If there is one quality that would appear obviously to determine a person's happiness, that quality would be health. We normally take health for granted until we injure ourselves or fall victim to some illness; only then do we value the joy of having a healthy body. When we are well, on the other hand, far from being grateful for this, we are much more likely to grumble about other matters that are disturbing us.

As we get older, we are all bound to come to terms with the failure of our bodies. None of us is exempt from the slow decay that is part of the mortal frame. The interesting thing about age generally is how what was once almost intolerable to consider is gradually approached without our thinking about it at all. A young person of, say, 20 years would have regarded a 60- or 70-year-old man or woman as very old indeed, but nowadays with the remarkable increase in longevity common in humans generally, these ages are the rule rather than the exception. Most people when they reach the "age of retirement" (usually about 65 years) feel that, provided they have saved enough money, they are entitled to spend the remaining portion of their life in relaxation. This may involve travel, reading, or entertainments of one type or another; in the end, a failure of one of the senses or of the mental faculty tends to narrow the possibilities, at least as far as personal actualization is concerned. But fortunately, there are other elderly people with active minds who can really start to live properly when the grind of daily work has at last been surmounted by an adequate pension. They may either follow the desire of their mind, or else branch out into some new activity. Age is certainly not the insuperable barrier that it was in times past, and elderly people can now achieve much involving the mind and body which would have seemed well nigh impossible before.

No one but a fool could deny the vital part that good health plays as a basis for happiness, whether personal or communal, but is the reverse equally true? Do people suffering from chronic ill-health of one type or another always have to be miserable? It all depends on what that person makes of their fate. The usual response will be to take refuge behind ill-health from fulfilling one's daily responsibilities, and no one who has suffered can fail to sympathize with this attitude. But what about the person who can triumph over ill-health, as we have seen St Paul do? But even his predicament is not the abyss of ill-health; it was more likely an inconvenience that interfered with his unique ministry. To me, the supreme example of a person triumphing over a condition that was never going to get better but, on the other hand, got progressively worse with the years, was Beethoven afflicted by his deafness.

The first signs of this ailment became apparent when he was still young in his musical profession, and he tried various ways of coping with it. Nowadays those who are deaf can be helped by electrical amplifiers that can make clearer what little hearing they still possess, but in his day nothing much could be done. Nevertheless, after a brief period of extreme depression he fought back and all his greatest music was written under the shadow of progressively increasing deafness, which reached its culmination before his composition of the five last quartets. He communicated by writing since he could hear nothing other people said to him. This handicap would have been terrible enough for any of us, but one can hardly imagine how appalling it must have been for a composer not to have been able to hear his own music. Indeed, the ways of genius are chastening as well as inspiring, and his heroism is beyond praise.

Many others who do not have great gifts of creativity also labour under failing hearing or sight. They can either retire into inner darkness or they can enjoy the world for what it is, despite their terrible handicap. Are these people simply to be pitied? The answer relies entirely on their own response; they can either see it as a terrible blow of fate and wither accordingly under its blast, or they can respond creatively. This to me is the power of Beethoven's music, which has a uniquely heroic quality that has stirred many people in times of great darkness.

Modern medicine now takes better care of us than before, but we all have to bear the fact of ultimate death. The end of all life is death; what matters is what one has made of one's life and what sort of death one may reasonably expect. Let it be said at once that no one alive in the flesh can know what happens when they die, or even what it feels like to die. With certain rare exceptions the "near-death experience" is fleeting and rather attractive. To the very few that have had a very profound glimpse of death (as I believe I was given), there is a darker element also. This I think is probably the proper sequence of events that follow any life lived to its full adult stature. It could not apply in the same way to young children who die prematurely.

The more one considers the whole matter of survival, the more one is confronted with unanswerable questions. I do not believe that we are equipped to penetrate these matters with our present range of understanding. What, I believe, we are expected to do, is to live our lives as perfectly as we can at the present moment. Jesus puts it thus in the Sermon on the Mount: "Set your mind on God's kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well. So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own" (Matthew 6:33-4).

Health is never a purely personal matter, because it involves the entire society in which we live. Only when people generally are satisfied with their living conditions can the corporate society be healthy. Here, of course, we come up against the problems of socialism and capitalism; the first would tend to even things out so that everyone lived at a modest level, but little reward would come to those with special gifts or talents, while the latter would produce a marginalized society with only the favoured few at the centre of the stage. Neither of these is healthy. But the question then comes to mind, is any type of social health compatible with the human condition? To my way of thinking, the healthy society can only evolve when people themselves are changed from merely grasping animals to souls who are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others. Self-sacrifice, as we have already said, seems to be a prerequisite for happiness, for when we are nothing, then at last we can forget ourselves - including ill health of various types - and give of ourselves fully to the people around us. It is quite easy to prescribe remedies for various obvious social evils and injustices with the full inner knowledge that these solutions have little practical reality and are merely ways of demonstrating our own goodwill. It is only when we have hit the bottom and have miraculously risen up again that we can identify ourselves fully with various social ills that previously we would never have known face to face. When this happens, we are actually forced to broaden our concern to embrace the masses of society who live at subsistence level, and then we can begin to play our part in healing the many rifts in the society of which we are a part.

When we see health in this very much larger context than merely the personal view, we are focusing on the great mystery of life itself. Health is the foundation stone of personal and communal life and on this foundation the quest for happiness can begin. Yet there is a deeper quest than even health, and that is our inner creativity; great works of art are known to have emerged in the minds of geniuses when their material circumstances could hardly have been more degrading. I often wonder whether Beethoven might have been, if anything, a more prosaic composer had he been able to hear perfectly. His handicap became a great challenge to an equally great soul. People of that stature do not attempt to opt out of the race for life itself; on the contrary, their lust for life is sharpened by their handicap. I often think with grief of Mozart, Schubert, Keats, Van Gogh and many other geniuses in the arts who died at lamentably early ages, and then a wiser mentor from the depth of my own being comes to me and tells me that it had to be. It would appear that they had completed their destiny in this particular life and it was time for them to move on to that unknown future that confronts us all when our lives are over. Hence, as I have already said, live perfectly in the moment, for we do not know what even the next moment will bring, either in terms of success or failure. What appears to be a failure, as occurs so often in the realm of the arts, is recognized many years later (quite often long after the genius has died) as an immortal achievement. I myself find the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the greatest inspiration, whereas most contemporary music leaves little impact on me. This does not mean, needless to say, that this music is necessarily inferior to what preceded it, but that I am merely a typical child of my own time.

When one can drive oneself against the odds and persist in one's efforts, as when the body would much prefer to be in the state of permanent relaxation, then can greatness show itself in all of us. There is obviously a time when we have to yield to the demands of the body, but also a time in the course of a chronic disease when one should react positively against it. It is in this fight for survival that even the least brave of people can show their heroism. It is no doubt much easier to be a hero on the battlefield than to contend valiantly against the failure of vital functions in one's own body. The great person need not necessarily be a spectacular achiever of creative wonders; their glory consists in being true to themselves when the whole world seems to be falling about around them.

How does one know that one is healthy or at least on the path towards the attainment of health? The mind seems to play a crucial part in this understanding. There is a sense of purpose in one's life which reveals a key towards its fulfilment. A healthy body is the outer reflection of a mind filled with satisfying images. If these images were entirely material; their futility would soon become obvious. We have already considered some of these images in the form of wealth and power. These are as likely to take one's mind off the main theme of living as to promote its onward flow. When one knows intuitively that one is on the right path, the body expands correspondingly. Thus the company one keeps and the work one is doing, if satisfactory and constructive, show themselves externally in the form of health.

Health, of course, is not merely a matter of external circumstances. We are constantly assailed by noxious agents as well as the hostility of various social pressures. These are not to be merely regarded as intruders in our private environment, but as ever-assailing forces that prevent us getting stuck in our present self-satisfaction. We slowly begin to understand that health is far more than merely a state of bodily contentment but one of infinite progress towards the barely discernible ideal of heaven on earth. This, as already indicated, is never a primarily individual state, because it has profoundly important social implications. As John Donne put it so memorably, "No man is an Island entire of its self. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions).

In all our lives the state of our body affects our basic outlook; anatomy is indeed destiny, as I believe Freud once said. We have thought about this already in relationship to Beethoven's deafness. It is interesting that the state of health of nations on a primarily physical level is now appreciated by all Western countries, and increasingly so by those of the East also, and this is as it should be. One cannot build a happy society when its members are collectively fighting battles of daily survival. And yet, paradoxically, it is the surmounting of these constant encounters that not only ensures the continuance of the species but also its upward, spiritual growth. If there were no struggles for survival, we would all soon lapse into a comfortable type of desiccating uniformity, but there is something deep inside us all that will not let us be until we have completed the work that we have been scheduled to do. It is a divine discontent. We alone are able to know the nature of that work, but until it is under way we are not in a genuine state of health. This is the real reason why such attractions as wealth and power may afford are in the end very superficial indeed.

But what about the type of person, apparently very common indeed, who can see no purpose in life other than acquiring as much as possible for themselves (and their families also)? It is no use preaching to these people - if indeed preaching is of any value at all, except to those who are already on the way to conversion to a nobler form of life than that commonly canvassed. Such people have to learn the inadequacy of their limited, self-centred way of existence by its results in such terms as ill-health, financial disaster and family breakdown. The great question in most people's lives is "Why did it have to happen to me?" The answer is actually extremely simple: "It had to be so because there were numerous lessons that you had still to learn in order to be healthy as an entire person." Even Job, though a perfectly righteous man, had to learn that doing all the good in the world was inadequate as long as he derived satisfaction from placing himself in his own mind above the position of those whom he helped. There is indeed no justice in our life so long as we expect it in terms of personal approbation. We can only begin to approach the portals of happiness when we have merged with our fellow creatures, which is another way of saying when we have surrendered our ego in the greater flow of life itself. I have come to see ill health in this much greater context of existence through participating in life in a state of pain; when one knows one is not special, then at last one is entering the healthy life. In the usual way of paradox, when we know we are nothing we are beginning our unique contribution in the world at large.

This understanding of health places such medical factors as heredity, infection and the degenerative processes consequent on ageing in their proper perspective. They are simply the inevitable way in which any living organism matures and ages, and none of us can be immune from their inroads. Real health, however, sees this as merely the springboard of the development of the soul, or true nature of the individual, which is not destined to destruction when the body dies, but, on the other hand, only begins to experience a far freer health when it is no longer tied to the ageing process native to all material things. The end of life is obviously death, but the end of death, though still rationally obscure, is spiritually illuminated by an understanding of the immortality of life which can be glimpsed only as a result of Divine inspiration.