Title: Ten Secrets for the Man in the Mirror
Author: Patrick Morley
Date: 2000
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0-310-24097-2
Length: 194 pages
Quote: “In this book we will explore ten secrets of happiness
for men who want to be happy.”
On the plus side, the ten secrets don't include the trendy
false idea that “people” are happier when they're not burdened by (oh, the
strain!) having choices. (Reality check: are you? Ever???)
Morley's ten “secrets” do at least make sense.
On the minus side, they're not exactly secrets, nor are they likely to be startling. Morley is a
Christian minister and “Secret #1” is that many people find happiness in being
Christians. The word he uses to sum up that idea is “Lordship,” and the other ten
non-secrets are summed up in the words Balance, Vocation, Suffering,
Discipleship, Stewardship, Witnessing, Service, Humor, and Love.
It is hard to imagine an English-speaking reader to whom any
main idea in this book would be new. In theory someone who'd grown up
practicing some other religion, and converted to Christianity, might be
unfamiliar with what Christians have traditionally told ourselves about
happiness. In practice, in these United States, anyone still practicing another
religion has probably been bombarded with information about what Christians
believe and how we live, and may feel unjustifiably brave merely for continuing
to identify with any other religion.
Christians, however, have not traditionally asked that books
about the Christian life be new. Ideas that really were new to Christian
readers would probably be unchristian ideas. We look for books that make the
same points our grandparents probably made when we were three years old, in
ways that address the adults we've become. We do not blame such books for being
unoriginal; we praise them for being sound on doctrine.
Morley's book is addressed to men, though written with, of
course, the expectation that a few curious women will read it. Most Protestants
will probably agree that it's sound on doctrine, though not as detailed on
doctrine as the books that remain in denomination-specific publishing ghettos.
And what does he have to say to men? (Did any women seriously
expect him to say something like “And of course we must avoid hiring or
promoting women”?) Nothing that's totally inapplicable to women or even to children:
“It is on the narrow road of self-denial that we find the
broad road of success and peace.”
“[T]he more you give away, the happier you will be.”
“If the mountain was smooth, you couldn't climb it.”
“A man was standing before God...he cried out, 'Dear God! I
see all this pain and suffering. why don't you send someone?' God answered, 'I
did. I sent you.'”
“To be a disciple means to be 'with Christ.'”
About one thing in this book I'd like to warn readers, not to
discourage Morley and not to “pick a fight,” but because the errors in books
are so likely to discourage readers and, when the books are Christian,
Christians' blandly supporting these books can do new Christians real harm.
This error is not, Heaven knows, peculiar to Patrick Morley. It's widespread.
It's easily mistaken for Christian doctrine rather than an ever-popular heresy.
I've written about this error before; I feel a need to write about it whenever
I endorse a book whose writer falls into it. And after reading Morley's account
of the super-patronizing, heavy-handed speech he gave a secretary he apparently
hired out of pity alone, after which I'd be surprised to read that the poor
woman reported for work the next day, I'm sure Morley can handle a little
rebuke.
I'm turned off by Morley's assertion that “Everything God has
caused or allowed in your life is for your good—to draw you into a deeper love
relationship with” [God]. I wonder whether the Christian belief that God can,
and ultimately does, bring good out of evil, can be worse explained than
that...it can be, of course, and has been. (“The pain,” maundered
well-intentioned Teresa of Calcutta, “is Jesus kissing you.” Only those who are
both very old (or young) and very small say things like that, even to sick patients,
and survive. The patient begged, “Please tell Him to stop kissing me!”)
Let's say this to all the heretics out there who imagine that
God “needs” to allow us to suffer: You are positing an awfully incompetent sort
of God, a God whose teaching skills lag behind those of the average fourteen-year-old single mother.
I couldn't pray to an allegedly Supreme Being like that, myself. Your God
sounds like one of those messed-up Greco-Roman Pagan deities who were always
fouling up their own personal relationships and envying mortals' brief times of
happiness, whom the Greeks admitted, by Plato's time, that no rational adult
could possibly worship.
I can't prove, of course, that this world wasn't made by that
sort of God—in some ways this world is such a mess as to support the claim that
it might have been made by some sort of slow-learning troubled-teenaged God!
When I pray, however, I don't address that kind of God, myself. I address a
Supreme Being that has endowed each mortal creature with Consequence.
Because we have Consequence, it's possible for Tracy Smith to
become permanently paraplegic, not because God wants or needs Smith to be
paraplegic, but simply because Terry Jones chose to be a drunk driver. God is
not obliged, or even likely, to keep that from happening merely because Smith
is a Christian. There may be times when Christians are warned, “Don't drive
down that street, don't dive into that water, don't eat from that dish,” and so
they avoid injuries, but those times seem to be more the exception than the
rule. The rule is that if the drunk driver is about to collide with someone
else at full speed, and the Christian happens to be on the road, the Christian
is as likely to be smashed as an unbeliever would be. Not because this
experience will do the Christian, or anyone else, any particular good, but
because God set the world running according to certain physical laws.
God is not better served by the Christian driver's
death than by his life. Mortals are better served by having to adjust
to a world where actions have predictable consequences than by living in a
world where God mops up every spill, and of course, if Tracy Smith is a
Christian who earnestly desires “spiritual growth,” it's as likely that Smith
will achieve “spiritual growth” in a wheelchair as it is that Smith will find
“spiritual growth” in an athletic career. But whatever lessons God may have to
teach Tracy Smith, God could have taught Smith more efficiently if Terry
Jones had stayed sober and not maimed Smith.
God is not so stupid as to imagine that people become kind by
being ill. God is wise enough to help people who, recognizing that the natural
tendency of illness is to make people selfish if not cruel, cultivate the
virtue of kindness when they are ill. God could, however, have simply chosen to
do other things that we all know are more likely to help people become kind,
such as exposing those people to kind companions, if God's purpose had been to
make people kind. God's purpose, we see when we think about the matter, is not
to make people kind. God made (a minority of) people who want to become
kind, and God helps those people when they try to become kind, but really,
whether people can be described as kind, selfish, or cruel is evidently a
matter of much greater concern to those people than to God.
Some part of the revulsion induced by misguided Christian
warbling about how “everything God allows to happen to us is for our good” is
disgust with the callousness this twisted thinking produces—the idea that if
God allowed my neighbor to be wheelchair-bound, God intended that to be good
for him in some sadistic way, so I don't need to hold the door when I see him
rolling up to a public building behind me. Some part is also disgust with the
infantile self-centered quality of this “me, me, me, it's all about me”
thinking. Get it through your head, baby, most of the things that take
place during your lifetime have nothing whatsoever to do with you.
You are not the center of the universe!
Against the callousness of the Positive Thinking heresy,
biblical Christianity sets the idea of “bearing one another's burdens.” The
Gospels, measured by length, seem to be mostly about how Jesus dealt with the
suffering people He met on His travels; and what Jesus did was not, not ever,
to warble about how some heretical, sadistic, feebleminded God intended their
suffering to do them good. What He did was help them. Naturally His healing
miracles attracted the most attention; and some of those can be duplicated
rather easily by any hypnotist or masseur, and some are now replaced by modern
medical techniques, and some continue to defy explanation. But Jesus was not
limited to “healing.” His miracles met people's felt “needs” even for fast food
and luxury items. When a meeting ran overtime He didn't tell people to
challenge their habit of eating at a certain time, or choose between staying
with Him and going home for dinner, or even use their sense of hunger to
sensitize them to the real hunger of famine victims; He took up a collection
and gave them “miraculous” sandwiches. Real Christians do real things, and give
real things, where Positive Thinkers flap their annoying mouths.
Do real Christians feel a need to lump all “suffering”from
“demands of a young family; marriage struggles...job dissatisfaction” on
through “A car strikes down a loved one; your home is burglarized” into one
category, on the basis of its emotional quality, as if the emotion were the
main issue? Jesus and the apostles didn't do that. They responded to each case
of suffering that they met in specific, individual terms. (They were not social
workers who needed a huge procrustean “policy” to carry out an anti-democratic
agenda.) Some people, like Nicodemus, really did suffer mainly from theological
questions, and could be helped by teaching them about the Bible. (Jesus must
have loved people like that.) Some people needed healing. Some needed to be fed
or materially supported. Some needed to be defended against unjust accusations.
Some actually needed to be rebuked.
Jesus and the apostles, like modern Christians, met many
times more people who needed practical, material help than people who needed to
be told about religious beliefs. They did not redirect these people to official
charitable programs, although both the Jewish community and the Roman
government had those, and although the New Testament endorsed them—so far as
they went. When they met people who, despite the existence of organized
charity, had material needs, they met those material needs...even felt
“needs” for luxuries, like wine at a party, or lunch for people who seem to
have been healthy enough to skip a meal.
We read of two similar but apparently distinct incidents
where Jesus “miraculously” supplied lunches for audiences of four and five
thousand, starting with one small lunch that one follower was willing to share.
I put “miraculously” in quotation marks, not because I doubt that Jesus could
have supernaturally turned five flatbreads and two fishes into fifty
thousand fish sandwiches, but because I find it hard to imagine that He needed
to do that. If the one boy had brought a lunch, surely others in the crowd had
brought lunch too. Very likely the “miracle” was organizing a lot of people who
didn't know each other into an impromptu potluck dinner party; very likely the
menu included fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese as well as bread and fish.
Not that it matters.
What we do not read in either of these incidents is
that “Jesus then lifted up His voice and said, 'Endure your hunger with
fortitude so that God may teach you through suffering.'” He did no such thing.
There would be no Christian Church today if he'd done that. And Christians who
desire real spiritual life should follow His example.
A Welfare State that systematically trains poor people to depend
on the federal government to deliver and oversee everything they “need” is in
some ways the precise opposite to a Christian fellowship that encourages rich
and poor people to “bear one another's burdens.” If Dorcas, in the Bible, had
been content to sit in her hovel and eat the food both the Jews and the Romans
collected for poor old people—for which she was certainly qualified, few people
in her time ever living to the age of eighty—there would have been no Bible
story about her, and, probably, none about the religious movement she
supported. (First century Judaism was rife with religious movements,
reforms, sects, “messiahs,” all of which were chronicled but then forgotten.)
Then as now, there were of course plenty of poor old people for whom all
that could be done was to send them baskets of food, and the baskets were sent,
and the poor old people mumbled their crumbs and died unregretted. But Dorcas,
whether she was still able to walk or not, insisted on working—at least on
taking in sewing and mending—and we are told that her life was miraculously
prolonged for that reason...and her religious movement became the Christian
Church. Biblical Christians must resist the urge to tell those suffering from
unemployment, underemployment, inadequate income, or sudden disability, just to
go on the dole and shut up. Biblical Christians must find ways to employ them,
through which both rich and poor can be positively blessed.
Then again there are Christians whose suffering cannot be
relieved by any means we know—people whose medical conditions are not (yet)
curable, people who suffer from unresolvable and perhaps pathological
“spiritual” conflicts—and for them it may be appropriate to seek some
kind of “spiritual growth” or “spiritual benefit” from their suffering itself.
Paul suffered, he said, from something he called a “thorn in the flesh.” From a
contemporary description of his squinting, and from his own references to “the
large letters I write with my own hand” at the ends of letters dictated to
other people, some suspect that this was his deteriorating eyesight. He prayed
about it, his supporters prayed about it, and after some time Paul felt called
to tell his supporters that he had received the insight that his “thorn” was
teaching him something about humility. It was appropriate for Paul to report
this insight as a message from God. It would not, however, have been
appropriate for anyone else to have shoved this idea at Paul. Christians
already had the book of Job to tell us that, when anyone is tempted to redefine
someone else's suffering as some sort of moral lesson or chastisement,
God tells that person to repent and make sacrificial offerings that at
least overcompensate for whatever material loss the one suffering may have
incurred.
I really think Christians need to develop a zero-tolerance
policy for Positive Thinking platitudes uttered when a Christian is in fact
suffering.
“I received this e-mail from Albert Absentee: 'My wife is
dying, and although we have money to buy groceries we're out of food because I
can't leave her alone long enough to walk to the grocery store.'”
“Ah, but Gaaawwwd...”
“Silence, fool! What Stupid Stevie Hypocrite would have
said, if he'd had any sense, would have been 'Albert, please may I go to the
grocery store for you now?' I propose that we as a church work on Stupid
Stevie Hypocrite for the next week, until he is on his knees crying real tears,
and meanwhile" [dialling], "Albert, may I go to the grocery store for you right now?”
“What exactly is your problem, Stupid Stevie? I don't see a
full-body cast or a wheelchair...is something the matter with your
feet?”
“Do you think the problem might be that you were discouraged
from using your imagination as a child? Maybe a conscious effort to regress and
read nonsense stories...”
“Are you by any chance a member of the Democratic Party,
Stupid Stevie? Do you need to read aloud, repeatedly, the collected writings of
Grover Cleveland?”
(And so on.)
Well...I have now written more in refutation of a quite
common error, in an otherwise good Christian book, than Morley wrote within
his error. Perhaps, to be fair, I ought to go on to write as many pages in
praise of the acceptable majority of Morley's book as Morley wrote while writing
about his legitimate Christian ideas. I suspect that your eyes are already
tired, and if you're going to appreciate the original anecdotes and aphorisms
Morley uses to flesh out his valid ideas, you need to turn to his book now.
It left me cold, but then I'm categorically excluded from its
intended audience. Morley is a fairly successful writer. Evidently men's
groups, for whom this book is really intended, find it possible to use his
books. If they correct for the errors of Positive Thinking and that
insufferable speech to the secretary, men's groups will find useful material
here.
Another use I can imagine for this book might be for women's
groups studying the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense: Read page 149 aloud.
(The page numbers are, for no immediately obvious reason, printed in a tiny
grotesque boldface font that most adults may not even recognize as being numbers.
Page 149 is just before the end-of-chapter questions for Chapter 8, “The
Antidote for a Boring Success.”) If an employer had given you that speech,
would you have (1) quit right then, (2) got through the day but not gone back
in the morning, or (3) begun a sabotage campaign the minute that pompous jackass
turned his back? If you had employed someone who's tempted to use the office as
a place to vent about her or his problems at home, what would you say that
might actually help the employee? Do you feel that 139 words, including two
gratuitous “calls” to someone who's already there, by her given name yet,
“soften” the message, or would you actually feel, as the secretary, that “I'm
feeling overwhelmed by all this personal conversation and I'd rather keep all
the private business out of the office” is a clearer, more honest, more
respectful version? How can we communicate this kind of idea to men who don't
even realize that they are verbal abusers?
Either men or women who want to buy this book here may buy it as A Fair Trade Book. (Despite feeling a need to rebuke Morley, I also want to encourage him.) The standard price of $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment offers considerable potential for savings over what you'd pay for the at least eight, probably twelve, books of this size that will fit into one package if you bought them all separately on Amazon pages that may seem to offer lower prices, so feel free to add other books, by Morley or other authors, to the package.
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