“Pssst…The Untold Secret about The Secret”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
March 25, 2007

Isaiah 43: 16-21;   John 12: 1-8

Do you have any idea what is the best-selling DVD today? It’s called The Secret. It’s a compelling presentation of an idea that truthfully is not such a secret. It’s been around for a while, but we all love secrets. I’m thinking of working “secret” into the title of my next book:“ The Untold Secret of Congregational Growth”.  So, kudos to their marketing team.  It’s a well-produced, interesting romp. Wanna know the secret? It’s the spiritual “law of attraction”. Basically, what it means is that we create our own reality, for good or ill. All that we see, feel, think, and all that happens in our world is a manifestation of your personal attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts.   So the first thing I want to know is which one of you is responsible for the weather these past two weeks? The Secret is flying off the shelves, with a little help from Oprah.

Now, I love parts of this idea that we create our own reality.  First I’ll tell you what I love about the idea. Then I’ll tell you why I don’t like the idea. And finally I’ll tell you what the Secret would look like through the lens of the Christian tradition. Then, I’ll disappear after the service, to escape the wrath of those who don’t appreciate any other perspective on this movie. Seriously, this feels a bit risky, because many of my good friends – some of you sitting out there this morning – are deeply committed to the truth of The Secret.

Why I Love The Law of Attraction

Ok, here’s the nugget of truth to The Secret. More than most of us care to admit we do create our own reality. Of course, this isn’t new. Psychologists and psychotherapists ever since Freud have been making their living off of this insight. On the one hand, our unconscious assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes play an enormous role in the quality and shape our lives take than we care to admit. If I have low self-esteem, for example, because I was fed on a steady diet of criticism growing up, I may find myself living in a moldy basement apartment, underemployed, depressed, and managing to illustrate to everybody who knows me that I am not worthy of their love. As long as this remains outside conscious awareness, I will make my life a living hell, all the while claiming to be a victim of circumstance.  On the other hand, if I go into see a competent therapist and bring all this stuff to conscious awareness, systematically go about making healthier choices, and do the hard work of retraining myself to get a job that reflects my healthier self, then I may find myself – after years and years of hard work – manifesting a new reality. In find myself in a bright, clean apartment, with a good job and a loving partner. I’ve seen this happen more than once in my life.

 Even before Freud, 500 years ago, a young man, Pico della Mirandolo, ushered in the modern era. He called together a meeting of Europe’s finest philosophers, and announced that humanity had entered a new age. Now, humans would throw off the shackles of a circumscribed and pre-determined fate to steal with Prometheus the fire of the gods. In the future, he predicted, humanity would fashion a self of its own choosing. He anticipated a virtual revolution, the age of enlightenment in which the church would lose absolute power over people, kings and queens and the aristocracy would be overthrown by peasants seeking to control their own destiny, empires would fall, slaves would be freed, women would find their voice, gays and lesbians would gain the legal right to marry. All because the “myth of the given” (Ken Wilber) was being deconstructed. We are not stuck with the circumstances we were born into. We do have the power to influence our own reality – yes, yes, yes. It’s part of the dignity of the human being, a gift of the modern era.

Why I Don’t Like the Law of Attraction a la The Secret

Ok, nobody can leave here saying that Bruce doesn’t believe we play a role in creating our own reality. It’s true. My favorite people are those that take responsibility for their lives. I wish there were more of you in church! But here’s the rub: it’s not absolutely true, and this is why I can’t abide what The Secret is telling the public. Let me reiterate what the Secret is saying; for good or for ill we are responsible for creating our own reality. Not that we are responsible for how we respond to circumstances beyond our control. No, Big Circumstance (to use Bruce Cockburn’s phrase) is an illusion according to this system of thought.  Whatever happens to us we have created. Here’s why I think this idea is dangerous and harmful when taken to its absolute expression:

1.                          It fails to pass what Ken Wilber calls the “Auschwitz test” – six million Jews created the reality whereby they were exterminated? One million Rwandans created the reality whereby they were hacked to death? This is unconscionable and immoral reasoning. I’ve heard people trying to cling to the law of attraction in the face of these atrocities, and it’s not pretty.

2.                          It fails to pass the “suffering test” – in this model suffering is something that happens to an unenlightened soul.  The fully realized individual is beyond suffering – after all, if we create our own reality who’s going to ask for suffering to come into our lives? The goal inevitably becomes to create an easier, freer life, usually associated with more money. But what if suffering is a defining aspect of the spiritual journey. For Jews, Christians and Buddhists, it’s an integral component of the spiritual life. We are called to enter into and endure our own suffering and other people’s suffering –suffering that is beyond our control – and yet find God in the suffering, not just in the process of realizing your personal intentions.

3.                          It fails to pass the “rational test”. In it’s absolute form, it is magical thinking. As a species human beings were at this stage a few hundred thousand years ago. Then, the outside world was merely an extension of oneself. At this stage of human development you believed that you personally were the cause of the world. Clouds moved in the sky because you wanted them to move. You performed rituals in order to ensure that the sun would rise each new day and the rain would come to water the crops. Without your input the sun wouldn’t come up.  On an individual basis, we pass through this level of development on the way to adulthood. If we don’t, we get stuck in a narcissistic personality disorder. In developmental psychology, this is a pre-rational stage of development. We hide our face behind a pillow and think because we can’t see anybody, we are literally invisible to the world out there. If you ask a child at a pre-rational stage why a cloud is moving, they will tell you that it’s following them. But if you ask why it’s not following the person who is walking down the street in the opposite direction, they are totally unable to make sense of it. There is not outside world at this stage. But it’s a stage, en route to rational thought, wherein you realize that while you have control over your life, it’s not absolute. You understand that you are connected to the outside world, yet distinct – and it’s world that does things to you sometimes, things not of your choosing.

4.                          It fails to pass the “spiritual discipline” test. Very few people, I suspect, are rushing out after seeing The Secret to make an appointment with a psychotherapist, so they could begin a five-year journey to make conscious what had been in their unconscious. Fewer would rush out to see a spiritual director to begin the long and arduous discipline of a regular meditation practice. Most, I submit, would go home, sit down in a chair and repeat the mantra, “I’m manifesting a million dollars”.

5.                          It fails to pass the Zhao Lin Tao test. She’s a twelve-year old girl whom Bill McKibbon met in a poor rural village of China. In his new book, Bill McKibbon writes about meeting a 10 year-old girl in Northern China. Her mother left home to work in the factory in the city and never returned. Her father beats her because she’s not a boy. When she reaches grade 9, the state will no longer support her education, so this will be the end of the line as far as her education. Did Zhao Lin create her own reality? Or by thinking intently about a new reality, will she overturn 5000 years of patriarchy, stop being beaten, and get a graduate degree from Harvard? There are real victims in life. Victims of circumstance they didn’t create.

There exists out there in the real world beyond my skin and my positive thoughts, an objective reality, political, economic, and social – real barriers to manifesting a preferred reality. The four billion people on the planet earth that live in poverty and disease didn’t bring it on themselves. Grandmothers in Africa who are parenting 15 grandchildren because mom and dad have died of AIDS didn’t manifest their reality. They could sit around until the cows come home intending something different, but nothing is going to happen until a Stephen Lewis damn near kills himself trying to change the political, economic and social structures that have created the problem. So that’s what I don’t like about the “law of attraction” in its absolute form. It’s ethically untenable, politically naïve, narcissistic, and magical.

The Secret – According to the Gospel

            So, what is a Christian take on The Secret – The Secret According to the Gospel of Christ?  Look at what is happening in today’s reading. Jesus is being anointed for death! And there’s only one person in the whole bunch that understands that the political, religious and social structures are going to crucify her beloved Jesus. Jesus’ dream bumped up against the hard, cold wall of reality. The other disciples refuse to get it. They refuse to hear Jesus when he tells them that he’s going to suffer and die. It’s a consistent theme in the all the gospels. They refuse to believe that Jesus can’t manifest a reality that doesn’t include crucifixion – if he’s going to be faithful to his calling. This one woman is singled out by Jesus to be remembered for eternity whenever the gospel is proclaimed – this line is not in John’s version, but it is in the other three gospels.  Why? Because she gets that Jesus doesn’t get to escape suffering and death – Son of God or not!

What she gets is that despite Jesus’ remarkable personal power, there are some things he cannot control. What he can control is how he responds to his fate – he can remain non-violent in the face of his impending death; he can love those who hate him; he can prepare his followers to accept that death is non-negotiable; he can trust God to create even out of his suffering and death. It is precisely his faithfulness – his trust in God – in the face of what he cannot control and did not create that will form the very heart of the gospel. Remember Mary, he tells us. She gets The Secret of the gospel. 

            The Kingdom doesn’t come when Jesus is crucified. It doesn’t come when his spiritual body is raised from the grave. Poverty didn’t come to an end. Injustice continues to be a reality. Peace has not arrived upon the earth. Love as a psychological condition of the human species remains a dream of humanity. Didn’t Jesus know “the secret?

 He did, but it’s not located primarily in our capacity to manifest what we want in life. The “secret” is in the cross – doing all we can to make a difference in this world, taking all the responsibility we can muster for our lives and the lives of others, absolutely – and then when we come against those things we cannot change to take up our cross. We suffer our limitations and the limitations of our imperfect world, by loving even what we cannot change. We ask for the same grace that was in Jesus – hanging from an instrument of torture not of his making – to forgive those who hurt us. We take up the cross when it seems as though, in Leonard Cohen’s words, the best we can say is that “gates of love have budged an inch”. We acknowledge that we live in an evolutionary universe – it’s taken 14 billion years for the Spirit to arrive at this moment. In other words, even Spirit had to work within the limits imposed by an evolutionary universe.  We can take up the cross and be the living, wounded, suffering and resurrected presence of Christ in our day and age – and entrust with Christ the outcome to God.