With happiness still on my mind, a line from “My Life in Christ” jumped out at me:

The degrees of beatitude and torment in the next world will be different [for each person]. This is proved by the present state of the souls of different people or of the same man at different times under different conditions. The more simple, the better and more sociable the man is, the more blessed he inwardly is; the more deceitful, evil and selfish he is, the more unhappy. The firmer a man’s faith and the stronger his love are, the more blessed he is; the weaker his faith and love are, the weaker, the worse he feels. Thus those who have little or no faith, those who hate their fellow creatures, are the most unhappy of men. By this we can understand what future torments will be.

In our crowded and stressed world, we’re all bound to come in contact with a few really bad eggs. It would be great not to have to admit it, but some people are a real pain to be around. But in my experience, they’re also IN pain.

Though those guys blunder around like a tornado, seeming to go to extreme lengths to secure the best of everything for themselves, they’re totally miserable. In spite of their outrageous posturing and nasty little machinations at work and elsewhere, they have no peace. You wish they could stop acting the way they do, but as near as I can tell, those destructive behaviors are all that they think is keeping them from humiliation and disaster. (It’s usually the exact opposite, but this is impossible for them to believe.)

I think of someone I used to work with years ago who was retiring. She had been there for many years, but on her last day, another artist and I realized that none of her co-workers had organized any sort of farewell for her. When we asked them, they couldn’t have been more negative. The woman who was leaving — I’ll call her Ann — was such a toxic person to have around that all anyone wanted to say at her exit was “Good riddance,” with perhaps a chorus of “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” after the door was shut behind her.

It’s not like I didn’t understand that sentiment. I haven’t met many people who went out of their way more regularly to say the worst thing, act in the most self-centered way and insure that an office was reduced always to the law of the jungle. Still, the other artist couldn’t bear to let her go like that, and so we took up a quick collection and did as much over our lunch break as we could. We got some inexpensive flowers, bought a card and forced people to write their goodbyes in it. I had a picture frame that I had bought and never used — I quickly stuck a bow on it, and we made our presentation.

I was really pretty embarrassed at how tawdry our effort seemed. It looked so lame that I steeled myself for Ann to respond with a volley of her usual acid-tongued put-downs.

But she didn’t.

She cried.

I felt really awful about that, and I’ve never forgotten it. Because I realize that our puny imitation of appreciation and affection was more than she ever got to see, and more than she could quite take in. I felt certain right then that she was actually — as Fr. John suggests — very unhappy most of the time.

I’d like to report that she underwent a complete change, but of course she didn’t. You rarely get that kind of satisfaction with people like that, and it’s part of Christian maturity to go on without it, to remember always that they were made in God’s image as we all are.

I don’t always win this fight with myself. There are some people who are really annoying, and there are some whose baser impulses (if left unchecked) can poison any group they’re part of. It doesn’t solve everything to know that they are suffering in a way you may not be able to understand, but in my case, it helps me get a little closer to the way I want to act towards them. After all, most of their flaws wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t recognize them in myself.