The Pursuit of Happiness: Aquinas-Style

On the 28th of January, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, I had the wonderful opportunity to preach to a youth group led by a friend of

mine, David Patterson, at St. Joseph's parish, Bowmanville, ON. As it was the feast of St. Thomas, I preached on the fundamental notion of his theology, that God created us to be happy, but that we are only truly happy when we seek Him in faith and the living out of the virtues. This past Tuesday, I received from David a CD recording of my talk, and thought I'd share it with you!

God bless!

The Pursuit of Happiness: Aquinas-Style

(Sorry, I don't know how to make it embedded. Click the link, and you can download the audio file as an .mp3!)


Edit: I forgot to mention a couple things. First of all, in my talk, I'd mentioned that I was going to recommend a good book about St. Thomas Aquinas, and then forgot all about it! So here it is:

St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox by G.K. Chesterton

Second, I managed to get myself quite tongue-tied when talking about my wife, Melissa, and inadvertently said that she's not "profound". This is most certainly not the case. What I was vainly trying to express is that she approaches the Truth of the faith from a very different perspective from me, and because of that, I sometimes assume that she won't be as aware of some deep theological truth or of the important ramifications of some situation or another. This is, of course, a defect on my part, and not hers--and her frequent surprising statements of deep profundity are not surprising to me because she doesn't usually think so deeply. Rather the opposite--they take me off guard and surprise me because I too often tend to underestimate her. My point in that little ill-worded anecdote is that we too often can treat our faith in God in a similar manner. We make God something comfortable, routine, and unsurprising, and then become uncomfortable when He in fact does something incredibly surprising. Just as I shouldn't underestimate my wife, we should attempt to preserve our sense of Wonder at God.