God wants us to be Happy

God wants us to be Happy is the New Revelation’s defining promise in Patricia Paiwonski’s explanation to Jill and Mike. She presents happiness as both a gift from God and a way of living: people should receive life’s pleasures gratefully, love generously, and neither abuse nor reject what has been given. The expression’s warmth is inseparable from its institutional setting, where a message of joyful salvation also marks a boundary between the faithful and those branded as opponents.

Patricia’s explanation of the Faith

Patricia first distinguishes outward transformation from the deeper change she wants Jill and Mike to understand. She says that the real change is inside and names it as happiness. She is not ordained and does not claim a special gift for preaching, but insists that she must try to explain what the Faith has done for her before answering their questions. Her testimony locates the doctrine within the New Revelation: in her account, Jesus preached the True Faith, later distorted during the Dark Ages, and Foster was sent to restore and clarify it.

Patricia’s manner gives the teaching a personal as well as doctrinal force. She points as she speaks and takes on the appearance of a priestess invested with religious dignity and symbols. The scene does not present happiness as an abstract proposition delivered by a detached authority; it comes through a committed believer who wants her visitors to recognize an inward change. Her confidence is visible even as she acknowledges the limits of her formal standing.

Gratitude, pleasure, and restraint

Patricia explains the promise through ordinary pleasures. God, she argues, filled the world with things that can make people happy, and their existence is evidence that joy is meant to be shared rather than treated as inherently suspect. Her example is wine: if God allows grape juice to become wine, people may enjoy it together and give thanks. That permission is not unlimited. She explicitly distinguishes convivial enjoyment from drunkenness, violence, and neglect of family, describing good things as meant to be used, not abused or ignored.

The argument joins pleasure to gratitude and moderation rather than setting them against each other. Patricia treats happiness as an answer to divine generosity, but not as a license to harm others. The example of drinking with friends makes the doctrine social: joy is pictured as something experienced among people who share the Faith, with celebration directed toward gratitude rather than excess. Her account gives the phrase a practical reach, linking religious belief to everyday choices about enjoyment and conduct.

Love and the boundaries of belonging

Patricia extends the teaching from pleasure to love. She interprets the command to love one another expansively, including even a snake in need of love, and rejects a fearful form of piety that treats the body as shameful. In her account, the physical world is part of God’s creation; loving people and taking joy in human life therefore belong within the Faith, rather than standing as temptations opposed to it. She includes care for babies and affection among adults in the same broad affirmation of love.

That inclusiveness has a firm boundary. Patricia distinguishes those she regards as faithful from sinners and people she says would lead others away from the appointed path. Her teaching thus combines an expansive ideal of love with a divided moral landscape: love is urged toward those within the accepted path, while opponents are cast as corrupting influences. The contradiction is significant to the expression’s meaning. Happiness is presented as open-hearted, but in Patricia’s account it is also bound to religious allegiance and the defense of the community.

What happiness cannot be bought

Patricia cautions against turning love or happiness into commodities. Neither can be sold or purchased, she says; imagining a price for them opens the way to spiritual ruin. She asks Jill whether she would perform the water-sharing ritual for money, raising the hypothetical sum from one million dollars to ten million, tax-free. Jill’s answer is no. The exchange sets a concrete limit on material value: even an enormous financial offer cannot substitute for a bond that belongs to the realm of shared trust and affection.

This moment connects Patricia’s account of happiness to the water-sharing practice without equating the two. The ritual serves as her test case for something that money cannot command, and her question draws Jill into the argument rather than leaving her as a passive listener. Patricia’s claim is that giving and receiving with an open heart cannot be reduced to a transaction; happiness depends on a kind of generosity that a price tag would falsify.

The doctrine within the Fosterite church

The broader account of Fosterite organization places Patricia’s language in a deliberately constructed religious culture. Foster’s movement drew on a range of institutional models and presented itself as a return to primitive Christianity. It offered an outer church open to anyone, where a person could remain a seeker while receiving some benefits, and a middle church for the saved. That inner public tier paid tithes, shared in the economic benefits of the church’s expanding business connections, and participated in a continuing atmosphere of carnival, revival, and repeated affirmations of happiness.

Within that middle church, salvation was associated with forgiven sins and a comparatively permissive moral outlook, provided members supported the church, dealt honestly with fellow Fosterites, condemned sinners, and remained happy. The narrative says that the New Revelation did not specifically encourage adultery, while treating sexual conduct in mystical terms. The distinction complicates Patricia’s popular, confident celebration of pleasure: her speech expresses a recognizable doctrine of gratitude and love, but the movement also organizes belonging through institutional loyalty and its own judgments about sin.

The repeated formula of happiness therefore works at two levels. For Patricia, it names a genuine inward change and a religious answer to the question of how people should receive the good things of life. For the church, happiness is also a public refrain—echoed in the middle church’s culture of repeated celebration and in its declaration of the faithful as saved. The expression’s force lies in that conjunction: joy is both an intimate conviction and the language through which a religious institution defines its community.