Welcome to our daily rosary meditation. Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for.

Today we meditate on the seventh beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. Peace is not the absence of conflict. Some

conflict is good, even healthy. St. Augustine in his work, the city of God, explains that peace is the

fruit of order. So if you want peace, and if you want to be a peacemaker, then the first step is to

get our lives in order. If we don't want our lives to be aimless, then we need some goal to order everything toward.

And a goal that everyone can agree on is happiness.

Everyone wants to be happy. But how might we define happiness?

It must mean more than pleasure.

Happiness is to possess the good things that fulfill or complete our human nature.

So what do you need, what do you want to be happy?

Well, we should want union with God

through Jesus, and we can receive Jesus

through the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and in daily mental prayer.

But we're not just spiritual beings. There are also physical things that we need.

Sleep and nutrition, hydration, exercise, hygiene, shelter

clothing. We also have emotional needs for stability and variety.

But don't we also want good relationships with family and friends?

And an essential ingredient to be happy is meaningful work, some way that we can all do good for others.

But we also are curious. We have a desire for knowledge. Our intellect wants to be fed by reality

in the form of truth and our emotions want to be nourished by reality in the form of beauty.

Can you think about anything else you might want that doesn't fit into one of those categories,

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