Before we left the house, I caught sight of a leaf on top of a table on the terrace. Sunset was still an hour away, and so the leaf basked in the yellow light of the afternoon. It must have fallen from a tree beside the wall. A breeze might have carried it to the table.
I felt light. The sight of the leaf gave me a lift. This was pure grace: that it should fall on the table and not on the ground, and lie in sunshine and not in darkness, that I should chance upon it now before the night and its attendants—wind and rain—could mess everything up.
On our way to the city we passed by schoolchildren going home, their hair and limbs flickering as they crossed the shafts of sunshine passing through the gaps between the trees and houses.
What scenes!
They made me reflect on the nature of happiness.
To Thomas Aquinas, it is God that we ultimately desire, and so true happiness lies in the act by which we unite ourselves with Him. That act is an act of understanding, of knowing, of seeing God, not so much with the eyes as with the mind.
When I think of the leaf warmed by the gold of the afternoon sun and the schoolchildren checkered by the columns of light, I realize that whatever pleasure I had in seeing them could never be perfect. Only the knowledge and vision of that from that they and similar things have received their splendor could give me perfect happiness—only the knowledge and vision of God alone, who brings all human desire to rest.
Of course, I can reach out to God in prayer, but human frailty will not allow me to spend every moment of the day in contemplation, or to keep up the same intensity of thought. Such that my vision of Uncreated Beauty and my experience of true happiness can only be on and off, as is my enjoyment of the lesser kind of happiness that the body and the senses offer. Duty asked me to abandon the leaf and the children. Time replaced the scenes with others. Light and darkness interchanged.
The world can dim one’s vision of God and His goodness, and one can find it hard, if not impossible, to contemplate, and experience the happiness of being united with Him. Just last week, a friend introduced me to his uncle who not long after he had lost a child to cancer discovered that he himself had the same ailment. Three times a week, a gaunt woman and her child wait for me near the side entrance of a church to take me up on my promise that I would give her money, but just a little amount, and only every other day. As a judge, I meet people whose lives have been damaged by violence, deceit and persecution.
Jesus went up and sat down on a mountainside to tell his disciples that the truly happy are the poor, those who mourn, the persecuted, those denied justice, the gentle, as well as the pure of heart, the merciful and the peacemakers. I feel that he did this because he did not want them, and us, especially the suffering ones, to allow poverty, injustice, pain, such things—to let the world’s physical and moral squalor—to veil our vision of God, and lessen our experience, however intermittent, and no matter if as yet just a foretaste, of perfect happiness.
This means that we should maintain our awareness of the presence, and our contemplation of the majesty and goodness, of God, despite the nasty conditions, the difficulties, the mind-numbing monotony of our tasks.
This was what Gandhi said: “If, when we plunge our hand into a bowl of water, or stir up the fire with the bellows, or tabulate interminable columns or figures on our bookkeeping table, or, burnt by the sun, we are plunged in the mud of the rice field, or standing by the smelter’s furnace, we do not fulfill the same religious life as if in prayer in a monastery, the world will never be saved.”
And we will never attain perfect happiness.