Positivity

Positivity is defined as “the practice of being or tendency to be positive in attitude.”  Positivity also means “consisting in or characterized by the presence or possession of features or qualities rather than their absence.”  So, a positive person is one who focuses on the presence of specific characteristics as opposed to what is lacking.

Further, the way this word is used in common speech refers to a personality trait where a person focuses on the good things, and not only focuses on the good things but focuses on them all the time, usually to a point where they are always the type of person who creates desirable feelings in other people and in a consistent fashion.

This attitude is highly desired in people.  I think this is because it leads to a more productive work environment.

Positivity has also taken center stage in many self-help books.  Look at titles such as The Power of Positive Thinking, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, and The Power of Positive Leadership.  And unfortunately, as many churches have been confusing self-help with the Christian message, this attitude has entered our churches.

Yet, this attitude is gravely misguided.  And it can harm us spiritually and by extension socially and personally if it is closely adhered to.

What?!

Consider that one of the oldest images of the Church is that of a hospital.  When people go to the hospital, they don’t talk about the good things. They talk about the bad things.  This in turn leads to healing.

So am I saying that someone should be a negative person?  Absolutely not. That is the other extreme of this continuum.  Negative people can cause others to never see the good, which often times is plentiful in and around us.  They can also cause others to develop emotional dysregulation, and shut down their motivation to do any type of good in the world because they feel like nothing they do can or will have significance.  This is certainly not an attitude anyone should take.

Holy Negativity

Yet, there is a type of negativity, which is modeled for us in the Bible, that leads to holiness and ultimately goodness.  This must be practiced if we are ever to grow spiritually. 

Where is that in the Bible?  And how can we practice it?

First, we see this in the Psalms.  Out of all the Psalms, 60 of them are laments, which are songs of sorrow.  This is 40% of all the Psalms.

The Book of Jeremiah and the Lamentations are also books which model holy negativity.

The Book of Job too is a very negative book because it deals with one of the most fundamental problems of the spiritual life which is: why do bad things happen to good people?

But why though?

Reason # 1: Sometimes there are much more negatives than positives

Because sometimes there is nothing to be positive about.  This is the first reason for holy negativity.

Negativity properly means “characterized by the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features.”  It does not properly indicate a bad attitude. For example, if we say we are unnoticed, this is negative. It means nobody gives us attention, not that we receive bad attention.

Also, often there are many things that are not present in our lives such as peace, harmony, predictability, and happiness.

In the case of Job, he went from being a very rich man living in comfort and blessed with ten children to being poor meaning lacking wealth, to suffering meaning lacking comfort and peace, to being childless.  He also lost his health and became sick with something similar to shingles.

Had the Judeo-Christian tradition been nothing but self-help positivity, we would never have received the Book of Job.  This book is one of the most thought-provoking texts ever written, and it has inspired reflection from Jews, Christians, and even those outside of these two religious traditions for thousands of years.  Indeed, the longest of all the books of the Church Fathers is The Moral Reflections on Job by St. Gregory the Great, which in modern editions is nearly 2000 pages in length.  This length did not discourage people from reading it; it was the second most produced book in Medieval Europe.  Some even risked life and limb and traveled across countries in order to get copies of this book and bring them back to their own lands.  Why? One of the many reasons is that the Book of Job powerfully destroys the idea that bad things happen due to a person’s sins or due to God’s grace leaving someone.  It elevates us to understand the providence and goodness of God.

Also, the books that Jeremiah the Prophet left us are very negative.  In his prophecies, God told Jeremiah that there was no way out for the Jews.  This was because God gave them the course of action they should follow to escape the destruction of their land, which was to submit to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.  But the Jews were going to continue to listen to the false prophets who told them that they would not fall to the Babylonians, so the Jews including the king and rules resisted the Babylonians.

Jeremiah intercedes with God to prevent this, but God does not hear him. Then Jeremiah even writes down his own thoughts and reflections at the end of many prophecies.  After the final destruction which God has foretold happens, Jeremiah writes a second book called the Lamentations. It is a poem whose imagery is piercing.

In chapter 2:11 of the Lamentations he writes, 

“My eyes fail with tears,

My heart is troubled;

My bile is poured on the ground

Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,

Because the children and the infants

Faint in the streets of the city.”

Then in Chapter 3, we find the most piercing of all the lines Jeremiah the Prophet ever put to paper,

He says,

“I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.

He has led me and made me walk

In darkness and not in light.

Surely He has turned His hand against me

Time and time again throughout the day.

He has aged my flesh and my skin,

And broken my bones.

He has besieged me

And surrounded me with bitterness and woe.

He has set me in dark places

Like the dead of long ago.

He has hedged me in so that I cannot get out;

He has made my chain heavy.

Even when I cry and shout,

He shuts out my prayer.

He has blocked my ways with hewn stone;

He has made my paths crooked.

He has been to me a bear lying in wait,

Like a lion in ambush.

He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces;

He has made me desolate.

He has bent His bow

And set me up as a target for the arrow.

He has caused the arrows of His quiver

To pierce my loins.

I have become the ridicule of all my people—

Their taunting song all the day.

He has filled me with bitterness,

He has made me drink wormwood.

He has also broken my teeth with gravel,

And covered me with ashes.

You have moved my soul far from peace;

I have forgotten [good].

And I said, ‘My strength and my hope

Have perished from the LORD.”

Remember my affliction and roaming,

The wormwood and the gall.

My soul still remember

And sinks within me.

This I recall to my mind,

Therefore I have hope.

Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed,

Because His compassions fail not.

They are new every morning;

Great is your faithfulness.

“The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,

“Therefore I hope in Him!”

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,

To the soul who seeks Him.

It is good that one should hope and wait quietly

For the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for a man to bear

The yoke in his youth.

Let him sit alone and keep silent,

Because God has laid it on him;

Let him put his mouth in the dust—

There may yet be hope.

Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him,

And be full of reproach.

For the Lord will not cast off forever.

Though He causes grief,

Yet He will show compassion

According to the multitude of His mercies.

For He does not afflict willingly,

Nor grieve the children of men.

To crush under one’s feet

All the prisoners of the earth,

To turn aside the justice due a man

Before the face of the Most High,

Or subvert a man in his cause—

The Lord does not approve.

Who is he who speaks and it comes to past,

When the Lord has not commanded it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

That woe and well-being proceed?

Why should a living man complain,

A man for the punishment of his sins?

Let us search out an examine our ways,

And turn back to the LORD;

Let us lift our hearts and hands

To God in heaven.

We have transgressed and rebelled;

You have not pardoned.

You have covered Yourself with anger

And pursued us;

You have slain and not pitied.

You have covered Yourself with a cloud,

That prayer should not pass through.

You have made us an offscouring and refuse

In the midst of the peoples.

All our enemies

Have opened their mouths against us.

Fear and a snare have come upon us,

Desolation and destruction.

My eyes overflow with rivers of water

For the destruction of the daughter of my people.

My eyes flow and do not cease,

Without interruption,

Till the LORD from heaven

Looks down and sees.

My eyes bring suffering to my soul

Because of all the daughters of my city.

My enemies without cause

Hunted me down like a bird.

They silenced my life in the pit

And threw stones at me.

The waters flowed over my head;

I said, “I am cut off!”

I called on Your name, O LORD,

From the lowest pit.

You have heard my voice:

“Do not hide Your ear

From my sighing, from my cry for help.”

You drew near on the day I called on You,

And said, “Do not fear!”

O LORD, You have pleaded the case for my soul;

You have redeemed my life.

O LORD, You have seen how I am wronged;

Judge my case.

You have seen all their vengeance,

All their schemes against me.

You have heard their reproach, O LORD,

All their schemes against me,

The lips of my enemies

And their whispering against me all the day.

Look at their sitting down and their rising up;

I am their taunting song.

Repay them, O LORD,

According to the work of their hands.

Give them a veiled heart;

Your curse be upon them!

In Your anger,

Pursue and destroy them

From under the heavens of the LORD” (Lamentations 3:1-66)

It should be noted that Jeremiah survived the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, but there is something altogether deeper in this Lamentation which will be discussed at the end of this article.

Reason # 2: Positivity can often lead to self-deception

But why so much negativity?  It is because positivity can often lead to self-deception so that we think we are better than we actually are or that we are in God’s favor for the blessings we have or that we are not in his favor for the hardships we have.

The blessings we have are God’s gifts bestowed to us, not a result of any good thing within us.

And the hardships we have are for our personal growth including understanding value because we come to know what we lack and we know what we have.

Everything God bestows on us is for us to further His Kingdom and is in line with His overall plan for humanity.

This includes whether we see a rich, godless person and a faithful beggar in a developing country.  These are in his overall plan because they teach us about the nature of faith and the nature of unbelief.

This idea is visited at the very end of the Book of Job when God finally speaks to Job.  He does not answer Job’s questions but rather asks him a large set of questions about everything in the universe ranging from the Constellations in the heavens, to physical reality, to weather phenomena on earth, and to the behaviors of animals.  Job is not able to answer one question. Now some will stop and point out that some of these questions have indeed been answered in the thousands of years that have passed since Job.  But this is not the point of the questions; the point is that we as humans are always limited in our knowledge no matter what time period of history we live in.  There will always be questions we cannot answer. This extends to why things happened the way they did, but God has set a purpose for all of them.

So for that reason, we cannot complain about our predicaments.  Even though we do not understand the plan of God, we know that there is a plan, and in the course of time, maybe later on in our lives, we will discern meaning in the way things played out, and we might see a clear reason for why things turned out the way they did with respect to our spiritual growth in Christ and for the furthering of the Kingdom of God.  But, we also might never know, but long after we have lived, others may perceive meaning and purpose in why things turned out for us the way they did.

Reason # 3: Negativity can lead to identifying problems, which is the first step to solving them.

A third reason for why holy negativity is modeled for us in the Bible is because if someone has a multitude of bad traits, and it is affecting everything they do, then focusing on positives can cause them to ignore solving any problems within themselves.

Consider when King David committed adultery with Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite.  She ended up pregnant. So he tried to cover the pregnancy by calling Uriah back from the middle of a war.  His purpose for this was that Uriah would go home, and sleep with his wife, so it would appear that this child was Uriah’s child.  Uriah, however, considered his fellow soldiers who were fighting and didn’t go home. When David saw this, he conspired with his own general to put Uriah in the front lines of the battle so that his death would be ensured.  David murdered him in a way that would never have been uncovered unless God uncovered it.

God uncovered it by Nathan the Prophet.  The Prophet Nathan came to David and told him what he had done in a parable and David passed judgment on himself.  If God, and the Prophets, had only focused on the positives of King David such as that David was righteous in so many other things, and was truly righteous from his heart, and had brought peace to Israel, and united them, and guided them in the ways of God, then David would never have repented from his sins.  And maybe, like with most sins, especially those of a sexual nature, it would have led him into a downward spiral into sin.

Further, the benefit of this confrontation led to David penning Psalm 51 which has been prayed by all those who have been deeply moved to repent from their sins.

To highlight from an analogy in the classroom, sometimes the best thing I have ever told a student is that they suck whether with respect to their attitude toward learning and with many of their skills.  These are usually the students who think everything is fine when it isn’t. I have always pointed out immediately that we could get their attitude toward learning and their skills to a much better place if we did so seriously and things did not have to remain this way.  Often, this has produced the biggest change and largest growth these students have ever experienced.

But isn’t this positivity?  It sounds very close to it, but this isn’t positivity.  What is this?

Optimism 

This is optimism.  But isn’t optimism positivity?  The answer is not quite. Optimism is “the attitude which reflects the belief or hope that the outcome of a situation will be good.”

Optimism focuses on what could be while positivity focuses on what already is.

All Christians are called to optimism because there we believe that we will ultimately be with God and “God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

Optimism is oriented toward the future.  Optimism believes that things will ultimately be good, but that they will be good might happen after a time of suffering, even a long one.  Positivity, on the other hand, considers that all things can be good now and that this can create good feelings inside. It is oriented toward the present AND the future.  But if the examples of the Bible from Joseph the son of Jacob, to Moses, to the Prophets, to our Lord Jesus Christ, to the Apostles, and to the history of the Church from that time until now, sometimes things don’t become good in the present.  After all, persecution has been a constant reality in the life of Christianity.

But the fact that we should focus on optimism and not positivity should not make us sad.  All things that have great value are not achieved easily. Think about those who want to become doctors, or teachers, or leaders in society.  This requires a long life of education, intense training, reflection, treading new paths leading to discoveries, and on top of that it is the result of seeing very far into the future and setting goals that will cause us to make real the vision we have seen from afar.

But positivity can often drain people and cause them to enter into despair when things become tough.  Positivity, especially that expected in many jobs today, does not consider that sometimes things don’t go as planned, often for long periods of time.  There is also the expectation that once you have finished your training, everything should go your way. Yet reality does not work like this. We are faced with challenges regularly.

But optimism, on the other hand, sees a good arising from the outcome of a situation.  For example, teachers in their first year often are totally lost on how to deal with the minds, wills, and personalities of other human beings, that is, their students.  And their first year is often not beneficial to their students. There simply is not much to be said that will be positive. But those who reflect upon their first year, identify problems, and come up with solutions come back very strong in their years afterward.  This leads to the success of most of the students they will have from that point on. This is the effect of optimism.

Optimism also leads to well-being.  This is because optimism allows us to be resolute and live meaningful lives because we know that the suffering we go through will ultimately lead to goodness, and in the words of a priest I have often heard speak, “Suffering with meaning is beautiful.”

This brings us back to consider Lamentations 3.  I said earlier that there was something deeper going on there.  If you read it again, you see that it describes the condition of us humans.  But it is also that condition that God Himself decided to take upon Himself and to share with us by living a human life with us in our Lord Jesus Christ.  Thus, the words of this lamentation become the words of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. But what good came out of all that suffering that He shared with us?  Nothing less than the salvation of humanity, which is knowing Him, living according to His life, being transformed by it, and leading to the transformations of others around us by radiating the life of Christ to others, and our journeying together to Him.  That suffering He suffered, is a suffering with meaning, and that “suffering with meaning is beautiful.”

This is especially true when we consider that we are part of the plan and kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ; our lives are oriented toward the goal of reflecting on and being with Him, so we will often feel well and have emotional regulation even when the days are rough because we know Who is walking with us and Who awaits us at the end of it all.

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