Shhhh...

"The Secret" hit the shelves with a vengeance a few years ago and flew off the shelves just as fast. The basic premise (for those of you who have been stuck in an alternate universe for the past year) is that the good things that happen to you are the result of your ability to envision them happening. If you keep a positive attitude, good things will come your way: positive energy creates positive outcomes.

There have been countless iterations of this idea for millennia, the most historically recent being Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking." (The Health and Wealth Gospel movement has been a more recent offshoot.) Of course, for any student of culture or religion, The Secret wasn't much of a secret at all. Indeed, a variation on this theme exists in the Christian tradition in Paul's letter to the Philippians:

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you." (4:8-9)

The Christian version of The Secret (more accurately, the various iterations of "The Secret" are really just misguided versions of the Philippians passage) promises, not that good things will come to you if you envision them, but that God's peace will be upon you if you continue to focus on the good and noble. And what is a better thing than God's peace?

In the work of animal welfare, it is far too easy to get overwhelmed by the sickening reality of animal abuse and the horrific conditions of factory farms and the plight of millions of animals who are euthanized each year in this country in the name of population control. We must nevertheless hold up, in the midst of the reality of this desperate situation, a vision for what things can--and with God's help, will--be. God has rarely made a practice of swooping in to stop suffering. Many of us wish otherwise, but that's not how it works (freedom invariably begets suffering, which is the price we pay in a broken world). That will all change, of course, when "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven," but until that day, WE are God's hands and eyes and feet and heart, and WE are the ones whom God entrusts to carry out his will that all suffering might end, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our freedom to do so.

Think of a world where animal shelters are empty, factory farms gather cobwebs, dog and horse racing tracks are turned into pastures and parks, where medical laboratories are turned into classrooms, where children dissect sentences instead of animals. Meditate on these things... then get to work to bring it about.