99.9%
A few weeks ago, a reader commented on my post in which I expressed my support for the ordination of women:
One is either Catholic or he (purposely did not write “he/she” here) is not. One cannot be 99.9% Catholic. You either are or you are not. Obedience is better than sacrifice, and is best when it is a sacrifice.
In other words: the cafeteria is closed.
For those of you who don’t get the allusion: when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to be Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, conservatives and ultra-traditionalists within Catholicism adopted the motto “the cafeteria is closed” as a way of expressing their belief that it is not okay for Catholics to differ with church doctrine on contentious issues, usually those involving gender or human sexuality. It refers to the pejorative label “cafeteria Catholic” which the purists use to denigrate those who have conscientious disagreements with the church.
“Cafeteria Catholic” and “the cafeteria is closed” are insults, typically used to imply that conscientious dissidents are traitors — disloyal to the church. I find it odd that the traditionalists would dare to accuse others of being traitorous, since Christ suggested that the one who calls another a traitor will answer for it in hell fire (Matthew 5:22).
Meanwhile, statements like “one cannot be 99.9% Catholic” are forms of judgment. So anyone who says something like this appears to be disobeying Christ’s command as laid out in Matthew 7:1.
Forgive my nitpicking; I merely wish to make a simple point. Those who take delight in attacking other Christians because they “pick and choose only what they want to believe” are, ironically, doing the very thing they are accusing others of doing. (more…)
Remain in Love
Yesterday a reader of this blog named Simon made this response to my post in which I announced that I’m writing a book on Christian mysticism:
Just something that immediately springs to mind. Do we really need another book on Christian mysicism? I mean, when is it going to end? There are whole libraries full of them. How about everybody, start at the Gospel, take what Jesus said seriously and take it from there? So much of this search for mysticism is just plain navel gazing and distraction.
Do we really need another book on Christian mysticism? I don’t know. Do we really need anything new? Simon suggests that we just “start at the Gospel.” It’s pretty hard to argue with a statement like this, until you stop to think about it. There’s a lot more going on here than just a dismissal of new books on mysticism. After all, mysticism itself is rejected as a “distraction.” So anything that distracts us from Jesus or the Gospel is bad. Hmmm. Think about it: just about anything that isn’t Jesus or the Gospels could be accused of being a distraction.
I can’t help but wonder if Simon really understands what mysticism is. Christian mysticism is precisely about entering into a deep, intimate, communion with Christ. My book may be about “mysticism” but that’s just to say it will be an invitation to do precisely what Simon recommends, in terms of being centered on Christ and the Gospel.
Meanwhile, consider this: the hostility to mysticism that Simon suggests under the rubric of “Why study mysticism, why not just get to know Jesus?” can easily be applied to anything. Yes, anything. (more…)
Quote for the Day
For Christ is revealed as the incarnation of God’s love for us: he is the great lover, and the Church is his beloved, and we in her. Academic theology finds its coherence, literally comes into being as a possibility, as we find in Christ God loving us and longing for our love. And it is this response to God’s love for us that is the central concern of spirituality. Prayer is in essence the loving pursuit of the beloved. The great part that silence plays in prayer has an analogy in the fact that silence becomes a mode of communion, and not an embarrassing pause, between people deeply devoted to one another. It is not without significance that the favourite single genre of mystical theology takes the form of commentary on the Song of Songs.
— Andrew Louth, Theology and Spirituality
Spirituality & The Aspiring Mystic
I have just finished a conversation with my literary agent, and I have wonderful news. My first two books, Spirituality and The Aspiring Mystic, both of which have been out of print for several years, have just been picked up by a new publisher that is specializing in reprinting books by living authors.
Spirituality will come out first, hopefully within the next few months. It will feature a new foreword that I will be writing, new cover design, and probably a new sub-title (I never did like the book’s original subtitle, which was chosen by the publisher). The Aspiring Mystic will not come out until the fall or even next spring; for this book we’re considering doing a complete revision so that it will be more of a companion piece to my forthcoming new book on Christian mysticism which is scheduled for a 2009 publication from a different publisher. It will also feature a new foreword and cover design, and will be entirely re-typeset for the new edition.
For an author, seeing books go out of print is like losing touch with your children. So having them come back into print is truly a blessing. Even better, thanks to the direction that publishing is going, this pretty much means these titles will remain in print indefinitely.
In case you just can’t wait for the new editions, used copies of both books are still available through Amazon, generally for embarrassingly low prices. Click on the images of the books to get your copies now.
Dogma, Dogmatically
My post yesterday on America’s Unfaithful Faithful elicited some very interesting comments. Consider these snippets:
Religion and Politics have one thing in common. They both make things more confusing.
Religion is a passing phase in the story of mankind on earth. There is no Truth in it at all, so you may as well not bother looking. The only truth ever is within you, and you know it when you hear it.
Sigh.
When I wrote my first book (which came in 1997), one of the bad habits that my editor had to break me of, was making sweeping generalizations.
- If I wrote “Contemplation makes you happy,” he would patiently reply, “If there is one person somewhere in the world who has not found happiness through contemplation, then this statement is false.”
- So I would go back and say something like “Many, perhaps even most, people who contemplate find that it helps them to become happier.” Then he’d write, “Can you prove this? Where’s the research, where’s the evidence?”
- Finally, I’d write, “In my experience, contemplation has helped me to become a happier person.” And then the editor would let it stand.
This is a made-up example, because it’s both too early in the morning and the editing of that book happened too long ago for me to recall an actual example from the book. But you get the drift.
What is at issue here is similar to something that Wikipedia calls Peacock Terms. A peacock term is a statement or assertion that is offered as being self-evident, when in reality it isn’t. As Wikipedia bluntly puts it, “Instead of telling the reader that a subject is important, use facts to show the subject’s importance.” Put another way, instead of telling the reader that your assertion is true, use facts to show the veracity of your assertion. When it comes to religion and spirituality, often the only “facts” at our disposal is our own experience. That’s okay, but then our writing should reflect that.
I’d be less annoyed by the above statements if they had been cast like this:
In my experience religion, like politics, just seems to make things more confusing.
I think that religion is unreliable as a means of finding truth. Frankly, I believe it’s better to seek truth within.
These statements, unlike the examples quoted at the beginning of this post, actually invite the reader in. I for one would be curious to hear why the first commentator finds religion so confusing, or why the second one prefers personal experience to external tradition as a means for apprehending truth. But in all honesty, when someone projects their opinion into an all-encompassing statement like “Religion is confusing” or “Religion contains no truth,” I stop listening to them — because my experience of religion is different. I find religion no more, or less, confusing than life in general (granted, I have a pretty high tolerance for ambiguity and paradox). And while I recognize that religion can be a haven for all sorts of untruth, in my humble experience I’ve found insight into truth through the received wisdom of religion that has literally expanded my consciousness, over and over again.
The problem with peacock terms is that they are tossed off as dogmatically self-evident. “Everyone knows religion is full of it!” Well, no, everyone doesn’t know that. And everyone doesn’t agree with it, either. Religion already has enough problems with dogma — statements accepted as true within a given faith community that may or not appear as evidently true to outsiders. To use unverified dogmatic language when writing about religion, it seems to me, just compounds the problem.
America’s Unfaithful Faithful
A recent study by the Pew Forum documents the growing “spiritual mobility” of Americans: more and more Americans are abandoning the religious affiliation of their upbringing and taking on a new religious or spiritual identity (or non-identity). Read an article about this study here.
My friend who alerted me to this fascinating study notes, “What it says to me is that people are seeking something behind church doors that they aren’t finding.” I’d agree with that, but I also think it speaks to how religion has increasingly become more like a marketplace phenomenon (just because I like to drink Guinness doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a Foster’s now and then), suggesting that changing churches is for many people no more momentous than deciding if the new car will be a Chevy or a Ford. I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard the phrase “health-care consumers” (I was in college at the time) — that something as holy and sacred as health care could be reduced to the mentality of the free market struck me as just somehow terribly wrong. I suppose we are rapidly moving to the day where churchgoers will be seen as “spirituality consumers.”
Memory Lane
I just discovered an online resource that archives old versions of websites. I’ve had a website at www.anamchara.com since 1996, and yes, the archives go back almost that far. It’s not by any means perfect — lots of broken links — but some of the archived versions are pretty much complete, and for me it was quite a trip down memory lane to look at the evolution of my website, from the amateurish page at the beginning that was essentially an infomercial for my one published book, to the blog that I am lovingly nurturing at the present.
Follow this link to see www.anamchara.com as archived on May 22, 1997. At that time I called the site “The House of Breathings: A Virtual Sanctuary for the Contemplative Way.” I was still an Episcopalian (although with marked pagan leanings), had a ponytail, no beard, and barely any grey hair. My first book had literally just been published, my second one wouldn’t appear for another two and a half years. I was only 36 years old. Yes, the site looks like something a 5th grader could do today, but give me a break: this was 1997!
A fistful of dirt
Here’s a wonderful story recounted by John Shea in Daybreak: Daily Reflections for Lent and Easter:
There was an old Celt who loved his wife, his children, his friends, and his jar. But most of all he loved the land he trod and fought for food. So when his time came, his sons carried him from the stone cottage and laid him on the stone earth. He clenched a fistful of Ireland and was gone.
When he arrived at the gates that only swing in, God appeared in the long robes of judgment. He noticed the closed hand. “Old man, you are not allowed to bring anything in.”
But the hand with the loved land heaved beneath the judge’s nose, “Then I stay outside.”
After a while, God appeared a second time as a pub mate with cap and pipe. He threw a tavern arm over the old man’s shoulders. “Friend, dust belongs to the wind. Let go of that earth and come inside.”
“Never,” said the tightfisted one.
After a while, God came out a third time as a small boy. He ran to the ear of the old man. “Grandfather, the gates only open for those with open hands.”
The old man rose with a slow sadness and never looked down as caked and crumbled Ireland fell.
The gates opened like arms flung wide and the old man entered. Inside was all of Ireland.
Holy Eros, or, “Only God can sleep with everyone”…
Other folks in the Christian blogosphere are worked up over a Michigan Assembly of God pastor’s decision to post a lengthy quote on his blog from Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic theologian who ponders the erotic dimension of life in Christ (not in a salacious or profligate manner, but certainly in an honest and candid way). One of these days, I hope that the average Christian will stop being afraid of the power of our God-given sexuality. I suppose it should not surprise me that this day has not yet arrived.
Here is the quotation in question, from Pastor Chris Hooton’s blog:
Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: “It’s pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people, then you go home and sleep alone.”
Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.
These two answers, Janis Joplin’s and Jesus’, are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone. What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.
To understand our sexuality and to live with its unfulfilled tensions, it can be most helpful simply to understand this. In loving, the ultimate wound is not to be able to marry everyone. The greatest human hunger, felt in every cell in our being, is that we cannot be completely united with everyone and everything….
It is important to understand this, but it is also important not to misunderstand it. Because our sexuality is ultimately geared to embrace everyone does not mean that we can be promiscuous and, already here in this life, try to live that out. In fact, paradoxically, it means the opposite. Only God can sleep with everyone, and thus, only in god can we sleep with everyone. In this life, even though our sexuality has geared up for universal embrace, we only have two options that are life-giving: Either we embrace the many through the one (by sleeping with one person within a monogamous marriage) or we embrace the one through the many (be sleeping with no one, in celibacy). Both of these are ways that will eventually open our sexuality up so as to embrace everyone. If we go the route of promiscuity, eventually, we will embrace no one.
— Richard Rolheiser, The Holy Longing
Random Saturday afternoon thoughts about the existence of angels
When William Blake was a little boy, he saw an angel in a tree. On his deathbed, he sang songs with all the angels that were surrounding him.
Like most people, I don’t have angel-vision anywhere near what Blake enjoyed. I’m the kind of person who occasionally sees someone or something out of the corner of my eye, and then I turn and whatever it was is gone. If it was ever there at all.
This most vividly happened a few years back when I visited a holy well near Clonmel in Ireland. I saw a woman dressed in white standing by my car. But then I looked again and no one was there. I was parked in an open space along an empty street. Was it just my imagination, playing tricks with me? Or did some sort of incorporeal being momentarily break through my psychic defenses?
I’m rather skeptical by nature and I tend to be suspicious of people who get all sorts of psychic messages or marching orders from God (or the gods, or the angels, or Mary, or whomever). I translate our solid legal principle “innocent until proven guilty” into a scientific way of approaching preternatural phenomena: I assume such things have a perfectly reasonable and down-to-earth explanation. So I guess I’m saying I consider nature to be innocent of rogue metaphysics (unless proven guilty).
But I’m not an atheist. I believe in God. I believe that it’s simply arrogant to assume that evolution pretty much topped out with humans and whales. But the question, of course, is where will the dance of evolution take us, from here? Will we transcend our bodies, like the Organian race on Star Trek? Which is another way of wondering: are angels just the next rung up on the evolutionary ladder? In the absence of any kind of evidence, this can only be a matter for speculation. But as Ken Wilber points out, validity is measured in matters of consciousness not by how representationally true something can be shown to be (because we simply can’t measure any consciousness, not even our own). Instead, validity is found in truthfulness.
Angels, spirit beings, heavenly messengers: they appear in cultures the world over. Sure, there are plenty of cranks and attention-seekers who tell stories of their angelic encounters. But there are also seem to be plenty of humble, ordinary people, who have keen minds and are willing to question themselves, who nevertheless have experiences that they interpret as angelic in nature.
So maybe the existence of angels is only a matter of speculation. But I think it’s worth the speculating. And just perhaps, the more open we are to doing the speculating, the more likely we will get to walk with the likes of William Blake: and sing the celestial song.
The Stake and the Soil
This thought occurred to me this morning:
So often, we approach religion as if it were a stake being used to hold up a plant in the garden. You and I and everyone else are the poor unruly plants, in need of the strong sturdy stake to provide firm, unyielding, inflexible (and completely external) “support.” This support helps the plant grow, but it also restricts the plant movement. “Conservatives” are those who think the loss of freedom is worth the chance to grow straight and tall, while “liberals” think that the freedom is really more valuable than conforming to some unbending external standard, no matter how adept it is at fostering growth in the straight and narrow.
But what if religion isn’t really the stake at all? What if the point of religion is to be the soil itself, the ground from which all life emerges? This is not to say that the stake is rendered unnecessary: stakes such as moral codes, ethical norms, and educational benchmarks could still have their use in the formation of a strong and healthy life. But those “stakes” are not the same thing as the soil, the rich, wonderful, dark humus out of which all life emerges.
Quote for the Day
Our discontent with the church is the very reason that we engage rather than pull out. Within the brokenness of the church is our own brokenness.
—Shane Claiborne, quoted in The New Atheist Crusaders
and Their Unholy Grail by Becky Garrison
Quote for the Day
Paul never conceives Christ Jesus in us in a material manner, a concrete, physical way of existing within us. He, in so many ways, leads us into the indwelling presence of Christ Jesus by maintaining always the “mystery” of God’s perfect love for us and our return of that love to God in and through Christ and the Holy Spirit. If we wish to enter into Paul’s mystical vision of our unity in love with the risen Lord, we must strenuously avoid any “objectification” of Christ’s union within us.
— George Maloney, SJ, The Mystery of Christ in You:
The Mystical Vision of Saint Paul
Teach pobail
No, the title of this post has nothing to do with instructing indigents on how to get out of jail. It’s an Irish word that means “church.” The correct pronunciation for American English speakers would be approximately chack PO-bwil (it would more or less sound like “Jack Pobble”).
What’s neat about this word, though, is to dissect its meaning by looking at each word individually. “Teach” means “house.” “Pobail” means community (it’s a cognate of people). In other words, this Irish word for church basically means “the house of the community” or “house of the people.”
The potential cross-fertilization between Celtic spirituality and the house church movement probably needs no further commentary. It’s just nice to see how the Irish language, which of course is the native language spoken by at least two of the three persons in the Holy Trinity, is so supportive of this nexus.
Personal Update…
Lots of fun stuff happening in Carl-world…
- The outline/table of contents of the big mysticism book is mostly complete. I meet again with the world’s coolest spiritual director, Fr. Tom Francis OCSO, on Friday to go over the details. This is important because once the skeleton is done I can start hanging the meat on the bones. I probably have some 30,000 words written on the book — not to mention material from this blog that will eventually find its way into the book — but I have to have a working outline before I can begin to put it all together.
- Yesterday I signed up for bass guitar lessons! They start March 19, which is good, because my Ken Wilber class runs through March 5. I’m excited. Right now I only know how to play two little riffs: the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water” and the middle section of “Roundabout” (the section with the lyrics that begin “Along the drifting cloud, the eagle searching down…”). Obviously, I need professional help to do something other than make noise…
- Also yesterday, thanks to some über-cool rebates and combining my DSL, cellular, and landline service into a package deal from AT&T, I was able to upgrade my phone to a BlackBerry, with only about $11 out of pocket expense and an actual reduction in my monthly phone/mobile/DSL costs. This is very exciting. I’m not the most technically up-to-date person — considering that the BlackBerry has been around since 1999, I guess that I’m finally just now crawling into the twenty-first century. I know the BlackBerry is all about email and online connectivity, but I’m mostly excited about the ability to blog and/or take notes when I’m not at a computer.
- Thanks to my brother’s lead, my family is in the process of moving my father from Virginia to an assisted living center in Athens, Georgia. He’ll only be about a mile from my brother (which is good because my brother is retired and can spend more time with Dad) and only about 70 miles from me. This is an 87.5% reduction in the distance I will have to travel to see Dad. We’re all excited about this. The move should happen by early March.
Life is good.
Salvation and Sacrifice
Last night Fran and Rhiannon and I enjoyed the hospitality of three house church communities gathered for an intra-church conference this weekend in Lithia Springs. After a potluck dinner one of the church groups performed skits based on the wisdom of the letter to the Colossians. Much wonderful singing and heartfelt prayer and praise rounded out what was a delightful evening.
As an active practicing Catholic, my spiritual life is oriented toward monasticism and sacramentalism rather than evangelicalism, so it’s always an interesting experience when I participate in a non-liturgical style of worship, last night being no exception. Catholics don’t do a lot of personal testimony and sharing (that’s an understatement), so I find that evangelical worship can be quite intimate and revealing, even to a one-time guest like I was last night. At one point, one person shared an insight he had received about salvation. And in doing so, I received an unexpected insight of my own, into some significant theological differences that separate Catholics and Protestants. (more…)
Quote for the Day
Every year dairy cows are artificially inseminated to produce a calf to maintain their milk production. A little over half their calves are male. Since these males cannot produce milk and the need for work animals has been replaced by machines, they are useless to the dairy farmer. Such males would grow to a size of 1200 lbs. and live 20-25 years and the cost of feeding, housing, and cleaning up after them would be huge. Therefore, the male calves are killed within a few days of birth, chained by the neck in a small, dark, cramped stall for 4-5 months and then killed for veal, or raised for 1 ½ years for beef. Because the dairy farmer cannot make a profit without killing the males, in every dairy product there is a hidden chunk of veal or beef.
— Jim Skirha, quoted in the
Christian Vegetarian Association
e-newsletter, 2/17/08
With apologies to Nirvana…
“Here we are now, entertain us!”
It may work as the refrain of a rock anthem, capturing the postmodern spirit of a generation weaned on cable TV and video games. But if this sentiment describes the future of Christian mysticism, then I need a new topic to blog about.
Paul commended his readers to “Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5, New Jerusalem Bible) and for contemplatives, this means to enter into the same Godly consciousness that characterized Christ himself (never mind that some of the more recent translations of this verse replace “mind” with “attitude,” betraying the disenchanted, anti-transcendent, flatland assumptions of our age). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that entering into unitive consciousness is a breath-taking experience if there ever were one. But this doesn’t mean that mysticism is about experience. To say mysticism is about experience is like saying a car is about fossil fuels. Sure, you need gasoline to make the thing go, but the point is to get somewhere, not to just sit around and groove on the noise that the engine makes. Or to use another metaphor: The point behind morphine is to alleviate pain; people who take it just to get high are abusing it. In a similar vein, the point behind mystical consciousness is to become Christ in the world, loving and serving those who are victimized, imprisoned, naked, hungry, anxious, violent, terrified, ill, dying, impoverished, addicted, starving, elderly, vulnerable, weak, angry, oppressed, marginalized, self-involved, unrepentant, and otherwise wounded or broken. If we reduce mysticism to some sort of cool spiritual entertainment, then we will have become the religious equivalent of a junkie. Which means that instead of being Christ for others, we will be the ones to whom others will come as Christ…
Sorry to be so cranky about this. But I think that a lot of the hostility to mysticism that surges through the conservative corners of the church may have to do with the idolatry of experience that has infected our culture so thoroughly. Granted, you can’t have mysticism without having experience. But I’ll say it again: this doesn’t mean that mysticism is about experience. it is the means, not the end.
The Choking Game
Here’s a sobering news article: The “Choking Game” has killed at least 82 children.
You can read more about the Choking Game (also called the Fainting Game and numerous other names) at Wikipedia’s entry for the “Fainting Game.” Basically, it’s a daredevil game that adolescents and even younger children play in which they submit to choking or strangulation just long enough to get a “dreamy feeling.” Obviously, this is a terribly inexact science and so dozens of youths have lost their lives looking for this momentary pleasure.
One of the continual challenges of mystical spirituality is learning how to celebrate extraordinary experiences of the Presence of God, without orienting our lives to trying to engineer such experiences. This is particularly difficult in our day, when we as a culture are addicted to experiential “highs” — even if the quest of such experience has potentially deadly consequences.
Everyone wants to feel good. We all crave pleasure and seek to avoid pain. But I think we need to reflect on what it means to live in a society where children risk death for a transitory high, and where ecstatic experience has become more important to spiritual seekers than living a holy life.
Breaking the Mystical Thermometer
A reader named Judy comments on my Teresa of Ávila page thusly:
… as to the stages of mysticism, the less I know the better. I do not want that craving of evaluating or one could say taking their spiritual temperature ever again. That sneaky ego always popping up saying “well done”. I am terrified of taking pride in what is “all God” and his work in me. I know myself and how quickly I can slide right down the chute, having done it several times.
As for being “terrified” of pride, I’d like to gently encourage Judy to consider Jesus’ repeated command to have no fear. That said, I certainly can appreciate her desire to live in a space uninfected, as it were, by the “sneaky ego” and the many ways hubris can insinuate itself into our spiritual lives. Which leads to why I find her comment so important:
We need to be careful whenever we put too much cognitive energy into understanding the dynamics or developmental process of mysticism (or spirituality in general). It’s way, way, way too easy to get caught up in measuring ourselves against what other people have said about the way in which the unitive life unfolds. (more…)
A Druid’s Final Resting Place?
My dear friend Judith alerted me to this fascinating news article:
Possible Grave of a Druid found in the United Kingdom
My only quibble with this article is its calling this archaeological find the “first” such evidence of a druid burial. I think the case can be (and has been) made that the Lindow Man bog body, unearthed in the 1980s, is that of a druid as well.
Gerald G. May: Mental Health and Contemplation
A reader writes:
Got a question for you. I’ve recently been promoted to a new job at the hospital where I work, and I’m in a position now where I can do some book or journal reviews for health providers nationwide. I’d like to do something in the area of spirituality and mental health, and was wondering if you might have any recommendations. We are working with people who have serious mental illness, and are in a unique position to offer hope to others.
What about the writings of Gerald G. May: Addiction & Grace: Love & Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions, Care of Mind Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spiritual Direction or Simply Sane: The Spirituality of Mental Health? He was a psychiatrist (Rollo May’s younger brother, actually) and also a Christian contemplative. He passed away a few years back but I think his work is still relevant. May was a leader of the Shalem Institute, an ecumenical Christian spirituality center located in Maryland just outside of Washington, DC. I love his work and it might be nice to review it. There are other wonderful book of his, too, notably Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology – but the first three are the ones I think are most germane to mental health professionals.
Positive Thoughts
The Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, the Prayer of Jabez, What the Bleep?… like many people who desire to orient my life around the love of God rather than my desires, I find many of the pop-culture “think positive and get what you want” movements to be troubling. I think they are primrose paths that distract people into a tar-baby-like relationship with their appetites, encouraging a focus on the stuff of ambition rather than cultivating a deep faith shaped by gratitude for blessings and patient trust to see through trials.
Having said this, I also think that those of us who intuitively reject the Pied Piper song of the Prosperity Gospel and its many Christian and New Age cousins need to be aware of the temptation to fall into opposite errors. This was brought home to me just last night when I was talking to a good friend. (more…)
