‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. According to the United States Declaration of Independence, those are three unalienable rights of all human beings. One of my philosophy professors, however, disagreed with that. He thought pursuing happiness would just lead to frustration and unhappiness. What we ought to do, he maintained, was pursue meaning, then happiness would ensue.

I think he had a point. We are all good at pursuing happiness: chasing after the next big thing, the next trend, the next solution to all our problems. However, how often does the promised happiness fail to materialise? How often does it just end up with disappointment and a new chase?

The thing is, God has, in a sense, made us that way. He’s made us with a restlessness, with a constant yearning for meaning and the happiness that it brings. Like a homing device in our hearts, it continually draws us to him, the source of all meaning, the source of all happiness.

When we authentically follow our hearts we are led to God. The trouble is that oftentimes we don’t listen to our hearts, we ignore them and just go after the latest shiny thing. It’s been like that ever since sin entered our human story. We look for meaning and happiness in all the wrong places and end up frustrated, unfulfilled and empty.

Only God can give true meaning to our lives, only God can bring us the happiness we truly desire: communion with the Blessed Trinity. St Augustine of Hippo put it best: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’

I think that is why Jesus gets so upset by what he sees in the temple in today’s Gospel. The temple was supposed to be the privileged place of encounter with God; the place where people could find communion and deepen their friendship with God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The merchants and traders, profettering on people’s prayers, on people’s desire for God, had turned it into a shopping centre. The very place built to find God was filled with obstacles to finding him.

At the heart of Jesus’ ministry is his overwhelming desire to help us find God and to enter into friendship with him. That’s why he drove out the money changers and merchants: he had come to make a straight path for us to follow, free from obstacles, and to walk with us along that path so that we may reach that for which we all yearn: the true meaning of our lives and the happiness that ensues from communion with God.

Where have you looked for happiness in your life? What obstacles prevent you from finding God? Ask Jesus to clear them away, just as he cleared them from the temple; ask him to lead you to the source of all meaning and happiness.