Category: spirituality

Transformative Loss: Finding Strength in Lent

Lent is a time of loss. The 40 days before Easter are meant to commemorate the 40 years the ancient Israelites were lost in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Lent is also a time when Christians lose things, give them up, as a way of commemorating Christ’s great loss, the sacrifice of  his life on a cross.

       Lent is a time of repentance, of turning around, of turning away from things that may be addictive habits the rest of the year. Some give up chocolate, dessert, or that lovely glass of wine after work. Many go deeper and see Lent as a time to lose unholy attitudes: jealousy, self-pity, unforgiveness, adulterous thoughts, the internal sins that no one knows about except us.

       Some choose loss during Lent, and some have loss thrust upon them. Due to the financial meltdown, people are losing their jobs, homes, businesses, retirement plans, and peace of mind.

       Those who work in palliative care, hospice, and hospital emergency departments receive training in how a person’s “assumptive world,” all the assumptions they have about the way life will be, can implode in an instant: their son or daughter is killed in a car accident, their spouse learns they have cancer, has a stroke, or dies. The normal response is to feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly disappeared, you are falling, and your whole life is falling apart.

       The scriptures contain one of the most spectacular stories of loss ever recorded, a story that makes most of our losses seem small by comparison. Job was a man of God who had it all: great wealth, a wonderful family, and an outstanding reputation. Then he had a total meltdown: he lost all his money, his family, and even his health. His friends accused him of bringing all this on himself through some hidden sin, although he couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve this. Even his wife urged him to “curse God and die.” However, despite all the absurdity, he continued to trust God.

       A time of loss can be a time of personal transformation. When people lose precious things, they start to realize that, despite their former assumptions, life is very vulnerable, dreams are fleeting at best, and one’s fortunes can suddenly reverse. The natural response is to ask, “What is really important in life?”

       In the face of all this loss, people search for a solid foundation for their life, something eternal and unchanging. People start to realize that the only lasting thing is God. Quite simply, it’s God or nothing. 

       It’s not surprising that church attendance goes up during individual or social meltdowns. Next to God, the church is one of the few constants in our civilization. It has been there through the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the advent of modern science, communism, two planetary wars, and the Great Depression. The church has witnessed many severe storms come and go.

       People who build their lives on the solid foundation of God know that, with God’s help, they can withstand any storm, crisis, or meltdown, just as the church has. They also know that God can bring a greater good out of any loss.

       Throughout the scriptures, God brings new life out of evil, no matter how great. Job trusted God and was vindicated in the end: everything and more was restored to him. As our human exemplar, Jesus trusted God and was resurrected so that all of us could reach the Promised Land.

       No matter how bad it gets, as long as we trust God, all is well, and as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Understanding Spirituality: The Essence of Consciousness

    God is Mother as much as Father. God as Mother is welcoming, warm, and inclusive. Returning to God as Mother would be a return to compassion and wisdom as a way of life.

The most foundational thing in existence is not matter, atoms, or quarks, but consciousness or spirit. Ultimately, we live in a spiritual universe.

    The bottom line is not money; it is God’s love. So, reality is foundationally safe and benevolent. Ultimately, it is not a scary universe. 

    God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.

    Salvation is not perfect morality. It is letting the dance/wind/fire of God flow through you.

    True religion is humble, not judgmental. It says, “Maybe I am the problem here, not you.”

    Love is to recognize the oneness of all things. God is in all of us, I am in you and you are in me, and we are all in this together. 

    God is not a concept to be believed in. God is a reality to be experienced.

    God, who is infinitely perfect and blessed, in an act of sheer goodness, created humans to share in God’s blessed life. That is our ultimate purpose.

        All the world’s major religions have identified the main problem as the ego.

    All the world’s major religions have identified the main problem as the ego.

    We all need to stop focusing on which worldview or religion is superior and start focusing on inner transformation by letting go of our egos.

    The only way to let go of ego is awareness of it. Ego is unconsciousness, so awareness kills it.

    The foundation of all justice is that our equality is intrinsic and founded on God’s love, not earned. Through no doing of our own, we are all equally loved by God.

    A teacher imparts knowledge or techniques. A master teaches by his or her way of life.

    All the great spiritual masters say: wake up: God has a plan for the creation. The plan is that God be all in all. This is the ultimate purpose of the cosmos. Do not shut God out of your life!

    The rich person may be poor, blind, and naked in God’s sight. Or not. The poor person may be rich in God’s sight. Or not. Outward state is no indicator of God’s favor or disfavor.

    “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.” – John Henry Newman

    To have everything, desire nothing.

    The garden of Eden, paradise, heaven, and God are within us, and it is the knowledge of good and evil, and the judgmentalism that comes with it, that keeps us out of the unity of all things.

    Life has always been a struggle and always will be. The fact life is hard does not mean it is not good. If the universe was perfect, there wouldn’t be anything to do. God made life good not easy.

    If we accept whatever God gives us: honor or dishonor, long life or short, health or sickness, riches or poverty, then we are free indeed.

    God is the only true object of desire because God alone has all love, knowledge, truth, justice, peace, freedom, and wisdom.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

From Winning to Losing: Navigating life’s Challenges

The universe is all about loss – things are constantly becoming, that is, changing. Nothing stands still, so we are constantly losing the way things were. Loss is built into the very fabric of reality and is essential to all life. Every creature is born, grows, and then dies.

       The first half of life is about winning, getting, and accumulating. Most people gain an education, their first big job, a spouse, a house, and children in the first half of life. The second half of life is about losing: the children grow up and move out, friends start dying, your spouse may leave you or die, you may be downsized, you retire, you may move out of your house, and your health starts to deteriorate.

       Eastern societies had a way of coping with these losses. There were four recognized stages of life: student, householder, withdrawal from active life to contemplate your losses and death, and finally, leaving everything to become a holy man or woman. In Western societies, there is no conscious process like this – you are supposed to keep accumulating throughout your life.

       Therefore, it’s a shock when we start to lose, but contrary to what we all believe, we are more losers than winners in Western societies. Loss always begets sadness, and the rapid change in our culture means rapid loss. However, we have no structured life stages that can help us cope with this. This may explain why we have suffered an epidemic of depression, as witnessed by the high proportion of the population that is on anti-depressants.

       We believe we are a society of winners because the media emphasizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous. What it doesn’t highlight is the thousands of people who tried but failed at becoming an American or Canadian Idol, or the five hundred individuals who applied for one job and didn’t get it, or the team that lost. The media makes everyone who is not a superstar feel inadequate, and so, alongside the epidemic of depression, we also struggle with a plague of diminished self-esteem.

       All these losses have four main purposes. First, to gain wisdom. In the first half of life, you grow in knowledge and material things; in the second half, you are meant to grow in wisdom about spiritual things, a spirituality of subtraction. The second purpose is to gain compassion. You can only open your heart to the suffering of others to the extent that you have suffered yourself. Thirdly, all these small losses are meant to prepare you for the biggest loss of all, your own death, in which you literally lose everything. Finally, these losses are meant to motivate you to search for and find the only permanent thing, that is, God.

       In the face of financial meltdowns and all the other losses in our lives, the only real losers are the ones who have not gained compassion for the setbacks and struggles of others and the wisdom to know that all of us die and all things pass away except God.

       Christians believe in a man who was arguably the biggest loser of all time. He started his earthly life in an adoring family and was adored by wise men and angels. He ended his life on earth publicly humiliated and put to a grisly death by the secular authorities as a criminal and by the religious authorities as a heretic. He failed his divine mission, failed everyone, even God.

       However, Jesus clung to the bitter end to his faith that the one thing no one can lose is God’s love, and so God rewarded him for this faithfulness. Two thousand years later, he still has more followers than anyone in history, people who come together to adore the wisest and most compassionate person who ever lived and, therefore, the biggest winner of all.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.. http://www.brucetallman.com.

Hypocrisy: not just religion!

People may refuse to attend religious institutions for a multitude of reasons, but in my spiritual direction practice, if I ask Christians if they belong to any spiritual community, they often reply they don’t go to church because churches are full of hypocrites. I imagine people of other faiths have the same reason for not going to synagogues, mosques, or temples. 

       What is hypocrisy? It’s pretending to be what you aren’t. It’s espousing high ideals (compassion and generosity) on Sunday, and then living by a different set of values (competition and greed) the rest of the week. Hypocrisy is the opposite of authenticity and sincerity.

        Non-religious people usually do not mind religious people who are authentic and sincere, who “walk their talk.” What they do mind are religious people who engage in hypocrisy. In this they are in good company. The only thing that made Jesus angry was hypocrisy. 

       Jesus handled hypocrisy in three basic ways. He used vitriol, blasting self-righteous religious people: “You hypocrites, you brood of vipers! You are like whitewashed tombs: beautiful on the outside but full of corruption within!” Or he got physical, clearing the temple of moneychangers and demanding to know why the religious authorities had allowed God’s house of prayer to become a den of robbers? Or he used humour: “Friend, why do you try to remove the sliver of wood in your brother’s eye, when you haven’t removed the log in your own?”

       I am often tempted to use humour in my practice: “Don’t let your idea that the church is full of hypocrites stop you from coming. There’s always room for one more!” Although I don’t use it, this joke might make the non-churchgoer think because it implies that perhaps they are not living in complete accord with their highest ideals either.

       The person who judges another as a hypocrite must have high ideals and be living up to those ideals themselves, or they have no right to make that judgment. However, our society as a whole, not just the church, is filled with hypocrisy. 

       We tell our children not to gossip or drink and then do it ourselves. We say we love our spouses in Valentine’s cards and then treat them badly the rest of the year. Unions say they are going on strike to serve the public better when it seems like their real motive is even higher pay. Corporate advertising is often deceptive. Politicians espouse high ideals and then fight for power.

       A helpful way to look at all this might be: hypocrisy and authenticity are on a continuum, and everyone, both in religion and society, is somewhere on the continuum. In both religion and society, the actions of some do not match their ideals at all, and for some, their actions and ideals are totally integrated. The latter are called “saints” in religion, and “together” in society.

       Churches, like the rest of society, do have hypocrites. However, no church I know of claims to be a society of the perfect. Going to church does not mean you no longer have human weaknesses and are not exposed to temptations like the rest of us. Most churchgoers I know are very aware of their imperfections and go because they need God’s help and the support of a religious community in living their faith. In other words, they go out of humility, not pride.

       In short, to those who judge churchgoers as hypocrites, I would only ask two questions: “Friend, where are you on the continuum?” And “Have you removed the log in your own eye?”

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.

Christianity needs to befriend contemporary spirituality

Twenty years ago, Eckhart Tolle’s books, The Power of Now and A New Earth sold millions of copies, and more recently Tolle facilitated what was probably the largest classroom in human history: 1.2 million people simultaneously online. 

       This great spiritual teacher’s vast popularity has led to the predictable reaction of some conservative Christians who have branded Tolle as a threat to Christianity and a leader of what used to be called the “New Age” movement, which is really simply contemporary spirituality. This is unfortunate because first of all, Jesus said “those who are not against us are for us,” and secondly Tolle can give us fresh new insights into the depths of the teachings of Christ.

       A Rabbi once told me that many Jews believe that non-Jewish people who live by the Ten Commandments, whether consciously or not, are on their side. Tolle, while not explicitly claiming to be Christian, is certainly not anti-Christian. If anything, he seems to bring to light things in Christianity that have been buried for centuries.

       One could easily argue that Tolle is a latent Christian and capable of helping many people become latent Christians, in that he subscribes to many of the same values as Christians, such as peace and detachment from materialism and consumerism. Also, in A New Earth he quotes Jesus more than anyone else, and the endnotes are almost all references to the New Testament.

       Throughout The Power of Now you could replace the word “Now” with “God” and the meaning would not change. His basic message in the book is that we need to live in the present moment, the Now, not in the past or future. Jesus said similar things, for example, “take no thought for tomorrow,” that is, don’t worry about the future or past, live now. He also said the reign of God is “at hand” that is, here and now.

       In A New Earth Tolle engages in a brilliant analysis of how the ego causes all our problems and how we must let go of it to live fully. Jesus taught that if you lose your small self you find you true self, your self in God.

       Richard Rohr, one of the most enlightened Catholic priests in the world, believes that Tolle could be seen as part of the “Sacrament of the Present Moment” tradition made popular by Brother Lawrence, Francisco de Osuna, and Jean Pierre de Caussade hundreds of years ago. Rohr sees Tolle as no threat to Christianity because Tolle is not teaching doctrines or dogmas, he is teaching practices just as John Wesley taught methods, and Ignatius of Loyola taught exercises, meant to help people overcome their prideful self, the ego.

       Rohr also believes that, although Tolle never explicitly states his theology, he is not a pantheist (all things are God), but rather a panentheist (all things are in God). The few times Tolle does speak of God he says things like “God is the One Life in and beyond all forms of life.”

       Rohr further believes that Catholics, who have a much longer tradition and are more familiar with mystics like John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, will more easily embrace Tolle than Protestants whose tradition began in the sixteenth century. Tolle in fact adopted Meister Eckhart’s name when he realized he was also called to be a spiritual teacher.

       If Christians want to be relevant, they need to respond to the “signs of the times” by engaging contemporary people who are SBNR, that is, spiritual but not religious, in dialogue. What is needed is intelligent Christianity, capable of sifting out the good wheat in the current “zeitgeist,” or “prevailing thoughts of a culture,”  and letting the chaff blow away. Otherwise, Christianity may miss the opportunity to understand its own teachings more deeply and seem irrelevant to millions of people outside the church. These people might be more interested in the church if the church was more interested in contemporary spirituality.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Seeing God and Humans at Work in All Avoids Pitfalls

If you understand that God works with, in, and through things without violating their essential nature, you can avoid many contemporary pitfalls. 

    To begin at the beginning, God created laws of nature, such as the law of complexity/consciousness, which means God and nature constantly co-create more complex, conscious, and free creatures. 

    John Polkinghorne, a physicist and Anglican priest, stated in his “free-process defence” of the existence of God in spite of evil: God allows nature a certain amount of freedom because it is better to have a creative world free to make mistakes than a mechanical world ruled by a cosmic tyrant.

    Evolution is so full of false starts that it would be easy to conclude it is just a random process. However, it is a divine/natural process that, overall, is heading in a spiritual direction: from matter to life to thought to spirit. We can see this in the movement from our planet’s original chemical soup to plants, animals, humans, and religions. Sri Aurobindo (Hindu), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Christian), and Ken Wilber (Buddhist) all agree about spiritual evolution.

    The increasingly free natural world co-created with God free human beings. God made humans with free will because it is better to have a world with people who make mistakes than one of perfectly programmed machines. Robots cannot love. For love, you need freedom. This is the “free-will defence” of God’s existence despite evil.

    With nature, God co-created humans with the intrinsic law of love: a deep desire for absolute goodness, truth, beauty, and love. In other words, what everyone wants is God, whether they know it or not. It would be easy to get so caught up with all the sins of humans that you miss our overall goodness: most people want to love and be good. On the other hand, you could get so caught up with the goodness of humans, as the human potential movement often does, that you could naively miss our sins and need of God.

    Similarly, the writing of scripture is a divine/human process. God co-created the scriptures with the human authors without violating their freedom. On the one hand, you could get so caught up with all the scientific and historical errors in scripture that it would be easy to conclude it is all a human fabrication, as John Spong and Marcus Borg have done.         

    On the other hand, you could get so caught up with the divine inspiration of scripture that you make it infallible in all things and fail to see that, while it may be inerrant on matters of faith and morals, it is not a science or history textbook, it is a faith document. Believing in the absolute infallibility of scripture closes people off from science, makes them fundamentalists, and contributes to the rise of scientific atheism in our culture.

    Similarly, Jesus was and is a divine/human person. The Spirit never violated the essential human and divine nature of Jesus but co-created his life, death, and resurrection with him. It would be easy to get so caught up searching for the historical Jesus that you miss his overall divinity. On the other hand, it would be easy to get so caught up in his divinity that you miss his humanity and his message of social justice, as Christians have largely done until the last hundred years or so.

    Churches are also divine/human co-creations. No church, synagogue, or mosque is a society of the perfect. Even Christian saints, such as Peter and Paul, and Jewish heroes, such as Abraham and Moses, were as full of human foibles as present-day imams. You could get so caught up in church scandals that it would be easy to miss the overall goodness of churches and conclude they are just an all-too-human enterprise. Most of the time, churches quietly go about doing good, but this rarely gets in the news. 

    On the other hand, you could focus so fully on the divine side of churches that you become triumphalist and believe the church has all the answers and doesn’t need to learn from science, psychology, history, and other religions. God works with churches, letting them make mistakes, but also guiding churches, other religions, and people who are “spiritual but not religious” towards the reign of Spirit. 

    At this crucial time in human history, in spite of all the doomsday predictions about the climate and economy there also seems to be a massive outpouring of Spirit going on in peoples’ hearts and souls. So, we need to avoid the pitfall of despair, as if God was not involved with and through the whole process. Again, God does not violate our freedom to make mistakes and wise decisions. God draws and invites us rather than forcing and driving us. 

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Navigating Modern Marriage: Beyond the Perfect Partner Myth

Paradoxically, the Internet, despite all its dating sites, has made it harder to get and stay married. 

    One site is called “Plenty of Fish.” The problem is choosing between infinite “fish” (potential partners) in the sea. People hoping to get married make a list of qualities of the ideal spouse and hunt for this mythical person on the Internet. This is making people much more choosy and less willing to accept imperfection.

       Fifty years ago, there was limited choice in a spouse, and you had to work with your partner’s imperfections, knowing you were not perfect either. The present emphasis on finding the perfect mate results in people who are looking for love getting locked in the prison of their own ego.

       This is the polar opposite of what marriage is about. For centuries, wedding vows involved vowing before God and other people that you would love your partner in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. In other words, the wedding vows were about unconditional love, not about rejecting people who fail to meet one of the conditions on your list. True marriage is about freedom from your ego through a commitment to something bigger than your ego, that is, marriage.

       God designed marriage to be two soulmates sharing life and love. So why do we so often fail at it? Why is the divorce rate for first marriages in Canada thirty-five percent and sixty-five percent for second marriages? Quite simply, marriage is one fallible human being having to cope day after day with another fallible human being. People seeking marriage should compare their lists with my lists of the hundreds of things couples fight over, from how to cut up the carrots to whether we should start having children.

       All marriage experts agree there are four distinct stages of marriage: romance, disillusionment (or ‘reality check’), misery, and true love. This is not what people expect when contemplating marriage. Despite the fantasies created by the wedding industry, in marriage, you have to go through the hard stuff to get to the good stuff. You have to go through the crucifixion of your ego in misery to get to the resurrection of true love. This is normal marital reality, but the list makers will not survive disillusionment, let alone misery. They will never experience true love.

       God allows conflict in marriage to challenge us to love and accept someone who is different from us, someone who is ‘other’ than our ego. To survive and thrive in marriage, you have to get out of your ego and grow in a whole list of spiritual virtues such as patience, trust, honesty, respect, acceptance, service, compassion, forgiveness, and commitment. God intended marriage to help you and your partner grow in mutual wholeness or holiness.

       Unconditional love and commitment and developing these spiritual virtues is a tall order. This is where prayer and the power of God come in. You cannot do these things on your own. You must call upon God’s grace to help you love as God loves. Faith is essential for a truly fulfilling marriage.

       Your spouse is made in the image of God (Genesis 1: 27-28), and since marriage is the most intimate of all relationships, the closest you get to God in the flesh is your marriage partner. The way you treat your spouse is the way you treat God. If you can’t love your spouse who you can see, how can you say you love God who you can’t see (I John 4:20)? Therefore, growing in spiritual virtues with your spouse is an essential part of spirituality. Treating the person closest to you badly is false spirituality.

       If there is prolonged or severe emotional or physical abuse, neglect, or infidelity, it probably was not God’s will that the two of you be married in the first place, and you should get out. However, short of that, prayer, commitment, and counselling can overcome almost any obstacle to love.

      Before and during engagement examine your partner’s character, his or her attitudes and values. If you are going to make a list do so wisely, putting at the top not how rich or good-looking he or she is, but is this a person who can help you grow spiritually? Is this someone with whom you can fulfill the goal of marriage, that is, mutual holiness, not ego-gratification? Putting spiritual growth first is foundational for a truly happy marriage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and marriage coach. http://www.brucetallman.com  

Resolving Religious Conflict: A Path Through Faith Development

 Throughout history, there have been conflicts between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: pogroms, crusades, and jihads. There have also been conflicts within religions: Orthodox versus Reformed Jews, Catholic versus Protestant Christians, Sunni versus Shiite Muslims. Religious conflicts are often rooted, at least partly, in different stages of faith, and the cure lies in reaching the higher stages.

       In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. James Fowler of Emory University conducted the first research-based study on how faith develops. Researchers interviewed thousands of believers from all religious traditions and identified six distinct stages of faith.

       Stage One, Imaginative Faith, does not cause conflict as most people pass through it by age seven. Stage Two, Literal Faith, normally extends to about age twelve. However, many adults clearly get stuck here, taking stories like Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark as literal history rather than as faith stories meant to convey a profound theological message about fall and redemption. Since fundamentalists in any religion consider anyone who has different beliefs to be a heretic, this is fertile ground for conflict.

       Most religious conflict happens between Stages Three and Four. Stage Three, Group Faith, is marked by conformity. The Stage Three motto is: “I believe it because my religious group believes it.” Faith is a simple matter of following group rules. People in Stage Three defend their own in-group, believing “my church is the only true church” or “Islam is the only true faith.” Anyone who disagrees is seen as their mortal enemy.

    Usually, at some point, Group Faith gets shaken up by life’s injustices, conflicting opinions of others, corruption of religious leaders, or new teachings such as those of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which moved many Catholics from Stage Three to Stage Four. Still, some want to revert to the 1950s when the Catholic laity was taught to “pray, pay, and obey.”

       Stage Four, Personal Faith, begins when a person asks, “What do I really believe?” Usually, there are a lot of struggles as the Stage Four individual no longer believes things just because someone else says they should. As many questions arise, the Stage Four person often feels like they are losing their faith, but if they keep the essentials, they are going deeper as they begin to own their faith, not just blindly follow the crowd.

       People in Stage Four may seem dangerous to the faith of those in Stages Two and Three, whereas people in Stage Four may see those in Stages Two and Three as a threat to rationality and civilization. Again, this is fertile ground for religious conflict.

       The solution is to go to Stage Five, Mystical Faith, characterized by the ability to understand another person’s faith from their point of view; and paradox, the ability to simultaneously hold two conflicting points of view. This creates great respect for other traditions. For example, a Stage Five person might think that “Jesus Christ is the only way to God and yet it is quite clear to me that there are also other ways to God. This goes beyond logical reasoning, but I am willing to suspend my judgement about what God thinks about these other traditions while being committed to my own tradition.” 

       Finally, Stage Six, Sacrificial Faith, means that you are willing to fight to defend the foundational human right of religious freedom and even lay down your life to bring reconciliation between people with differing beliefs. This was Gandhi’s faith, who, in attempting to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims in India, paid for it with his life. A Hindu fundamentalist killed him.

       To prevent religious conflict, we need to be aware that differing stages of faith often cause it. We also need to work towards Pope John XXIII’s recommendation: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is, we need to strive for the highest stages where the unfathomable essence of the One God transcends all differences, and we need to be charitable toward those with differing beliefs. After all, God is exceedingly tolerant and loves everyone regardless of their faith stage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

The Secret: Understanding the Law of Attraction and Its Flaws

The Secret was a book by Rhonda Byrne that became a self-help phenomenon because it was cleverly mass-marketed as “the secret to life” that all the greatest people down through history have known – now being revealed to the public! It promised greatness for everyone, Oprah Winfrey endorsed it, and so it was a mega-bestseller.

       The Secret is “the law of attraction” – whatever you focus on, positive or negative, you draw to yourself. In general, this law is true: if you focus on becoming a doctor, your chances of becoming one are much greater than if you focus on being an airline pilot. If you worry all the time about becoming ill, you may make yourself sick.

       The problem with the Secret, from a Christian point of view, is that it takes things too far. Advocates of the Secret tell you that whatever happens to you in life, you have drawn to yourself. The underlying message is that you are totallyresponsible for your life. If you are homeless, for example, it is because you want to be homeless. It has nothing at all to do with corporations cutting wages and downsizing jobs while the government simultaneously lifts rent controls so that your income disappears while your expenses skyrocket.

       This philosophy allows us to conveniently blame the victim. That way, you do not need to be compassionate towards anyone because whatever has happened to them, they brought upon themselves, whether they are refugees, battered wives, or schizophrenics.

       The disturbing thing is that this philosophy also infects a lot of Christians. It’s part of the “prosperity gospel,” that is, if you have worldly success, it must be because God is blessing you, whereas if things are not going well, you must have drawn it upon yourself.

       One of my directees (person receiving spiritual direction) has chronic fatigue syndrome. She has tried repeatedly to identify what sin in her past God is punishing her for but can’t come up with anything that deserves such a severe illness. She laughs, “If tomorrow they found a pill that would cure this, would that suddenly make me a righteous person?”

       The Book of Job in the Jewish scriptures was meant to end all simplistic reward/punishment religious thinking. Until then, the thinking was that your external life was a sign of God’s blessing or wrath. 

       Job suddenly loses all his wealth and his family and becomes sick. His religious friends tell him that it must be due to some unconfessed sin in his life, but Job protests his innocence. We learn that God agrees Job is an innocent man, and there is no necessary correlation between what happens to you in life and where you stand in God’s eyes. 

       In the end, God reveals God’s glory to Job, showing him that there are things that utterly transcend human understanding. As John Henry Newman wrote in his famous prayer, “Perhaps my sickness serves God, though I know not how.” Perhaps our faithfulness under trials will inspire someone else to hope in God.

       Jesus always struggled with the Pharisees to have them put compassion before their purity laws. His story of the Good Samaritan is a classic example of this, where the religious leaders refuse to compassionately treat a man who has been robbed and beaten because it would make them ritually impure. So, they avoid him, whereas a man from Samaria, a land considered full of heretics, goes out of his way to take care of the injured man.

       At one point, Jesus says to the Pharisees, “Do you think those laborers upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were any more evil than anyone else?” Things happen that defy rational explanation. Other parts of Scripture state that the righteous can expect trials and persecution if they do not follow the crowd. Thus, virtue can actually attract suffering to us.       

    Job is meant to be a foreshadowing of Jesus, the totally righteous man who has the worst injustice fall upon him: being publicly humiliated and put to death as a criminal and heretic. The crucifixion is the ultimate demonstration that very bad things can happen to very good people through no fault of their own.

      Being responsible for our actions is important, and the Secret has some good points, but the main problem from a Christian point of view is that it exalts personal responsibility over compassion.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com.

The Historical Reality of Jesus: Myths vs. Truth

Within Christianity in the past thirty years, there have been persistent attempts to recast the basic tenets of Christianity itself. One of the most remarkable attempts came from Tom Harpur, who noted in The Pagan Christ that other cultures had myths about the dying and rising god, and therefore, the early church just made up a myth about the dying and rising Jesus. 

    Myths in many cultures have been powerful carriers of cosmic truths, and the early church knew this. However, according to Harpur, over the course of its first three hundred years, the church gradually came to claim that the myth they had made up was a historical reality called Jesus Christ.

    My sense is that Harpur is either not being true to himself or has somehow forgotten his theological studies as an Anglican priest. Every student of Christian theology is taught that the distinctiveness of the Jewish God was that this God acted in history. One of the most dramatic examples of this was when God liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. God acted throughout Jewish history from the time of Abraham to the kings and prophets. 

    This experience of God acting in history simply continued in the most dramatic way of all when God became human in Jesus Christ. God acting in history was not a new idea that the early church made up. The church did not try to change a myth into a reality. Rather, it proclaimed that all the myths of other cultures suddenly became a reality when Christ was born. This was Paul’s basic approach when he told the Greeks and Romans that Jesus was their Unknown God.

    Harpur is right that God has always been incarnate in all of God’s creation, and therefore, there are many paths to God, but the traditional belief of the church has been that God was incarnate in a special way in Christ and therefore, Christ is a specialpath to God. This idea that the Infinite Ruler of the Universe can be in a specific location in a special way is, again, not a new Christian idea. Jews believed that God was present in a special way in the sanctuary of the temple. Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans have taken the special incarnation of God a step further in their belief that the cosmic Christ is incarnate in a very special way in the communion host.

    It makes sense that God would not just tell us how to live, as God did in the Ten Commandments, but God would also showus how to live by becoming human. In Christ, God gave us a three year audio-visual demonstration of what a true human being is and also what God is really like.

    There were many witnesses to the specialness of Jesus before, during, and after his life. First, there is the ancient scriptural record. Before the historical Jesus appeared, there were dozens of prophecies recorded in the Jewish scriptures of what the Messiah would be like: royal, suffering, and divine. Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, particularly the ones by the prophet Isaiah, who said that a child will be born who will be called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” and will have a kingdom without end (Isaiah 9: 6-8). This suffering servant will be “pierced for our sins”, but “by his wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)

    Then there is the vision of the prophet Daniel of a man who was led into the presence of  God. God gave this man everlasting authority, sovereign power, and glory, and the people of every nation worshiped him (Daniel 7:13-14). There are many other Jewish prophecies like this.

    During Christ’s life, he gave great and sublime teachings such as the Sermon on the Mount, in which he first focused on the nature of true happiness in the Beatitudes. The rest of Christ’s teachings also extended and completed the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.

    Another witness is the astounding miracles: Jesus calming the raging sea, multiplying food for the hungry, healing all manner of illnesses, driving out evil spirits, and raising a man to life who had been dead for four days!

    Even if we overlook the miracles, there is the witness of the way Christ lived. His courage, integrity, wisdom, and compassion were so complete they must have had a supernatural source.

    There is the witness of the appearances of Christ after his resurrection to hundreds of disciples, and there is the New Testament record of miracles performed in the name of Jesus by these disciples.

    There is also the witness of people dying for their faith in Christ, the record of all the martyrs in the early church. No one would lay down their life for some mythical human being. Then there is the record of the ongoing growth of the church through the centuries and of so many present-day martyrs.

    Put all this together, and one is almost forced to conclude that in Jesus, something extremely special was going on. In fact, it all points to one reality: that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God. In the birth of Christ, God gave us the greatest gift of all: God in the form of a human being.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion www.brucetallman.com