Co-opting religious concepts for New Age

I was listening to the Catholic Laboratory podcast by Ian Maxfield yesterday, where he was bemoaning a recent report in NewScientist magazine about the effects of mental practices on recovery from illness.

Yeah, stunning, I know.  If you are grounded in your thinking, this will help you recover faster.

Ian’s remark, though, was about the particular New Agey practices that they mention:

• Positive thinking
• Trusting relationships
• Knowing your purpose
• Meditation

Sound familiar?  Yes, these are core practices of our religion and belief in God.

Yet, NewScientist also tends to promote a strongly secular attitude that religion is unnecessary, that God is an artifact of weak thinking.  There’s a lot of this going around these days, where religious concepts and practices have been wrapped up in the vague “spiritual but not religious” hogwash.

Spiritual, I guess, in the sense that we worship honor our God a more powerful being “the universe.”  As if “the universe” gives us any particular purpose.

As a career and business coach for 12 years now, I’ve associated with a great many people who get caught up in the whole New Agey thing.  So I’ve come to understand some of how this mindset is emerging.

This seems to be the idea:  There certainly is something more powerful than me, or my family, or even society as a whole.  Perhaps I’m not comfortable calling that “God”, because that would imply that He gets to tell me what to do.  Instead, I’m more at ease with the thought that I get to do whatever I wish, like my parents taught me:  “You can grow up to do anything you want!  We just want you to be happy!”

So we co-opt the scientific concept of “the universe,” and assign to it a sense that it’s always there to help us.  But fortunately it’s so large that we can’t possibly have a responsibility toward it.  That’s safer than the 60s’ “Mother Earth,” because we found out that we indeed can do damage at that level, which means we have to take some personal or societal responsibility.

Then we have the mixing of global cultures, so people start seeing some similarities between religious practices across the world.  You meditate, I pray.  You play drums, I chant.  We both burn incense for similar purposes.

But you can really only meld these together into New Age if you get rid of a particular God.  You have your version of God/Goddess/Gods/Higher Power, and I have mine, but we’ll just focus on the practices that seem similar.  We’ll just replace that God Stuff (hey, what did he ever do for me anyway?) and assign the target of our attention to be The Universe, or Mother Earth, or an even more undefinable Power Of Attraction.

Sorry, folks.  Having a relationship is pointless unless it’s with someone.  If you’re trying to love nothing in particular, it’s not love.  It’s an emotion, maybe, or an interesting thought – but love isn’t love until it reaches someone.

So go ahead and learn from New Age thinking.  It’s good to realize that we have a responsibility to something larger than ourselves, and that we are all interdependent.

But don’t expect there to be much of a point to all that unless it also calls you to The Purpose which has been given to you by your maker.  The life of infinite love that we’re all called to here and beyond.