This day could be your last

I am reading a really exceptional book at the moment, called 20,000 Days and Counting.

It's a work of Christian self-help, and is constructed in quite a post-modern way, but it's a terrific read, and really quite incredibly inspiring.
I discovered in it a quote from Emerson that I hadn't encountered before, and I thought I'd share it with you:

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"One of the illusions [of life] is that the present hour is not the critical , decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Joel Goldsmith's Christianity

It's interesting as a blogger to see what gets commented on most.
And for me it is my posts about Joel Goldsmith.




There are obviously many dedicated readers and students of Goldsmith's work out there.
One of the comments I got on the blog yesterday prompted me to do this post, as it addressed a question I have myself been considering for many years: Can Joel Goldsmith be called a Christian?
Rhoberta, the commenter, mentioned that Goldsmith himself rejected the label. This doesn't surprise me, as almost all of the New Thought teachers saw themselves as universalists who drew on all the world's religious traditions and whose teachings were in turn accessible across the board. And while this sentiment was admirable, in practise the written work and the rhetoric of Goldsmith, Fillmore and others was so rooted in Christianity and in Biblical reflection that it makes their work very difficult for the non-Christian to negotiate.
I worked for many years in a New Age bookshop, and Goldsmith was always shelved there in the "Christianity" section. I had not read him at this stage, but was fascinated by his books because they were among the only ones that ever sold from that section. I remember asking customers on several occasions what Goldsmith was all about and they suddenly grew very mysterious, and so I was left none the wiser. I read at some stage a passing reference to him in another book as a "Christian Sience writer" and this made him even more mysterious, as Christian Science was by that stage (in mid-90s Australia) an almost entirely forgotten tradition, and I was intrigued as to why we sold so many copies of The Infinite Way.
I'd actually be really interested to see some specific references to Goldsmith's denial of his Christianity, as I have been unable to find any in the books in my collection. I would suggest that his teaching is entirely grounded in the Christian tradition, via the heterodox theology of Mary Baker Eddy. Like his predecessor Charles Fillmore (who had also emerged out of Christian Science), he invoked the Christ ideal in his writing. Australian journalist Tess Van Sommers, in her quaint 1966 overview of Religions in Australia, sums up this theology perfectly, writing "Jesus Christ is not regarded...as a Divine personage. He is looked on as the man who developed the power of divinity within himself to the fullest possible extent. Christ is regarded as the power of God within Jesus, and potentially within all humans, which can enable them to demonstrate their oneness with God."
Goldsmith writes frequently about this idea of an inner Christ, of "the Christ in each one" (Gift of Love, 1975). While it is far from orthodox Christian theology, it is nonetheless an idea entirely focused on the Christian ideal, employing Christian language, and it is rarely expressed in any other way (unlike, for example, in the work of Ernest Holmes, which occasionally makes reference to Buddha-nature and other Eastern spiritual concepts).
Goldsmith describes Christ, or the Christ-ideal, as the ultimate in spiritual attainment, the summit of spiritual perfection, writing in Practising the Presence:

"I was led ultimately to that grandest experience of all, in which the great Master, Christ Jesus, reveals that if we abide in the Word and let the Word abide in us, we shall bear fruit richly..."

Finally, I wanted to make the point firmly that Goldsmith was for many years a conventional Christian Science practitioner, as described so interestingly by Lorraine Sinkler in The Spiritual Journey of Joel Goldsmith, Modern Mystic. One of my other readers, Jean F., rightly castigated me for previously dismissing Goldsmith's Christian Science period as a brief blip in his spiritual development.
So yes, I would suggest that, in all outward forms and for all basic purposes, Goldsmith was a Christian. Certainly, if you pressed one of his books into the hands of an average 21st century secular reader they would be incapable of distinguishing his writing from that of the devotional tracts of more conventional Protestant clergymen - which is why you will normally find his books mouldering away in the "Christianity" section of second-hand bookstores. But I absolutely accept that, on a a more careful analysis, he was a deeply heterodox religious thinker who, perhaps, saw himself as a universalist and whose personal theology was so removed from conventional Christian thinking as to be rejected by most mainstream-Christians as entirely heretical and outside the fold.

Evil in the Science of Mind

Probably the greatest theological problem faced by New Thought is the question of the existence of evil. This same problem dogs orthodox Christianity, of course, but at least itcan fall back on the doctrine of original sin. That doctrine is rejected by New Thought, which teaches that we are all created perfectly, not just in the image of God but as manifestations of God - a part of creation which is eternal, wholly good and perfect. The existence of bad thinsgs in such a schema would seem to be a fundamental stumbling point. It was exactly this point that many of the early critics of Christian Science (most notably Mark Twain, to the consternation of his devoutly Christian Science daughter) harped on, and it continues to be the achilles heel of New Thought philosophy. If God is Good and good is our natural state of being, why do we witness so many bad things in our world?
"Evil is man created," says Ernest Holmes in The Science of Mind (p. 499). He goes on to explain "God - the eternal goodness - knows nothing about it. He is too pure to behold evil and cannot look upon it. Evil is the direct and suppositional opposite to good, and has no reality behind it, or actual law to come to its support." This is the standard explanation, and is pretty much the same thing you'd hear from a Christian Scientist or, for that matter, a Swedenborgian. God is only goodness, so anything that we might interpret as evil is created by us, and is, in fact, an illusion. This seems an adequate response, but I always want to ask, "Yes but why? Why do we have to suffer these delusions? If God is Good and wants only happiness for us why has he allowed us to create these phantoms of unhappiness?" The response to this is that we have been afforded free will - that free will is, in fact, the one essential aspect of our being as humans, the thing with which God has gifted us. This is an idea which derives clearly from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. We are free to choose at any moment between good and evil. Interestingly, this same notion of free will is essential to most Buddhist thinking - that conditions, circumstances and karma are all very real, but equally real is that moment of volition when we can choose between a wise or a foolish action.
It is interesting to note, as well, that in this passage Holmes seems to be anthropomorphising God, something strictly frowned upon in New Thought theology. This turn of phrase is undoubtedly reflexive, but it betrays an older way of thinking about God, creation and the problem of evil. God in this description is definitely a pure deity, one who knows only good, and cannot see imperfection. But to my mind it begs the question - because it is unseen, does it mean it doesn't exist? In the rest of his writing (and in New Thought in general) Holmes absolutely rejects a dualistic vision of the universe as divided between good and evil. The problem is always in human perception, in our own misunderstanding of circumstances. In an essay on The Impersonal Face of God, Holmes writes:

"We are not dealing with a negative as well as a positive Power—not two powers but one; a power that sees neither good nor evil as we see it. It knows only that it is all, and since it is all, it creates whatever is given it. From our limited standpoint we often think of good and evil; not realizing that, as yet, we do not know the one from the other. What we call good today, we may call evil tomorrow, and what we think to be evil today, we may tomorrow proclaim as the greatest good we have known. Not so with the Great Universal Power of Mind; It sees only Itself and Its infinite ability to create."

To further refine his explanation in The Science of Mind, Holmes goes on to make a distinction between God, which is all good, and Universal Law, which is objective and unchangeable. "The law is no respecter of persons and will bring good or evil to any, according to his use or misuse of it" (SOM, p. 500). So God is the source of all good, but his agency is the action of Universal Law. It is the duty of the human to work with these immutable laws and fall into harmony with them - thus bringing ourselves the promised perfection.
So serious is this question of evil (and, probably, so recurrent were the questions surrounding it) that Holmes devotes a whole section of The Science of Mind to it. Here he underlines the notion of evil as an unwise use of life's laws and conditions. It is nothing in and of itself - it is a fiction. It is the word we use to describe a whole host of results, the causes of which are mysterious to us. Evil is a destructive meme, and the student of Religious Science can leave the concept behind forever. "To turn from evil and do good is the desire of every soul who is consecrated to the Truth; this we can do only as we cease talking about, believing in, or doing evil."

Eric Butterworth - Discover the Power Within You

Eric Butterworth was one of the most influential New Thought preachers of the mid-twentieth century, as well as being a prolific author. His influence on the Unity movement was enormous, and continues to the present day. Unity FM has just started a whole radio show devoted entirely to the teachings of Butterworth, and recently the 'Hooked on Classics' book club on that same station studied his 1968 classic Discover the Power Within You.
It is actually quite an impressive work, a carefully laid-out view of New Thought spirituality, especially the central notion that "You ask for success by getting into the consciousness of success" (p.114). Butterworth was obviously a great scholar, and his writing is based on an easy grasp of literature and religion. Despite its corny title, this is actually quite an erudite work, and its argument quite compelling.
Butterworth excels at putting some pretty difficult New Thought notions into plain language, evincing a grasp of aphorism and folksy philosophy that is a very old part of American literary culture. The book is intended as a practical guide, and so encourages people to apply their spiritual views to their daily lives. Reading the book one is constantly discovering areas in which the author seems to be speaking directly to us. I am also conscious that he is enunciating New Thought philosophies that date back to Mary Baker Eddy, though with far more accessible language. For example:

"When we realize that evil is simply the concealment of good, then any person who is unloving, vicious, or unjust is actually a person who is good but doesn't know it. In a very real way, we can change him - at least as far as we are concerned. We can see him with the "single eye" that relates only to the good and the true" (p. 124).

This is basic Christian Science thinking - that there is only goodness in God's creation, and that all of us, being a part of this creation, must at heart be good. The error is in the seeing; we choose to see bad. It is a challenging philosophy, and one difficult to apply, but I think Butterworth describes quite a noble effort in this passage.

One of the constant criticisms I hear about self-help books is that they pander to the selfish side of humanity, that they encourage materialism and tacky consumerist desires. This frustrates me because any careful reading of almost any self-help book exposes a constant injunction to develop the spiritual above all other attributes, and to see growth in metaphysical rather than materialist terms. It is a point that Butterworth himself drives home over and over again: "Success cannot be measured by what you have amassed" (p.131). This is, above all, a devotional work, a book that is about the development of a complete spiritual worldview, the growth of a soul. As such it illustrates perfectly one of the central points of my thesis, that self-help books are in fact quasi-religious texts that offer practical moral teachings and metaphysical worldviews.

The author has sought with this book to describe a practical, progressive and positively-focused Christianity. There is a surprising amount of theology in the book, much of it of a decidedly Girardian flavour. I know that would shock my academic friends, but I stand by my assessment. Butterworth's book is a lyrical, complex and deeply thoughtful text which challenges the authority of mainstream Christianity, as well as the easy laziness of reflexive individualism and the unexamined life.

Norman Vincent Peale

One of the giants of self-help writing is Norman Vincent Peale. He almost single-handedly defined the genre in the 1950s and 60s, starting off with his monumental bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, and he established for decades a particular style of self-help writing, a style which is still being emulated today.

I have written before of the overt religiosity of Peale's writing, and his radical re-casting of Christianity as a positive aid to lifestyle and success both captured the zeitgeist of mid-20th century America and helped, in part, to shape it. The stolid Protestant friendliness of Peale's utterances, coupled as they were with just the right degree of acknowledgement of science and medicine, set the minds of a generation at ease. His great genius of expression inspired other writers, most notably the Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who sought to do with Catholicism what Peale had done with mainline Protestantism. In Australia Peale's style was copied by the Presbyterian clergyman Gordon Powell.

Peale sought to reconcile Christianity with psychiatry, something M. Scott Peck managed so successfully a generation later with The Road Less Travelled. Peale established the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry right next door to his church, and from here he attempted a kind of Christian psychotherapy, employing professionals from both camps. It would seem that counselling was his great passion, and his books are filled with case studies of people he had counselled. He seemed inordinately proud of the new hybrid he had created. Of course, this movement seems these days to have come to nothing and at the very most Christian-tinged counselling and psychology has acquired a dubious name, associated as it has become with the extreme right-wing fringe of Christianity, and the mental and spiritual abuse of young women and gay people.

Peale, I think, would have been shocked by the state of things now. He was most certainly not a fundamentalist, and saw himself as a part of the great tradition of American liberal Protestantism. Though the language of his books is almost shocking to a contemporary secular audience, it's worth keeping in mind that his reading of the Bible and his theological understanding was distinctly progressive. Though he claimed all his life to be a conventional Protestant clergyman, and was lionised by people like Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan, he was deeply influenced by the ideas of New Thought, and was for a time a student of Ernest Holmes.
Like most successful self-help writers, he diversified into other forms of media, and was particularly successful on radio, where his program 'The Art of Living' ran for 54 years. He was also one of the first to produce audio versions of his books, and you can still buy recordings of him reading The Power of Positive Thinking.

These days Peale is deeply unfashionable, though his books remain in print. It is hard to imagine that his worldview, as unashamedly religious as it was, will ever again be mainstream. Self-help critic Wendy Kaminer, in her book I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, accuses Peale of being a magical thinker and "oblivious to social injustice."

The Quest for Meaning

I am quite a devotee of Unity FM, the on-line radio station run by the Unity School of Christianity, an American church that propagates the teachings of New Thought. The church has been around for over 100 years, and as churches go it is on the extreme-liberal end of things, with openly gay clergy and a reasonably open-ended theology that encourages people to seek their own spiritual truths. The church exists more to encourage positive thinking and the cultivation of spiritual technologies such as prayer and reflection. Unity is the largest and most widespread of the New Thought denominations.
Their radio station is reasonably new - I think it's been running for about two years now - and for me it offers a fascinating insight into American self-help culture. I especially enjoy it when they discuss books, and one of the shows, Hooked on Classics, is devoted solely to the study of New Thought books, normally reading one particular title over a number of weeks in a kind of on-line bookclub.
The output of Unity FM is quite impressive, and I am invariably weeks behind in my listening. So it is that I've just finished Jim Rosemergy's book The Quest for Meaning, which was the book being discussed a couple of months ago!
Until then I'd never heard of Jim Rosemergy, a Unity Church minister who turns out to have been an extremely prolific author. This book is about the notion of vocation and mission, and how we might view our lives and our work as some kind of spiritual mission. Interestingly, at exactly the same time I have also been reading Micki McGee's academic study of self-help writing, Self-Help Inc., and in it she discusses this very trope.
As one would expect from the pen of a mnister, this book is overtly religious, and targeted I would imagine primarily at church members. He discusses the classic New Thought notion that we are all children of God, and that all of us are blessed with a special mission that we should do our best to fulfill. This idea is much older than Unity, of course - I can trace it back at least as far as Swedenborg, and almost certainly way before. At the end of each chapter he provides a series of questions for reflection and topics for prayer, a set of work he refers to as an "Adventure." This kind of structure is quite typical of self-help writing, though in this case a number of the questions were quite esoteric - sometimes almost koan-like.
Rosemergy quotes the special notion of mission that Unity Church's founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, lived with. He includes their extraordinary "covenant" - a document they wrote together which set forth their life's plan and all that they were prepared to do to achieve it. This was written in 1892, and serves as an early example of the "mission statement" that all corporate entities are encoraged to committ to paper these days.
The Quest for Meaning is an interesting little book, and would fascinate a conventional theologian with its very specific - and very specifically New Thought - Christology.

Jesus in The Science of Mind

As with most New Thought, The Science of Mind relies heavily on Christian imagery, and is filled with biblical quotations. It also uses regularly teh person of Jesus to illustrate its own metaphysical concepts. For example, in the chapter on "Physical Perfection." Holmes writes: "It is probable that when Jesus forgave the man his sins, he realized that the man had a complex of condemnation within himself. The sense of condemnation which the race holds about itself weights it down, and it must be removed. This explains why Jesus said: "Thy sins be forgiven thee.""
Similar to the Fillmores, who were fellow students of Emma Curtis Hopkins, Holmes sees the Christ as a Divine archetype, as a Godly quality that we all possess, a goal we can all aim toward. And while he remains "the Master Teacher," he is not the only paragon of Good that the world has seen. This New Thought reading of Jesus is much closer to Hindu and Buddhist understandings of Great Teachers and Realised Ones. It is also this refusal to recognise the unique and exclusive divinity of Jesus that puts Religious Science outside the parameters of conventional Christianity.
Science of Mind teaches that Jesus is "the great example, not the great exception," who points us toward the Universal Oneness to which we all belong, and in which we are all Divine. But Holmes' great love for the Bible, and his heartfelt adoration of Jesus, is palpable throughout The Science of Mind, and to this end I see it as one of the really monumental works of Christian devotion.

Joel Goldsmith

Joel Goldsmith is an enigmatic figure in the history of self-help. While never a real superstar of the movement, his books always had a cult following, and many of them remain in print to this day. His great classic was a slender book called The Infinite Way, which layed out his basic philosophy. Its brevity does not denote ease of reading, however, because it's a dense little volume. After its publication groups emerged all over the US and the world (up until the late 1990s there were still groups meeting here in Sydney) devoted to the study of the book and Goldsmith's philosophy.
He is often characterised as the great modern reformer of Christian Science, and he seemed to have attracted many followers from that camp. My favourite Christian Scientist, Doris Day, was a fan of Goldsmith's work, and claimed to go to sleep every night listening to his tapes.
Certainly Goldsmith's books present a more overtly religious - and by that I mean Christian - aspect than most of the other modern New Thought books. I suspect this is what stopped him from becoming a genuinely popular literary figure. The Jesus talk was simply too unpalatable for the general reader.
That said, once you begin to examine the books' underlying theology you quickly realise that we are not in the realm of mainstream Christianity here. Beside the fact that he was a great advocate of meditation, Goldsmith's own religious life was quite fascinating. he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, and was educated in a Hebrew School. Quite when he began healing in the name of Jesus no-one knows, but Goldsmith described his emergence as a spiritual leader as a slow process, something that happened in stages until one day he realised that no-one came to see him any longer for business purposes - 100% of his days had been taken up by healing work. Taking this as a sign from God, he allowed his business to go broke and instead set himself up as a fulltime Christian Science practitioner. Later, of course, he was to reject the dogmas of that church, as so many had before him, and instead he established his own school based on similar principles, but allowing its students more intellectual and spiritual freedom.
Much of The Infinite Way seems to be pretty standard Christian Science minus the dogma and the insistence on exclusive truth. Goldsmith was at heart a Universalist, and recognised the name of Jesus as a concept and spiritual symbol more than a defining point of religious difference. He said that we need to develop an exclusively spiritual mindset, and once we did that the world will fall in line with the perfection that is the law of spirit.
To my mind Goldsmith's most readable book was Practising the Presence. Indeed, it is quite beautifully written, an extended meditation on the necessity to be always at prayer, always "showing forth the health, harmony, and wealth, which are our spiritual birthright..." (55).
There is a fascinating (and quite rare) biography written by one of his closest assistants which describes Goldsmith as a "Modern Mystic," and he certainly is entitled to that description.
As an example of mid-20th century self-help, The Infinite Way stands out as being among the most overtly religious in its vocabulary and concepts, but it was a religious view so unorthodox that it separates Goldsmith from those other great populist clergymen Norman Vincent Peale and Fulton J. Sheen.

The Power of Positive Thinking

While I was in Phnom Penh I was delighted by the presence of really quite good second-hand bookshops - something that is absent from Vietnam. As usual in such places, there was an eclectic collection of books - heavy on chick-lit and murder mysteries, and also a substantial number of business and self-help titles. For US$3 I bought this well-thumbed copy of the self-help classic The Power of Positive Thinking, and it travelled with me all through Cambodia and Vietnam.
I had never read it before, so was surprised to discover that it is extremely religious in content - Peale's main advice throughout the book is to read and memorise scripture and use quotes from the Gospels as positive affirmations. I can't imagine it appealing at all to modern day self-help readers, who are largely an unbelieving bunch, and those that are interested in spirituality tend to steer away from the old-fashioned style of 'memorise scripture' Christianity.
It would be unfair, however, to characterise Peale as some sort of fundamentalist Christian idealogue trying to propagate a religious agenda by stealth. He was, after all, an ordained minister, and a famous one at that. Kind of like the Benny Hinn of his time, only nicer and more substantial.
Peale had been born a Methodist, but became a famous clergyman with the Reform Church in America, which was very similar in theology and worldview. And while the religious advice he offers in this book is perfectly inoffensive and acceptable to almost any kind of Christian, his own personal beliefs were reasonably unconventional and progressive - influenced as they had been by the New Thought teachings of Charles Fillmore and Ernest Holmes, and incorporating a species of spiritualism influenced by his reading of Swedenborg.
So it's an odd book - I wouldn't even call it self-help, more a prayer manual and a practical guide to using the Bible. But if you find it in any bookshop (and it is still in print) it will almost certainly be filed under "Self-Help."