Can One Be Happy Apart from God?

By Dehyana

This is a question that’s been in my mind for the past few days. Can one be happy apart from God?

As I sat with that question, memories from the past began to surface. Moments in my life when I had isolated myself in grief. Times when despair screamed, “Leave me alone.” Seasons when I was disappointed with life, disappointed with myself, and perhaps, if I were completely honest, disappointed with God.

There was absolutely no happiness to be found there.

When Hurt Makes Us Withdraw

And yet, isn’t that what so many of us do? When life hurts, we often withdraw, we isolate. We close the door to our hearts and quietly declare, “I’ll carry this alone.” It struck me that maybe our struggle is not really a love-hate relationship with God, but a love-hurt relationship. I don’t think we push God away because we don’t care. I think that sometimes we push God away because we care so deeply that our hearts have forgotten how to trust.

The Illusion of Separation

For decades I have studied and taught A Course in Miracles, and one of its central teachings is that separation from God never actually happened. We can believe we are separate. We can experience loneliness, fear and isolation, but the separation itself is an illusion.

If that is true, then the question isn’t really: Can one be happy apart from God? Maybe the deeper question is: Can one be happy while believing they are apart from God? To me that feels very different.

What Are We Really Searching For?

As I reflected, I began thinking about our world. People spend their lives searching for happiness in success, money, relationships, possessions, recognition, travel, achievement, even spiritual accomplishments. I’ve done it too.

There’s a voice in our head that keeps repeating, “When I have enough, when I become enough, or when I finally arrive, I’ll have made it.” But in my experience the finish line keeps moving.

Maybe Happiness Is Something We Remember

What if every search for happiness is actually a search for God in disguise? Or what if the longing beneath our desire for success is really a longing to know we are enough? What if our desire for security is really a longing to rest in something eternal?

What if our search for love is really the soul remembering the Love from which it has never been separated? That thought changed something in me. I began to think God is not withholding happiness until we finally find Him. Happiness has always been there, waiting beneath the layers of fear, grief, striving and forgetting.

Like the sun hidden behind clouds, it has never stopped shining.

Searching Beneath the Zodiac at Dendera

I’ve taken many groups to Egypt over the years, and one of my favourite moments is standing beneath the magnificent zodiac ceiling at the Temple of Dendera. Almost everyone instinctively looks up, searching for their zodiac sign. And as I evolve I find myself wondering if we are searching for much more than a symbol in stone.

Perhaps we are searching to remember who we are, why we are, and to remember the Love that has never left us. Maybe that is what happiness really is. Not something we create, or earn. Not something we chase either, but something we remember.

Can One Be Happy Apart from God?

So today, I’ll leave you with the same question that came to me just a few days ago.

Can one be happy apart from God?

Don’t rush to answer. Just sit with it and listen to what rises within you. It may lead you far beyond happiness…to the sweet remembrance that Love has never been absent.

Remember…

You have never been separate from the Love you seek.

With love, Dehyana