is more certain to increase happiness than the doing away with self-love.
If we place the concerns and pains of the father whose child is aborted or the sexually confused person in the context of the problem of self-love, we can better comprehend why it is that unhappiness naturally results from serving one’s own ego rather than surrendering to the will of God. This is rarely mentioned today, and to our way of thinking that is the root cause of the problem.
Society refuses to acknowledge that acts of killing, such as abortion or euthanasia, are cultural illnesses. And of course that same community fosters celebration of gender perversion rather than exposing the problem as a pox on the body of humanity. To put it quite simply, cultural happiness cannot thrive in a void, nor can it grow in the presence of contradictions to its very meaning.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:
The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself. Truth in words, the rational expression of the knowledge of created and uncreated reality, is necessary to man, who is endowed with intellect.
Without the fundamental practice of this goodness as the hallmark of a national identity, anguish, suffering, and dehumanization will naturally occur. The antidote for the nation’s cultural unhappiness is at hand. All our fellow citizens need to do is bend a knee, adore God, and recognize the genuine happiness He, not the culture, offers.
What a wonderful Christmas miracle that would be!