posted by KWiz on Personal Development, Spiritual Growth

“We must never cease from exploring. At the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot

“The Secret.” Jesus of Surburbia. Drug addiction. Anorexia. Alcohol addiction. Bulemia. Sexual addiction. Workaholism. Misogyny. What do all these terms and concepts have in common?

Let’s take these examples. According to an article appearing in Salon.com entitled “Oprah’s Ugly Secret” written by Peter Birkenhead,

“The main idea of ‘The Secret’ is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it — and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it — the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme — is brilliant. But what really makes ‘The Secret’ more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam…”

Now I’m not coming down against Oprah. I happen to be a fan. I thoroughly appreciate the fact she tries to make a difference in the world on a day-to-day basis. I absolutely believe she seeks to help people learn and grow in wisdom and understanding. Evidence of this is the recent opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. She is doing vital work to help a generation of girls rise above the rim of oppression so they can help others in their country and throughout the world do the same.

Nevertheless, Birkenhead raises some interesting questions:

“I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa’s chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, read about Oprah’s connection to ‘The Secret’ and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read “The Secret” and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with ‘bad thoughts.’ Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of ‘The Secret’ are, that food doesn’t cause weight gain — thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as ‘The Secret’ advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn’t she espouse them to her students?”

My reaction to these lines was “Wow. Incredibly profound. Frightingly true.” With regard to “The Secret,” Birkenhead continues by saying,

“‘Secret’-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It’s unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. This modern idea of faith isn’t arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books — we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we’ll have Amazon send Damascus to us.”

In other words, many are looking for a quick-fix to their problems, and “The Secret” provides a pain-free way of going about the fix. As Birkenhead says,

“The kind of faith that couldn’t be reached by shortcut, the confidence of the great doubters and worriers, of Moses and Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, has been replaced by the insta-certainty and inflated ‘self-esteem’ of ‘The Secret’s’ believers.”

To me, it means we avoid the pain that permeates our lives instead of reaching down deep to discover its root. Instead of doing the work to dig it out, we seek to patch up the pain. And while those open wounds continue to ooze the blood and fluid signaling something is wrong, we put more bandages on them, seeking any kind of relief we can find.

It’s the same with the phenomenon behind the popularity of Jesus of Surburbia, (legal name Jose de Jesus) which ABC featured in their Primetime special “The Outsiders” this past week. In Jim Avila’s report, “When asked to explain who he is, de Jesus responds: ‘Jesus Christ…the second manifestation, the Second Coming of Christ.’” In fact, one of his followers said, when Avila asked her who this man who was leaving the building was, replied, “There is only one God, and he just left the building.”

What de Jesus espouses is a “no sin, anything goes” message. According to the report,

“‘Before the presence of God, there’s no more sin,’ [de Jesus] says. And with no sin, de Jesus teaches his followers, there’s no devil and no need for prayer, because after Jesus of Nazareth died and was resurrected, one can literally do no wrong in God’s eyes.”

As a Christian who studies and teaches biblical texts for a living (who was taught by credible biblical scholars at Emory University), the above claim is absurd. There is no where the Bible makes such an assertion. The claim scripture does make is that Jesus paid the price for sin; however, as the apostle Paul teaches, while sin does not rule us when we believe in Jesus as Savior, we still must not become a slave to it.

Nevertheless, it is provocative and appealing to believe sin does not exist, because if there is no sin, not only is there no accountability to anyone, a person can try to relieve whatever pain exists by whatever pleasures are available for him or her to do so. (I am contending that just because a person believes there is no sin, emotional, psychological, and physical pain within the soul still exists.) That relief can take the form of excessive alcohol and drug use, licentious use of sex, immoderate overeating, becoming a “workaholic”, inordinate use of the internet, inflicting abuse (whether emotional or physical) on another, or any other activity that masks and buries that which causes us to act out – pain. (I argue that just because a person believes there is no sin, that doesn’t at all suggest that emotional, psychological, and physical pain goes away. ) Once again, just like “The Secret,” these are quick fixes. But they don’t get at the actual problems which plagues a person’s soul.

Nevertheless, in his book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, Stephen Covey says,

“Einstein put it this way: ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.’…If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms…[those] perception[s], assumption[s]…frame[s] of reference or lens[es] through which you view the world.”

And as anyone who has undertaken this kind of self-analysis knows, this is not a quick-fix to growth, peace, or happiness. A person going through this type of examination may take three steps forward one day, only to fall two steps back the next. But that person is still ahead of the game being yet one step closer to his or her destination of being healed.

So I go back to the initial question – “The Secret.” Jesus of Surburbia. Drug addiction. Anorexia. Alcohol addiction. Bulemia. Sexual addiction. Workaholism. Misogyny. What do all these terms and concepts have in common?

The need for a quick fix.

Is it possible.

I don’t think so. Because ultimately, they leave us unfulfilled and deeper in the holes in which we found ourselves in the first place. But as T.S. Eliot says, we must continue to explore, continue to search, continue to plow through in search of the healing we need so that we can be the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, workers, and children of God He intended for us to be.