蜜芽传媒

If you were born in 1957 you may have special reason to feel happy about it. Yesterday, a study from Warwick University declared that yours was the happiest year at least since 1776.

The report published in partnership with the Social Market Foundation analysed billions of words such as peaceful, enjoyment and happiness from contemporary books and articles, against words like stress and unhappy and found that the happiness count peaked in 1957.

The happiness index suggests that 1950s happiness was not determined by economic factors or creature comforts. This was after all, a time when few people had central heating and most had outside loos.

Happiness can be an accessory of wealth and privilege. And why not? But the report suggests that you just can鈥檛 trust material things to make all of us happy, all of the time. And one of the enduring values of faith is the reminder that we are more than we own, and that happiness is not always contingent on the nice things people say about us.

It鈥檚 what Jesus meant in his celebrated Sermon on the Mount: 鈥淏lessed鈥� are you when you are persecuted, lied against, or become peace-makers. Literally, he meant 鈥榟appy鈥�. You can be blessed or happy, because happiness is also a gift of God.

But something else about the report intrigues me. 1957, it claims, was close enough to the end of the war and food rations to help people appreciate what they had.

So it seems a proximity to disaster can be a trigger for happiness.

Last Saturday I attended the 60th birthday party of a good friend. The party was put together with uncharacteristic speed and it was only in his 鈥榯hank you鈥� speech that we all understood why. A prostate cancer scare given the all-clear by an MRI test made my happy friend even happier. And he called us to party!

Christians recognize this pattern throughout the New Testament. The prodigal son, the lost coin and lost sheep all tell the same story. Happiness may actually come to us in the aftermath of loss and disaster, providing what the report describes as, 鈥渁 greater sense of realism.鈥�

Happiness comes to us in many ways. It turns out that one of them is through the gift of retrospection.

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