Richard's take on "The Secret"

February 22, 2007

So many are now asking me about 'The Secret" highlighted on the Oprah show, that I thought I would give you my short response, and as you requested also make it available on our website. See you started something that I hope will be helpful to others!

"The Secret" which is now gaining popularity in the USA, is probably a classic example of something that is partially true, and even good, being made into the only lens through which you read reality, and then it becomes untrue. Heresy could be defined as when we absolutize a partial truth, and I believe that is what is happening here. But I would also love for Christians to learn the partial truth, and that is why we teach the contemplative mind here.

Contemplation is also saying how you see is what you will see, and we must clean our own lens of seeing. I call it knowing by "connaturality" (Aquinas), or knowing by affinity or kinship, it is the participative knowing by which the Indwelling Spirit in us knows God, Love, Truth, and Eternity. LIKE KNOWS LIKE, and that is very important to know. There definitely is a communion between the seer and the seen, the knower and the known Hatred cannot nor will not know God, fear cannot nor will not recognize love. Because this deep contemplative wisdom has not been taught in recent Catholic centuries, and hardly at all among Protestants, it is a great big lack and absence in our God given ability to "know spiritual things spiritually", as Paul would say (1 Cor.2:13). I can see why people respond so enthusiastically, as Oprah and others are doing, as if it really were the whole Gospel. I guess it is indeed a "secret"! Most Christians have been allowed to operate for centuries out of dualistic, judgmental, and negative minds--which cannot see or know God.

BUT, it is also a first world luxury to think this way! Suffering people, poor people, oppressed people know very clearly that "your thinking does not make it so"! It will help their ability to love and survive within this painful and sad world, and that is indeed wonderful; but to make it into an entire metaphysical principle is just not true. Reality has plenty of reality to it before my mind comes onto the scene.

Left to itself, it would be the continual recurring heresy of Gnosticism, which asserts that spiritual reality is the only reality, whereas all orthodox Christianity (not sure how much is out there!) would believe in Incarnationalism. This would say that matter and spirit never have been separate nor ever will be, and we come to one through the other. They need one another, and that is why for us the CHRIST is the symbol of that unity. Our faith is in the particular, concrete, physical incarnations of reality as the portals to the Divine, even very sad and painful ones (the common word for "what is" for ordinary people is ''the will of God").

"The Secret" will actually do a disservice to many people when their mind cannot control the death of their innocent child, or make them a million dollars, or make their former husband forgive them, etc. It will also keep people from that much more honest, humble--and REALISTIC--position of Incarnational Christianity. God comes to us disguised as our life, not as a Platonic world of ideas, even positive and good ideas.

We are still not in control, I am afraid; but we can control and mature our responses, and that is the good part of "The Secret".