Good Vibes Only?

Missing out to “It Might As Well Be Spring” for the 1945 Best Original Song at the Academy Awards was “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” It’s set and sung in the style of a sermon, but it reduces explicit biblical accounts to a godless homily on the power of positive thinking. “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.” Released toward the end of a brutal World War, it offered a kind of moral therapy. But in doing so, it quietly exiled Mr. In-Between: the one who refuses both despair and denial, who insists on telling the truth about how bad things really are. It might as well be escapism.

I think Mr. In-Between needs a bit more of a hearing.

It’s no different my side of the pond. This week I heard someone criticise the new Archbishop of Canterbury for talking about Jesus. It made me think of the meme: “You had one job.” The chair of St. Augustine is an impossible job with an impossible amount of criticism, but being attacked for talking about Jesus seems like an ideal place to start. Having sat through too many sermons where Jesus didn’t get a mention (one in Advent, no less) and heard school assemblies (church and state do mix in the UK) reduce the gospel to values, I think her role has a bigger expectation gap than most. Because what society has come to expect of the church is no different from any secular pulpit: good vibes only. We might think this neatly fits the English preserve of squishy middles, but it robs us of being able to hang our hopes on something more honest.

It’s worse than that: Because not only do boosteristic political leaders boost themselves by condemning others, but the law of toxic positivity accuses us whenever we feel sad, anxious, or broken. You should feel bad about feeling bad.

It also places far too great a burden on the power of our minds. Manifesting, that secular piety, places fantastic faith in the human mind to invent reality. But that reality in itself is precarious. Vox’s senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings reported that “overestimating the power of one’s thoughts, which is a symptom of OCD among many other disorders, ‘could be very dangerous to people who already have anxiety disorders, but potentially, it might even be enough to start those symptoms happening in someone who originally doesn’t,'” according to cognitive neuroscientist Rhiannon Jones.

What a mess. And then, if we meditate on a positive outcome but that doesn’t make it happen, where does it leave us? Admiral Jim Stockdale, having been tortured twenty times over eight years in the Hanoi Hilton, said that those who didn’t make it out of the prisoner of war camp were the optimists, dying of broken hearts. The reality didn’t obey their optimism. His own approach was different:

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” The Stockdale Paradox, as business strategist Jim Collins has named it — or might we call it Mr. In-Betweenism — isn’t the power of positive thinking but the power to hold two thoughts at once.

It’s how Nehemiah has the audacity to pray for success and favor in the same prayer where he is confessing wickedness and sin (Nehemiah 1). Repentance isn’t performative feeling bad-ness so God will like you. It’s simply the relief of reality. “The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, its gates have been burned with fire, everyone’s in a state of disgrace, but your grace is going to cover that.” He doesn’t begin a rebuilding project with willpower but God’s power, and not defeatism but also not denialism. The only sure footing to avoid slipping into despair is to know that your hope is grounded somewhere secure. And as the world falls apart, boosterism and “positive vibes only “aren’t going to save us.

Therefore, repentance isn’t a guilt trip but the relief of rebuilding our lives on something more solid than ourselves. “Sorry” might be the hardest word, but repentance unlocks much more than lip service. In a post-truth world, we need honesty that marries truth with grace. The only way we can be certain we’re not oscillating between false hope and nihilism is Jesus.

The cross doesn’t need spinning. It is the ultimate brutal fact — suffering before glory, judgement before grace, death before life. No amount of positive thinking stops it, and no amount of denial softens it. And it’s only through this death that resurrection comes.

Which means that we don’t have to live at the extremes. Not in boosterism. Not in despair. But in the strange, uncomfortable middle — where things really are as bad as they seem, and yet hope arrives from somewhere entirely outside of us.

Mr. In-Between, it turns out, is where Jesus has been all along.