Your life, your work, should never be negative, nor anti anything. It is — it must be! — positive, optimistic, youthful, cheerful and peaceful.
-St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge
St. Josemaría Escrivá’s exhortation is worth pondering for anyone. The world is rife with examples of destruction, but the force to create and sustain is much less common. There are whole movements and organizations defined as opposed to some person or phenomenon. The results are often a purity quest that ends in futility.
With the astonishingly widespread security in parts of the world of food and shelter, the temptation to fixate on lack and fault has grown significant. We are tempted to fixate on what is perceived to be missing in order to “fix” problems. Ignoring problems is not helpful, but fixating on them also does not solve them.
Theodore Dalrymple writes memorably of the contrast between the welfare state of affluent England and nations with chaotic societies in which death was common. Initially, upon arriving in Africa as a young doctor decades ago, Dalrymple was shocked by the material suffering and dysfunction that surrounded him. After years of work there and years working in the British prison system, Dalrymple concluded that the physical deprivations of material poverty were indeed great. He writes, “Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England.”
It was the relatively well off nation that bred misery, disconnection, and discontent. The nation that sought to fill every need, put a refrigerator and microwave in every publicly-funded tenement, was the one that unintentionally perhaps did the most damage. Comparing nations with capricious rulers and many people in material poverty with the welfare state of Britain, Dalrymple observes, “I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.” If ever there was needed proof of man’s soul, there is the simple fact that the person who is given every material comfort can struggle to get out of bed in the morning to face another day of being satiated.
How can such a well-intentioned system have such devastating effects? The ill-conceived “War on Poverty” is perhaps fixated on the lack and the perceived material cause of suffering. Rather than bringing positive, optimistic human energy, the welfare state seeks to plug in the material that will have the desired result. Starting with the assumption that people lack something they need to succeed—free housing, state-subsidized nutrition, free college education—ignores the resources that people have to solve their own problems. Of course, such bootstraps talk is anathema these days, but try as we might the results of government intervention continue to disappoint.
Moving from the welfare state to the daily life of ordinary people, what does the exhortation mean? Most of us know, when pressed, what negativity is. Though it sounds dreadfully new-agey, there is something captured in the word “energy” when considering a person, the dynamics of a group, or the emotional tenor of an activity. This force infusing daily activities and conversations becomes more palpable the more one becomes attuned to it. Though not a tangible metric, this energy can be identified. You know if the activity you are engaged in is negative.
Many people enjoy a good kvetch but when does “venting” turn into gossip and destruction? St. Josemaría has a point to staying on the course of positivity at all times. Once we focus on something, it is more noticeable at every turn. St. Josemaría’s advice is not just religious. In any arena of life there are defects and trouble spots that can consume us if we let them.
Training oneself to recognize the allure of negative, critical, and destructive behavior opens up the possibility of redirecting those thoughts to creation. What is in the full sense? By what miracle do we exist and what can we do to be more fully alive?
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