“Manifesting Your Heart’s Desire”

January 11, 2009

Rev. Rali Weaver

First Church and Parish in Dedham

As I have been meditating on “manifesting our heart’s desire” this week I have been considering two types of desire, the desire for that which is needed and is already within our grasp on the one hand, and the desire for more than what is needed and we must strive for on the other. I think it is essential that as we explore the concept of manifesting our heart’s desire that we ask ourselves where we are searching for what we need and what is already present within our potential and where are we searching outside of ourselves for things beyond our grasp.

When I think back to last Sunday’s Sermon and Victor and Tyler’s comments about their trip to the Gaza Strip and I reflect upon all of the news coming out of that area today - I wonder if this isn’t also a part of what is so unnerving about what is happening there. How much is the security that Israel desires already within their grasp? And how much of it is something they must strive outside of their own walls for? When does the desire for more end? How do we ever know when we have enough?

A few years ago, when I was serving as the Assistant Minister at King’s Chapel, a parishioner invited me to join him at the Boston Garden for an evening with Joel Osteen. If you aren’t familiar with him- Joel Osteen is not a basketball player or a rock star but is actually the minister of the largest church in the United States the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. This mega church serves nearly 20,000 people each Sunday not to mention how many people watch his message on TV, and on the computer and read books written by he and his wife. When I was invited to see this preacher in action I naturally had to say yes.

To inspire an audience of 20,000 the event was similar to a rock concert with flashy lights and upbeat motivational music. The Boston Garden was full of people truly inspired by his ministry.

I listened critically to his message. Rev. Osteen spoke of a God who calls us to live life abundantly. He spoke of Jesus dying on the cross so that we could be free. While his message felt shallow and empty to my ears, I left wondering what harm, if any, it might be doing to the American psyche. How could encouraging people to look beyond themselves do any harm? How could encouraging people to live life more abundantly be a bad message to give? At its best Rev. Osteen appears to be to reframing the optimism of Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” and at its worst he appears to be holding up an empty promise that not everyone listening would be able to experience.

He brought his mother forward and told of her having cancer and recounted a tale of her healing that implied if you had faith enough you could be healed of anything you choose.

While I am enough of a Pollyanna myself to believe that faith and hope and a positive spirit are important parts of healing our lives and manifesting our hopes and dreams I felt the danger of his words implied that without that faith and hope and positive spirit you make yourself ill and that with ‘enough’ faith and hope we can make ourselves well. If that were true people would never die. We would have cured cancer by now. There would be no suffering.

Life just isn’t that simple.

Although Joe Osteen offers an account of Divine Will that to my Unitarian Universalist sensibilities seems to miss the mark, it isn’t just the Osteen’s pedaling this message. The age old idea “think it and you will become it” is articulated from many arenas throughout our modern landscape.

By no means the first or the last peddler of the optimistic road to manifesting your hearts desire in 1950, Norman Vincent Peale coined the phrase “When life gives you lemons, make lemon aide”. A Baptist minister who founded the magazine Guideposts and wrote the Power of Positive Thinking, Peale strove to use his own intrinsic optimism to encourage people to systematically look within and orienting the heart in a positive direction to live your life to its fullest and find everything you desire. Peale confessed that as a youth he had "the worst inferiority complex of all," and developed his positive thinking/positive confession philosophy just to help himself. For his contributions to the field of theology, President Ronald Reagan awarded Peale the Presidential Medal of Freedom on March 26, 1984.

When I was growing up I was indoctrinated to this way of thought at a very young age. My father had a series of tapes titled “Strangest Secret” by Earl Nightingale that he encouraged my sisters and I to listen to when we were teenagers. These recordings came out motivational tapes Mr. Nightingale made to motivate his employees in his insurance company while he went away on a fishing vacation. In these recordings Earl Nightingale retold the story of the Acres of Diamonds as an illustration of how everything we want is right here and accessible where we are. He went on to share information he learned by studying all the world’s religions with the question “Why are some people miserable while others are so happy?” These recordings went on to be the only recorded message to become a gold record. His central concept was that “We become what we think about.” Nightingale like Peale tried to systematically teach people to take pride in their work, to strive to their highest potential and to do so with a positive attitude.

As a young woman with learning disabilities these messages certainly gave me hope. Hope that I too could strive to become better and better at what I could do. If my Father had not given me those tapes I would have never become a Special Education Teacher because everyone around me growing up believed I should do something with my hands for a living because they believed my brain could not manage anything more.

The modern manifestation of this ages old directive toward self-improvement and how to go about manifesting our desires- comes from philosophers like Jack Canfield and Bob Proctor and Deepak Chopra and even Wayne Dyer. And their recent interation titled “The Secret” suggests that human beings are magnets and we are what we think about. If you haven’t already been exposed to it, the basic philosophy of The Secret is founded in the Law of Attraction. Put simply “The Secret” is that if you fully focus on the things that you want and put your energy behind those things you will call those things into being. Conversely if you focus on the things you don’t want and you spend your energy focused on negative things you will equally call those things into existence. As they describe it the law of attraction does not discriminate, humans simply act as magnets so whatever we put our energy behind we will achieve. Dr. Joe Vitale a metaphysician states in the film that the promise is as is that “you are the masterpiece of your own life.” and so if you become aware of your thoughts and you direct them in the way you want them to go you can sculpt your own destiny.

My dearest friend Susan and I watched the film “The Secret” together last year on a visit. She had not been exposed to the Earl Nightingale and Norman Vincent Peale messages as a child as I had, and so this idea that we manifest our own destiny with our positive intentions, while not exactly new to her was somewhat novel.

When the film was finished we started thinking how we could test this theory. All of the authors encouraged having fun with this and so we decided we should experiment.

At some point during the film Jack Canfield talked about how he tested The Secret by attracting money. So Susan decided this was the test she wanted to do. In the film Jack Canfeild talked about attracting a large sum of money such as $10,000. And Susan already limiting her expectation decided that she would only ask for a hundred. I didn’t think that would be much of a proof so I encouraged her to ask for more and so she asked the universe for $1,000.

With great intention Susan went about asking for this amount with a positive attitude three times a day by looking in the mirror and saying thank you for the $1000.

Then I started thinking that we wouldn’t really know if this was working if she didn’t put a date on it so I encouraged her to put a date on it. She decided on December 23 (2007). And then every day she would thank the universe for the $1000 on December 23^rd. She would strive to have these thoughts when she was already feeling good, if a favorite song came on the radio she would thank the universe for the $1000 on December 23^rd. If she took a walk on a beautiful day she would focus her brain on that $1000. She even drew a picture of a personal check written to her from the Universe for $1000. At least three times a day when she was feeling good she would focus her mind on that $1000 coming on December 23^rd. She was so intent on this that some days she would put her curmudgeonly husband off until she had focused her mind on thanks to the blessed universe. One day in fact she had gone out with some of her friends after work and when she came home her husband started in about a phone call from his mother (her name was Evelyn) Evelyn (who passed away recently) was the kind of mother in law who although you loved her dearly you were generally happy to postpone a conversation with if you wanted to stay in a good mood. So Susan asked for a few minutes and ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and said her mantra really quickly before the positive feeling from her night out could fade. And then you know what happened? She returned to listen to her husband and this is what he said: “Honey I called my mother to thank her because in the mail today we received a check from her for- and he paused $1,000 dollars.” “One Thousand Dollars” she said “What is the date?”- “December 23^rd.”

I know this story sounds unbelievable, and if you had known Evelyn you would really know how really unbelievable it was, but I promise you that it is true. I will invite Susan up here from North Carolina to tell you this story herself sometime. I have a million stories of my own. And I know while the Law of attraction isn’t full proof it is true.

The shadow side of the law of attraction is unconscious thinking. Our own insecurities and egos and judgments of our selves and others can get in the way of positive action. And we can consciously and unconsciously attract negative things with negative thoughts. If I am overwhelmed by work or my life and I spend all my energy thinking “this is horrible, it is never going to get better, life just isn’t fair” and this is the energy I put out into the world, this is the energy I will receive. Most of the negative beliefs we carry and send out into the world are often unconscious to us, which is why self-awareness is such a vital part of manifesting our hearts desire.

Very simply wakening to our motivations and our unconscious obstacles are as important to manifesting our hearts desire as focusing our thoughts in a positive direction.

Perhaps Unitarian Minister The Rev. Forest Church of All Souls in New York said the beet:

“Want what you have. Be who you are. Do what you can.”

If we lived fully in connection to these simple words in 2009 how might we change our own lives? If as a Church we focused our hearts on what we already have and we opened our hearts to who we already are and we do what we can, how might we change our church? If governments adopted these simple principles to look within instead of looking without how might this change the course of history? If life is truly what we make of it, perhaps 2009 it is time that we should make it our own.

May it be so.