Does having make you happy?

When I read Ernest Hemingway's conjecture that "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” my immediate reaction was to scan my own group of friends. It didn't seem to pan out. Over the years I have gathered a circle of friends that includes relatively well-known leaders in various segments of society as well as a Guatemalan peasant unknown outside of his own family. I did not find a sliding scale of happiness rising from some level of misery for the wealthy to contentment for those who possessed less. What’s more, I didn’t find the opposite either.
       In the process, I had to ask myself the obvious question: What is happiness? Obviously it is important because along with life and liberty, the Declaration of Independence tells us that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. At that point I decided to check with the authorities. I discovered that this issue has been under discussion for as far back as we have written records. Sometime before 289 BCE (traditional date for his death) the Confucian thinker Mencius, taught that joy in life comes as a result of practicing the great virtues. In Buddhism ultimate happiness is the reward for overcoming craving. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas, the Italian philosopher and theologian, taught that happiness was the result of contemplating the divine which would then inform the intellect as it directed one's life.
       More recently, Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor in psychology at UC Riverside, has concluded that 50% of happiness is genetically determined, 10% relates to the circumstances of life, and 40 % is subject to self-control. If this is true, and I believe it is, it suggests that we have a very good chance for happiness by simply choosing it and taking the appropriate steps. But this seems to run contrary to Hemingway's observation that happiness is a rare trait among intelligent people. Could it be that "intelligent" and "wise" are not the same? It may be that for the average person the former term means something like having a detailed knowledge of an area and the latter as expressing how that knowledge may be applied to life. This would explain why Hemingway's "intelligent" people are not necessarily happy and why a "wise'' person is far more apt to be happy.
       While happiness may be difficult to define, it is not difficult to recognize. And in a broad sense, everyone knows what it means to be happy and it doesn't make a lot of difference whether it is defined hedonistically as the result of seeking pleasant experiences and avoiding the unpleasant, or in the classic Greek sense (the eudemonic tradition) as the result of living life in a full and deeply satisfying way. As once again I scan my own friends, the accumulation of wealth has little or nothing to do with the degree of their happiness. For me, and those I'm pleased to name as friends, happiness has come as a result of knowing God in a personal way through the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. On a practical level the pleasure of each day is, to a significant extent, determined by how this relationship with God is allowed to control both our thoughts and our actions.