Purveying Positivity

God is good all the time! All the time God is good!

An acquaintance of mine has dubbed me the Purveyor of Positivity. It's an appropriate moniker, I think. I have spent a good part of my life training myself to be the quintessential optimist. I can remember being very frustrated with my avid sports fan of a mother during my childhood in terms of what I saw as her pessimism. I grew up in the wonderful age of baseball when the Big Red Machine cranked out back to back World Series. I did not choose to be a baseball fan; it was thrust upon me. I would have rather watched "Little House On The Prairie" but Mom insisted we watch baseball. I wish I had understood at the age of seven the great sports history I was witnessing. Mostly I remember keeping track of the game on my homemade scorecard and telling Mom in the late innings, "It ain't over til it's over!" It seemed no matter how good the Reds were, she thought they were going to lose. I countered with no matter how far behind they got, they could still win. I'm sure I annoyed my mother as much as she annoyed me, and I later learned that what I took for pessimism was more often than not pragmatism-- something I am in lack of.

Where does my optimism come from? At the heart of it is my Catholic faith. To be a Christian, a Catholic, is to be a disciple who lives in great hope and faith despite what the world presents us. I can't be truly Catholic without being positive about life, the future, and the world. It all began that way. (Everything God created He declared "Good". See Genesis 1.) I believe that I and my gift of life are good. They began that way, and God intends for us to continue that way. It's up to me to be in accord with that plan.

We live in hard, challenging times. Our culture is a culture of death. There is fear and negativity and sin everywhere. I have to purposely focus myself on this endeavor of optimism in today's world. I have discovered some practices, disciplines if you will, that have helped me to cultivate this habit of optimism.

The first practice was taught to me two years ago when I was faced with being a budget cut at the school I was teaching at. My immediate response to this potentially devastating news was to ask for prayer from some of my best prayer warriors. Two quick text messages garnered me the desired prayer cover, but I got a big bonus in the surprising response from one of my friends. His text read "Thank God!" I must admit I was taken aback by what could have been construed as an insensitive response. I had just been told I was unemployed. But as he explained, we are called as followers of Christ to thank God in all circumstances. For the next three weeks, per his advice, I put aside my worry and fear, and focused on thanking God for this blessing and all those in my life. I am forever thankful for this prayer warrior friend's timely lesson, as I believe it is what spared me from a very bitter path. Instead I have found a life of joy. An attitude of gratitude can be a skillful tool in avoiding the pit of depression in our negative world

The next lesson came from my patron and tutor, St. Anthony of Padua. He gave me a prayer that I have found to be very useful in many aspects of my life. "Lord Jesus, help me to find what I need to find and lose what I need to lose. Amen."  Of course, with St. Anthony being the patron saint of lost items, I have found this to be helpful in dealing with material items and needs. But I have found this prayer to be especially useful in terms of cultivating this positivity. I pray that I lose my attachment to my fear, my stress, my anxiety about the things of this world. I pray that I find the peace that surpasses all understanding.

The prayer has led me to a lesson about emptiness and living in the present. Our world does not value voids. It is the law of physics that nature abhors a vacuum. We want our life full. When it does not seem full we can fall into the pit of negativity, which can feel like being trapped in quicksand. I realized this lesson while speaking with a friend recently. He has a great love of history. This is a blessing and a curse. Because of his love for the past, he often finds that the present is not satisfactory because it isn't like the past. Our language about the past implies a void. We say, "I miss the way it used to be." or "Life was good back then." The implication, though not said, is still there that today is empty of the good we value. We equate emptiness with negativity. That is a false premise. Often it is far better to have things, people, ideas, and opportunities missing from our life. When the wrong things are gone, we have a void that God can fill with blessings. We need to change our attitude toward voids. We need to begin to see them as opportunities and places for God's blessings to come into our lives. If we live rooted in the NOW (as opposed to constantly looking at our past or anticipating the future-- they both don't really exist, anyway), we can ask God to help us keep the flow between what we need to lose and find balanced.

It is helpful to keep a physical list of the blessings in our life. This list-- its very existence and the act of creating it-- can become a train track that guides the direction of our mind during our daily life. Purposely creating voids in our life (cleaning out closets and boxes, leaving spaces empty in our life, embracing silence, etc.) can help us to deal with the unexpected voids in a positive manner.

It is my prayer that we all can learn to see the blessings this life has to offer, and can connect in a deeper way with our Father who passionately loves us and blesses us. And He wants to continue to bless us in abundant ways. After all Jesus told us, "I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly!" Being salt and light to the world means proclaiming Good News over the neverending din of negativity.

As Johnny Mercer wrote, "You gotta accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, try hard to be affirmative, and not mess with Mr. Inbetween."

Remember "It ain't over til it's over." (Thank you, Yogi Bera.) And when it is over, Christ has won! Alleluia!