I’ve always been a fan of Monty Python, all the way back to the first time they were on television. I love the group’s wacky sense of humor shown not only on their TV shows, but in the movies they made. A couple of them are on religious themes: Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, now made into an hilarious musical Spamalot with the wacky Python knights off on a somewhat less than chivalrous adventure, and Life of Brian, a parody of the life of Jesus that, at its conclusion, has the smiling savior hanging on cross between two thieves he’s trying to cheer up, singing:
Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing.And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...
Ah, Jesus, if it were only so easy. I know you get to go to heaven. You’ve got a deal with your father. But what about the thieves? And what about us? Should we always be looking at the bright side of life? Yes, say the proponents of the Gospel of Prosperity – those who say we should just brighten up, even if our lives are just plain rotten. The preachers of this Gospel have been attracting folks to their message ever since the days of Amy Simple McPherson. When it comes to religion, by almost any measure, the most successful preachers aren’t those preaching hell-fire and brimstone – or, in our case, logic and reason. They are telling anyone who will listen that if we just engage in positive thinking everything is going to be all right: “Always look on the bright side of life.”
According to Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America:
Gone are the threat of hell and the promise of salvation, along with the grim story of Jesus’ torment on the cross; in fact, the cross has been all but banished from the largest and most popular churches of the new evangelism….
Instead of harsh judgments and harrowing tales of suffering and redemption, the new positive theology … offers promises of wealth, success and health in this life, now, or at least very soon. You can have that new car or house or necklace because God wants to “prosper you.”
… And the way to get prosperity to “manifest” in your life isn’t through prayer. It’s through positive thinking.
Ehrenreich is a cancer survivor who found that chemo-therapy and a painful regimen of radiation treatment were more important to her becoming a cancer survivor than what she calls the “pabulum” of positive thinking: a mind set she believes encourages “victim-blaming, political complacency and a culture-wide flight from realism.” She says an emphasis on such “bright-sidedness” is not only keeping many of those who must confront diseases like hers from getting the help they need; it’s keeping our society from doing what it needs to do to achieve constructive social change. Ehrenreich says: “As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly” tried to make people believe that to “be disappointed, resentful or downcast is to be a ‘victim’ and a ‘whiner.” So, get off it, and cheer up. Being positive is all we need to do to make things better.
It’s this philosophy that lies behind the Gospel of Prosperity that so many ministers successful, like the minister about whom we heard in this morning’s reading. Forget about Jesus saying it’s going to be as hard for the wealthy to get into heaven as for a person to squeeze through the eye of a needle. Pastor Garay says Jesus wants his followers to be wealthy. He wants them to be able to find their heaven right here on earth, with nice homes, big cars, huge TV sets and Carnival vacations. And they can have it, says another preacher of prosperity, Joel Osteen, whose church is a huge former basketball arena in Houston, because people can produce whatever them want by just “seeing it in their minds.” And if they don’t do this they’re going to face doom, because the Devil is a negative thinker who wants you to believe: “you’ll never amount to anything.” There’s even a minister named Jim Sammons who says this. He tells his followers to think positively so they can to get out of debt and tithe. Do you think a Sammons could ever get away with that here at JUC? If he could, we’d have no budget problems!
But you don’t have to go to a church to hear such a message. In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, which you can get for a great discount on Amazon.com, T. Harv Eker says all we need to do to overcome the fact that wealth isn’t flowing our way is place our hand over our heart and say:
I admire rich people!
I bless rich people!
I love rich people!
And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!
Or, if we prefer to get such a message in person, we go hear what Ehrenreich calls one of the “spiritual cowgirls,” like Gabrielle Bernstein, who give workshops all over the country. In her workshops, Bernstein tells her followers all they need to do to “manifest their desires” is to think prosperity into being. And, we better to this, because if we don’t our lives are going to be disasters. Another of these cowgirls, Rhonda Byrne, suggests in her best-selling book, The Secret, that bad things, even the tsunamis in Indonesia or the earthquakes in Haiti and Chili happen not because of unavoidable quirks of nature, but because doom-thinkers are “on the same frequency as the event.” Remember Pat Robertson’s claim that 911 happened because Americans were soft on homosexuality? So, we better be careful about what we think.
Clearly, there is reason to be weary about an emphasis on the power of our thinking, including when it comes to dealing with a disease like the cancer. In no way, Ehrenreich believes, was her cancer the result of negative thinking, anymore than is an earthquake or tsunami. And in no way could positive thinking have cured it. She doesn’t mean being gloomy would have helped her. When she found out about her cancer she decided she would be hopeful that, with help, she would be able to overcome the disease – and she was. But she bridals at the idea, promoted by some: “breast cancer is not a problem, not even an annoyance – it is a ‘gift,’” as though it’s a blessing to be able to suffer – to always have to “learn from something.” But she found “those who can’t or won’t adopt such a sunny attitude may be ostracized or browbeaten,” which also isn’t of much help in fighting a disease.
Ehrenreich wasn’t willing to buy into the cult of positive thinking because she discovered: “The sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost” because: “it requires the denial” of one’s “feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer.” She says” “This is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining,” but is not so easy on the person who has cope with the disease.
One of the ironies for people doing this is that they often have to minister to their friends rather than having their friends minister to them. Someone who is coping with a disease like cancer doesn’t need to offered advice about positive thinking. They need to be offered what Paul talks about in I Corinthians 13, probably the most often quoted, and most helpful, parts of the Bible. Paul says that no matter what the situations in which we find ourselves, it is with faith, hope and love we should approach our lives. Faith means trusting that we have the strength and courage required to deal with whatever it is we have to confront. Hope means believing good things will come our way, in sprite of what4ver may be happening now. Love means believing not only can we care about others, we can be open to them caring about us, instead of believing we must face everything on our own. Our Universalist forbears thought that living this way would bring to life they believed was Divine. Our Unitarian forbears believed that living this way would develop the kind of character in us that would save both us and the world in which we live.
While I don’t believe that when bad stuff come our way we should, like that Python up there on the Cross, just look on the bright side of life – after all, the Gospels say that when Jesus was nailed to the cross he cried out asking God why he had forsaken him. I believe, no matter what Ehrenreich may say, having the faith, hope and love talked about in I Corinthians 13 are just as important as the other things we may need to do in facing a disease, including taking advantage of the best medical help we can find. I also believe Michelle Goldberg, writing in the on-line journal, Religious Dispatches, is right in saying that at some points Ehrenreich overstates her case and we need: “some variant of determined optimism” to not only deal with the tough things in our personal lives, but also with the issues facing our society. Goldberg says: “It’s delicious” to watch Ehrenreich “demolish the smug pieties that rationalize so much American injustice, but even a committed pessimist can see that not all positive thinking is negative.”
Ehrenreich actually seems to understand this. She says she didn’t launch into her critique of positive thinking “in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment,” nor does she have a “romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue.” On the contrary, she says: “I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, more joy,” in people’s lives. In her own vision of Utopia, Ehrenreich says: “there is not only more comfort and security for everyone … there are also more parties, festivities and opportunities for dancing in the streets.” But, she says: “we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it.”
Unitarian Universalism is sometimes faulted for forgetting about the dancing and centering on our personal responsibility for dealing with problems. But what is there that can its place: magic or divine intervention or getting on the bandwagon of the cult of positive thinking? If only it was that simple. Sure, we need to get out from under the black clouds we create. We need to be hopeful, have faith that good things can happen and be caring. But we also need to be realists when dealing with whatever problems we have to face. In another of the verses in I Corinthians 13, Paul says that when facing life we’ve got to stop thinking and acting like a child, who looks through a glass darkly, and see what’s real, “even as we are seen.”
Or as it’s put by Jack Canfield, author of the famous Chicken Soup of the … Everything! If we want to be successful in our lives, instead of just thinking positively, we should:
Be aware – Canfield says life tells us things every day. Do this. Don’t do that. Think about this. Try me. Forget that. We live in a world that seemingly encourages us to live on autopilot. Successful people fly manually every day and so should we. When those feedback signals come in, listen to them in planning your next step.
Be committed – Commit to finding out why things aren’t working and learn what will fix them. Once we start the process it will be much easier to continue. Nothing fruitful stems from inaction.
Be trusting – Trust that making changes to the situations in which we find yourself will ultimately bring the best results. Sure, we might go through discomfort during a change and experience some unlikely or unwelcome outcomes, but in the end we’ve got to trust that things will come out all right.
It was in adopting this kind of response to her cancer – and then engaging in the fight she needed to wage to overcome it – that brought health and happiness to Barbara Ehrenreich. And, it’s what may bring the same result for us when things aren’t going so well. If I can twist around a bit what Bryan was singing up there on the cross, we all know that:
Some things in life are bad…
And that can really make us mad…
But when things make us want to swear and curse…
It’s not going to help to grumble or whistle…
We’ve got to get to work...
Adapted From an Article in The Atlantic by Hanna Rosin
I drove up to the church in Charlottesville where pastor Fernando Garay’s bright blue Mercedes was parked in a place where everyone could see it. Billy Gonzales, one of the parishioners, remembers how back in Mexico Pastor Garay always talked about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” Now, says Gonzales, he talks about jobs and houses and making money, which eventually came to make sense to him: money is “really important,” he now believes, and besides, “we love the money in Jesus name! Jesus loved money, too!”
In his sermon that morning Garay said, “You don’t have to say: ‘God bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!” he went on: “Fight the attack of the Devil on your finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week! Now, now, now!” he preached to the men in the front row, as they raised their Bibles and wept. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” On the alter, as Garay spoke, alongside the other paraphernalia, were the key to his Mercedes.