Before I accepted Christ, I was deep in the New Age movement – crystals, reiki, medium readings, law of attraction, you name it. So do I understand the mentality of someone living that life? Yes. Absolutely I do. Then Jesus appeared and yanked me out of it by dropping a huge dose of truth on me, and I woke up from the haze I didn’t even realize I was in.
One of the biggest pieces of the New Age movement that has seeped into popular culture (and many churches) is the belief that we must always be positive. Anything negative is bad. Over the years what this has evolved into is:
- “If it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it.”
- If someone ever hurts or upsets you, they are toxic and you should abandon them.
- “If you have a problem with me, it’s because of something that is unhealed in you that you need to work on. It can’t possibly be a problem with me.”
- Disagreement is immediately viewed as hate, judgment, or shaming.
- Think happy thoughts and the boogey man will go away.
- You are perfect just the way you are.
None of those are truly healthy mentalities. Over time it inflates the ego and creates people who are so self focused and overly confident in themselves that they lose their humility and can’t accept personal responsibility for their human errors which are inevitable. They become the god of their own universe where they believe they are creating their reality in a very magical capacity, and they are equipped with excuses that make them feel justified to place all the blame for problems on everyone else. Ultimately you get detached from reality. Been there. Done that. Not proud of it.
My response to those points is this:
- Dirty laundry doesn’t bring me joy, but I must wash it, not throw it out.
- People are not disposable, and if you mistreat me, your behavior is part of the problem. I can own my part in it, but you need to as well. There are at least two sides to every story, and it is most often the case that everyone involved holds some degree of fault. It’s ok as long as we can address it calmly and rationally.
- In objective discussion, disagreement does not have to mean hate (see previous article Who Are You To Judge?).
- While happy thoughts and positivity are ultimately beneficial, they don’t erase the things you don’t like.
- Nobody is perfect. We crucified the only one who ever was. For your psyche to be grounded with humility, you cannot be the limitless god of your own universe – there must be an authority higher than you which you must answer to.
Consider that every feeling we perceive as negative exists with purpose. Pain is an alert system that calls our attention to something physical, emotional, or spiritual which needs healed. Fear can be a safety mechanism, like a person who is afraid to touch a hot stove not wanting to get burned. Shame can drive us internally to change a bad behavior that led to the initial belief of guilt. Their intended function isn’t inherently bad. It is actually part of a healed, whole, balanced pysche to be able to accept reality as it is and appreciate the proper function of all your parts.
The problem arises when we don’t have truth – when we only see the pain and not it’s source which then spirals into depression, when fear overwhelms us, when we feel consumed with shame over false guilt or condemnation from another. It is healthy to experience a full range of emotions. It is not healthy to allow any of them to disproportionately or irrationally take over your life. They need to be seen objectively by developing self awareness which is what Christ and study of scripture grants us. Truth brings us back from the edge of the cliff that feelings try to push us over.
The truth is this fluffy “all positivity, lalala I can’t hear negativity” way of living is not sustainable long term, and while you are ignoring your problems, they grow. This a big part of the reason you are seeing so many people abandon the New Age movement and flock to Christianity. Jesus offers truth and grace, not just grace. The New Age offers excessive freedom and preaches personal power, a version of man made grace that reflects chaos, but there is a short shelf life for half truth. Much of what is taught in the New Age is twisted or partially correct, but corrupted truth is not pure truth. It’s a lie.
It doesn’t truly satisfy the soul to settle for less than the fullness of life which requires truth in order to be complete.
You find yourself continuing to reach for something, often not even knowing it is God’s love you are searching for, so you go deeper and deeper down the dark rabbit hole. Jesus is reaching a hand down into that rabbit hole to pull people out into the true light of balanced truth and grace, not this false light of fluffy truthless grace. He helps us confront the dark things in ourselves, strengthens us to look them head on, face them like David and Goliath, and be an overcomer. Then we gain love, joy, and peace beyond comprehension in true freedom, because we are no longer suppressing or running from problems. We have been truly healed!
The feelings we ignore inside ourselves don’t vanish. They just build pressure until they rupture out. You can certainly mask negative feelings with positivity or use positive thinking to help you get through hard moments, but those bad things will never truly leave you until you accept personal responsibility, confront the problem, process it, and release it. It has been my experience that this typically requires us to learn from the situation. The more painful the problem, the deeper rooted the trauma goes and the greater the multitude of lessons to learn from it.
Do we need joy and positivity? Without a doubt! Do we need grace? Oh heavens, so very much! But we cannot continue to acquire these things at the cost of truth. We also need to see the flip side of the coin where some Christians dive so deep into truth they get lost there and become legalists, authoritarians, judgmental, and are constantly downers. We need to stop this duality based approach that says life is only right if it’s truth or only right if it’s grace – this is a both/and situation.
Jesus – who called himself the way, the truth, and the life – died on the cross to forgive the sins of our past. We were ignorant to the truth and didn’t know any better. So why do we continue to crucify truth once we know it? Just because grace is easier and we don’t want to try doing hard things? We were built capable of doing hard things, and succeeding in that mission creates value and meaning in life!
Jesus is the immovable rock of truth, meaning that the archetypal principles he taught were timeless. Without it, as it says in Proverbs 31:30, grace is deceitful.
Look at this in psychology terms. Jesus took the ultimate punishment – being beaten bloody, publicly ridiculed, and crucified unto death – so your psyche would be capable of accepting that recompense has been paid for the errors of your past. This allows you to find peace in releasing it rather than feeling additional punishment is necessary, because no greater punishment is even possible than what he endured on our behalf. Nothing more can be done than what has been done. All that is left is forgiveness. It teaches us that slate cleaning forgiveness is possible and moving forward is ok.
BUT then he sent us the Holy Spirit to guide us forward so we can be taught to walk the right path, molded in his image. That way we don’t keep repeating the same mistakes. We are called to repent (turn away from sin toward God who is love) and forgive, to learn and to grow, not to remain stagnant in our sin and pretend it isn’t there.
Not only does this apply to us as individuals, but it is offered to all. That means everyone is redeemable! So when someone hurts us, it’s possible it was a mistake. Often they aren’t any more toxic to me than I am to them. We are in this together, which means I can forgive and be forgiven in family and friendships, and we can work to grow alongside each other. Both concepts are clearly present in the gospel (good news), because as John 1:17 says, grace and truth came through Jesus. He was the perfect representation of this balance.
Obviously there will be times where we have to draw lines with people for safety, but I have seen some pretty radical things lately. Just the other day there was a Facebook post in my newsfeed where the person said they were going to block anyone who they saw post about something negative that day. Is not talking about politics going to make it better? No! Is blocking someone who is battling depression and crying out for help online going to help them heal? No! Not everything is as cut and dry as we would like it to be.
We need to understand that truth can be spoken in love and work on developing the emotional intelligence and healthy communication skills necessary to allow that to happen. Then we will face any obstacle that arises with the composure of Christ.
True, pure, non-toxic spirituality has nothing to do with meditating yourself into a void of nothingness. It’s about filling yourself with life and finding the peace of God there. Both can produce silence, but one is in the dark and lacks any purpose. The other is full of the light of life and connected.
The Bible doesn’t say empty your mind. It says meditate on both the corrections and promises in the Word (Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2, etc), be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), and tells us we will be filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). God wants your life to be filled to the brim to bring you to wholeness (1 Thessalonians 5:23), not to throw away the pieces so there is nothing left of you. He gave you life to be lived abundantly (John 10:10).
Truth grounds us to discern and understand moral good and bad so we can make decisions from a sound mind. Grace allows us to fly freely from that truth to find joy and a pure heart. We need to be grounded before we fly so we know where to land. When the two concepts are in a perfect union, they epitomize divine love. When you can see the beauty in all of it – then you will find God’s peace. Isn’t that the one thing we are all lacking? We need the understanding that we are on common ground and to embrace moral truth so we can stop hurting ourselves and each other. When we do that, we will become truly free.
How can we be freed from shackles which we deny exist? Perhaps we cannot, and that was the point.
I’d like to end by quoting a Ted Talk by Psychologist Susan David. Her words are so very on point that they bring tears to my eyes, and I am ok with feeling that emotion. She said:
Being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. In a survey I recently conducted, I found that a third of us – a third – either judge ourselves for having so-called “bad emotions,” like sadness, anger, or even grief, or actively try to push aside these feelings. We do this not only to ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children – we may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to a solution, and fail to help them see these emotions as inherently valuable. Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. But when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me what they don’t want to feel. They say things like, “I don’t want to try because I don’t want to feel disappointed.” Or, “I Just want this feeling to go away.” “I understand,” I say to them. “But you have dead people’s goals.” Only dead people never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don’t get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
