Unhappiness

[Joan92]

Is this a fair statement:

“One’s unhappiness is in direct proportion to one’s distance from God.”

(By unhappiness, I don’t mean a fleeting displeasurable thought/feeling evoked by your NFL team losing or your child’s poor report card. Nor do I mean the legitimate discontent when you hear sad news of someone’s death or another tsunami in the world.)

I mean unhappiness as a character trait. The semi-permanent state of an unhappy life.

 

[Beryllos]

I wouldn’t put it exactly as you did, but it does remind me of something from St. Augustine:
“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

It also brings to mind Fr. Robert Barron, paraphrasing St. Thomas Aquinas:
“One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as “concupiscence,” but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term “addiction.” When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.”

Fr. Barron has further remarked that these four things are good in themselves. Each has its proper place. Another saint or theologian (I can’t remember who) said that if we put God first, we will know what to do with these other things.