The Pursuit of Happiness-God's Way: Living the Beatitudes

When we think of happiness we have to admit that our idea is at times worldly and self-centered. Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount showed us that true happiness will elude us however if we follow that kind of thinking. And in the form of a series of promises and challenges which we have come to know as the Beatitudes He told us how to find perfect happiness--both here and in the hereafter. In a world that is capable of the best and the worst we all have reason to be concerned about the very possibility of ever finding happiness in our lifetimes. The good news of the Gospel message is that we can. Even more it teaches a way based not on rules and obligations so much as one founded on love a way that depends upon and leads to the blessings of God Himself. These pages have been written in the conviction that every seeker should make the Sermon on the Mount the primary source of what will and will not make her happy. In His approach to the question Jesus insists from the outset that we face up to the inevitable trials of life: poverty tears hunger and thirst and shows us how we can find God--the source and object of our joy--in the midst of them. Servais Pinckaers OP is Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The author of a dozen major works in French in the area of moral theology and spirituality he is best known in the English-speaking world for his work titled The Sources of Christian Ethics.