The Secret 6 comments

By Ann Conway

The Secret is suddenly everywhere, which seems counterintuitive. I first heard when chatting with a former colleague. We talked about a woman we know, who works for the state of Maine.

Or did, it turned out.

“You heard about The Secret?” Phyllis asked.

“Vaguely,” I said. I thought I had heard it mentioned—a pop culture kind of secret, not the sort of secret I grew up with in an Irish family.

“Yeah, Vicki got interested in that and now she’s house-sitting in a beautiful place on the ocean in Florida. She’s waiting for what comes to her next,” Phyllis said, with a gleam in her eye. Phyllis was a legal secretary for many years and takes no prisoners.

“Okay,” I said, adhering to my most recent pledge not to be cynical.

I saw The Secret everywhere after that—a book display at Barnes and Noble, a blurb on the MSN home page about an Oprah program (next to an ad for “Soyjoy” bars). The program reviewed The Secret 2006 movie, which concerned, in part: asking, believing, receiving, ancient parchment, spiritual messengers, an emerald tablet, and corrupt priests.

According to Rhonda Byrne, an Australian who had created the film, The Secret relates to the law of attraction. “What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want,” she said, “based on what we’re thinking and feeling.”

The power of positive thinking is hardly a new stream in American thought. Byrne mentions The Science of Getting Rich, a 1910 book by Wallace Wattles, although there have been many others. From my twenties, I remember Silva Mind Control and EST. In the 1980s, Louise Hay wrote that we caused our own illness, which understandably caused an uproar....

Recently, a woman I used to see on the streets of Augusta, Maine, was murdered. Once, I saw her singing, pushing a filthy doll carriage. She was elderly, clearly ill, emaciated. Her name, it turned out, was Audrey.

Audrey had an apartment in a shabby blue house, which was largely populated by sex offenders, since no one else would rent to them. About six weeks ago, one of these men raped and strangled her. After her death, it emerged that that Audrey had once been an accomplished, beautiful woman; she had graduated from Syracuse and taught French in Africa. Overtaken by mental illness in her forties, she ended up in the charnel house on State Street. She had become, not the woman she was past and present, but the Other.

Self-help fads like The Secret attempt to persuade us that we can be the Divine Administrators of our lives.

But there is a loneliness—even a solipsism—in this, as well as a brutal naiveté. The Secret has no room for someone like Audrey, unable to manage her life course and abandoned by others. It also discounts the idea that you or I could be Audrey, given the right combination of circumstances.

One can understand an Audrey, I think, only through a sense of connection, which requires the surrender of self implicit in community. It is no surprise that The Secret movie partly concerns a religious plot to conceal its existence. In our culture, the connection of religious community is increasingly seen as a sinister intrigue, one intent on limiting the spiritual freedom of individuals to fulfill their destinies.

This is unfortunate, because community with one another and God helps us to comprehend brokenness. But more than that, it opens us to the encompassing mystery already present in life.

And that’s the paradox: that the mystery is not a secret. It’s in plain view. But we can only begin to comprehend it when we acknowledge our dependence upon one another.