Greetings,
Either I’ve accumulated some useful wisdom in my years or I’ve become a suspicious old curmudgeon. (OK, maybe both!) I offer here some thoughts on the latest round in the genre of “How To…” books that are enjoying such great popularity these days. This is not a book report, so proponents of these approaches to spirituality may have some legitimate gripes with my conclusions. (That’s what the comments section at the end of this blog is for, after all.
Perhaps the prime example of “the latest spiritual rage” is “The Secret” with its personal application of “The Law of Attraction.” Essentially, this law states that we can attract what we want/desire/need by means of an attitude of mind. If we have a negative attitude, we will attract negative things, but if we have a positive attitude and visualize the outcome we desire, The Universe is just waiting to give them to us. A corollary to the law according to “The Secret” is the belief that The Universe contains such abundance that if all of us learned to attract what we wanted, The Universe would be able to fill all of our orders. (And by the way, IT would accomplish this feat without creating scarcity in other areas of life and without toxifying the planet!!) While I have observed some experiential truth in “The Law of Attraction”, I’m concerned with its application.
All right, even I can hear my negative tone. Apparently, I’m violating the prime directive of “The Secret”. Regardless, I need to point out that the purpose of this approach is to achieve abundance and happiness by maintaining a positive attitude. And that is exactly where I take issue with it.
The pursuit of happiness is not a new issue, either in the political world or in the world of religion. We know from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Prophets of Israel railed against the cult of Baal. They saw the Baal worshipers as believing that proper ritual would bring people what they desired, namely a good harvest, fertile wombs, and probably improved social status. In short, it would keep them happy. Worship of the God of Israel (at least as I understand it in its healthiest manifestation), on the other hand, was not based in convincing God to take proper care of them. It was based in the trust that if they obeyed God’s Law (that, by the way, mostly had to do with the integrity of the community) they would then thrive AS A COMMUNITY! True worship of God never pitted the interests of some people against the interests of others. It all came down to how people in the community took care of each other.
If we look at a different tradition, we see that the Buddha preached detachment from stuff. Both happiness and sadness were seen to be manifestations of the desire for stuff, and even happiness itself, to the degree that people could experience it, turned out not to be satisfying. So, the Buddha taught people how to eliminate their suffering, which is not identical to teaching them how to be happy. In his culture and in ours, happiness is just one more commodity that someone is going to try to sell you.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is also not about the accumulation of the means to be happy. It’s all about how people take care of each other – about how they function as the embodiment of the Realm of God. You know, “Love one another as I have loved you.” I have preached and written elsewhere about the startling realization that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the very things that our culture teaches us to pursue in order to be happy. I summarize those qualities as Safety, Comfort, Power, and Status.
However these varied religious traditions conceptualized God (if they did at all) health always had something to do with community and with the way people chose to relate to the rest of creation. It boiled down to a fundamental choice: Find a way to manipulate the Divine so The Universe will give you what you want, or Learn how to be a full participant in creation, relating to the rest of it as if it were an extension of yourself. In Jesus words, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
That’s my issue with so many of these popular approaches to spirituality. They’re fundamentally selfish. They foster the adolescent refrain that: “I want what I want, when I want it! And I have a right to get it, too!” Of course, if I don’t get what I’ve asked for, then I have no one to blame but myself. I must have let too many of those pesky negative feelings into my consciousness.
By the way, any religious tradition can be modified into some version of “The Secret.” American Protestant Christianity has its own (very popular) version. It’s called “The Theology of Abundance.” Its unofficial subtitle is: “How to become wealthy without guilt!”
I am not suggesting that unhappiness is any more noble or healthy or spiritual than happiness. How much happiness we have is just not the central measure of the successful life. Happiness and unhappiness are emotions that we experience as we go through life, but they are not the point of life at all!
It has always been important for communities to learn how to be healthy. Some have done it better than others. But it has never been so crucial for us to give up our focus on the desires of the individual and practice being a community – even a community of faith. The spiritual surprise in a healthy community is that individuals actually have more opportunity to differentiate and grow into their deepest identities. Individuality and Community are not opposed to each other. Selfishness and love are the opposites.
Now, with hunger and violence more rampant than ever in our world, with global warming threatening to make it difficult, if not impossible, for human (and other) life to survive on this planet, with the increasing distrust between the “Haves” and the “Have-Nots” or between groups that speak, look, believe, or worship differently, the stakes have become enormously high.
Today, the prophetic voices of many religious traditions ring loud in our ears: “Learn to be a healthy communal organism, or perish!
Will we listen and respond? Time will tell.
Meanwhile, if we insist on taking seriously “The Law of Attraction”, let’s use it to attract healthy community rather than trying to manipulate either God or The Universe to grant us personal Power, Safety, Comfort, or Status.
Wayne
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not.” The United Church - of Christ
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