Desiring Peace Above Happiness: A Vision for the Interior Life

Let’s begin with a confession, because this is, after all, what Catholics do best: We confess we’ve been wrong about happiness for quite a while, at least since the first time someone tried to sell us chocolate-coated marshmallow cereal and called it “a balanced breakfast.” Our culture is obsessed with happiness, glazed and fried and monetized in the aisles beside deodorant and phone chargers. Happiness, it turns out, is a slippery squid; every time you grip it, it wriggles away and starts talking about vacation plans in Tahiti or something involving season tickets and reclining leather chairs. Peace, by contrast, is the wise, wry octopus of the interior life: Strong, quiet, hidden in the depths, and liable to squirt you with holy ink when you try to define it.

Here’s my thesis, lightly roasted: Authentic peace, grounded in the holy madness of seeking union with God’s will, forms the stable bedrock of the Christian life in a way that happiness, subject to mood swings, stomach aches, and playoff losses, simply cannot. To desire peace is to desire conversion, year after year; to desire happiness is to desire comfort, often accompanied by chips and another episode of that show about British baking.​

Let us consult the cast of Catholic all-stars. Here’s St. Augustine, who somehow wrote so much that even his laundry lists were probably in Latin. He proposed, wisely, as usual, that peace is the “tranquility of order.” Not the absence of noise, which is rare if you live with teenagers, but an interior alignment: all loves and hopes, even the ones you have for the Mariners, sorted according to their true place in the cosmic sock drawer. “Our hearts are restless,” he said, “until they rest in thee.” Which means that peace is not a hammock in the backyard, but the sturdy result of getting your loves in the right order, beginning with love for God, or at least serious intention of loving God, or, on crabby days, the faint hope of loving God eventually.​

Next up: St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote so many words you’d think he was getting paid by the syllable. He made a distinction between beatitudo (perfect happiness in God, which comes after you die, so do not hold your breath) and felicitas (earthly happiness, which is imperfect and patchy, like your attempt at sourdough bread during the pandemic). Aquinas argues that peace is the rich fruit of charity, found by practicing virtues and growing closer to God, not by checking the “fulfilled” box on your online shopping orders. Imperfect happiness here is possible, but peace, as Aquinas saw it, is more stable and more worthwhile. It stays steady, even if the Wi-Fi goes out.​​

Other wise souls echo the same: Romano Guardini spoke of the mature conscience and the serenity born from obedience to truth, which honestly sounds better than the serotonin rush of checking your likes on social media. Caryll Houselander declared that genuine inner stillness is what allows Christ to be formed within the soul as a quiet, stable, not a noisy pub, thank you very much. Thomas Merton described peace as the fruit of non-possessiveness, humility, and undistracted attention, qualities not typically associated with the annual consumer stampede for discounted socks. Jacques Maritain called joy a metaphysical participation in God’s life, much deeper than the fragile evanescence of what the world calls happiness, bless him for using “evanescence” non-ironically.​

Secular happiness runs on the fumes of pleasure, self-expression, and personal success, all of which, if pursued like a high-speed chase, may lead not to bliss but to burnout and possibly to the frequent consumption of large quantities of ice cream. Happiness is volatile, a creature of emotion and circumstance; if your football team loses, happiness flees the house like a startled squirrel. Peace, by contrast, is a virtue: It disciplines desire, deepens freedom, and remains unruffled when your flight is delayed yet again.​

In fact, if happiness is like weather, a brief and ever-changing atmospheric phenomenon, peace is the climate of the sanctified heart: slow to form, lasting, nourishing all growth, even in the quiet winter of suffering.​

Here’s the catch, dear reader: Peace is hard work. It demands the spiritual equivalent of cleaning out the garage. It asks for moral formation, prayer, surrender, and the ongoing purification of desire. Peace involves regular examen, silence (which is awkward at first), adoration, and the small miracle of authentic forgiveness, activities that produce more interior stability and less dramatic angst than binge-watching self-help gurus on YouTube.​

To strive for peace is to shift from a self-centered model (“Find your best self!”) to a God-centered one (“Lose your self, and you’ll find your life!”). It’s not about comfort, or even about good feelings, but about becoming a faithful witness to the wild and ancient promise: “My peace I give to you … not as the world gives.”

Look, nobody’s against happiness, except maybe the saints who smiled mysteriously while getting martyred. But the Catholic vision invites, cajoles, and occasionally whacks with a holy stick: Desire peace above happiness. Swap your quest for pleasure and validation for the harder, truer labors of charity, conformity to God’s will, and neighborly affection, especially toward that neighbor who puts up his Christmas lights in October.

The result? Interior stability. Greater charity. A more faithful witness. And participation in Christ’s own peace, a peace that remains even when the happiness is fleeting, the coffee pot is empty, and the socks remain unmatched.

Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of grace. So may the real peace, rich, hard-won, hilarious in its surprise, find you and fill you, today and all the days that follow, commencing with this very moment as your coffee cools. Amen.