Our spiritual transformation through the practice of contemplative prayer takes place, primarily, through the supernatural power of Almighty God. One of the most important things we can do to help ourselves toward this spiritual New Life in Jesus Christ, is to make an effort to move from a negative world view to a "positive world view." For the Mind of Christ which we seek to reflect and "put on," consists of the fullness of perfection of both His natural and supernatural natures. And as St Paul said, in union with the perfection of Jesus Christ, we are more than conquerors! And in the Spirit of God there is no negativity, but only a positive, loving outlook wherein "all things are possible." We should strive to have the same positive outlook in order to be fully conformed to the natural and supernatural perfections of His Spirit.

But you may ask, what about humility? Isn't a Christian supposed to practice self-effacement and to let others strive for glory? Isn't a Christian meant to downplay activity and emphasize contemplation. The answer lies in a proper understanding of humility and our relationship with God. The Christian is meant to be humble about his natural self without God, and his total, wholehearted dependence on God. He is meant to realize that, by himself, he can do nothing in terms of the things that matter connected with eternal salvation and ultimate happiness. And as he grows in humility, he also grows in the capacity to perform tasks that are not self-seeking, but that give glory to God. As can be seen from the prodigious accomplishments of many of the saints, the power to move mountains works best in perfect humility. Here's what Fr Louis has to say on the subject:

"A humble man can do great things with an uncommon perfection because he is no longer concerned about accidentals, like his own interests and his own reputation, and therefore he no longer needs to waste his efforts in defending them. For a humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact he is not afraid of anything, even of himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God, before Whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle."(Fr Louis, OCSO)

So, when everything seems to be going wrong in our job, in our marriage, in our Church, in our children, and in our life, we must become postive thinkers who always trust Almighty God to turn the natural, visible negative reality into the Supernatural, Invisible, Positive Reality of Eternal Life and Overcoming Love. For God is Love, and there is no mountain He cannot move! He has promised us that, in relation to the miracles of Jesus Christ, "greater things than these we shall do if we just have faith." And we become most like Him when we have a positive outlook on our life based on an unwavering faith and trust in Him, and in the promises conveyed through His Word.

We must become people who are consciously grateful to God, and who express our gratitude for the Love that He gives us. For His gift of love is nothing less than the gift of life, itself. When all our relationships, and all else fails in this world, His Love for us remains steadfast. It reminds us that each of us is very precious, and we have great significance just by the fact we have been given life. It reminds us that the Most Attractive, Compassionate, and Powerful Person in the Universe, Loves us with an Everlasting, Infinite Love! And this love is freely given and does not depend on anything we are or do. Although we may turn from Him by choice, He will never turn from us. His Love is the Ultimate Force, and the Ultimate Goodness, and the Ultimate Joy of Being. And when we pray, we invite this Loving Power into our spirit. And without love none of us can grow, or even survive, as is evidenced by the following experimental results:

"The importance of affection for developing infants was scientifically demonstrated by Rene Spitz' study of a foundling home in South America. Ninety-seven babies ranging from three months to three years were given adequate food, clothing and medical care. However, due to lack of personnel, the nurses could not give the babies the affection that they needed. Within three months, bad symptoms began to develop. Within five months, "Most of the babies became shrunken beyond recognition." In their first year of life, twenty-seven children died; seven more in their second year. The twenty-one who remained in the institution were classified as "hopeless neurotics or worse." [Smiley Blanton, M. D., Love or Perish (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), pp. 39-40]. [Rene A. Spitz, MD and W. Godfrey Cobliner, The First Year Of Life (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1965), pp. 27-31; 277-284].

Recognizing that we will physically and spiritually die without Love is in line with the nature of the Loving, Overcoming Mind of Christ Who said He came that "they might have Life, and have it more abundantly!" And the saint, who lives in conformity with the Mind of Christ, is one who believes in the reality of "goodness," and all its positive possibilities to make things work out right for us, "in a spiritual sense," even though our natural life appears to be a disaster and a failure. And such an attitude is possible even though the Scriptures tell us that this world is under the control of the principalities and powers of darkness due to the Fall of Man. For the New Man in Jesus Christ is a positive thinker, because he knows that, "with man it may not be possible, but with God all things are possible!."

So in the spiritual walk toward sanctity, grace perfects nature, and strengthens our character, and perfects our attitudes, to bring them in conformity with the Mind of Christ. Serious prayer, eventually, will even energize our conscious mind by freeing-up mental energy we use to bury, and keep buried, painful memories. These memories lose the greater part of their power to hurt us in the here and now as we pray for those who have perpetrated the hurt(including our own soul for the hurts we have caused) each time the memory returns. We also thank God for allowing the hurt as we know He allowed it for the good of our soul, just as Christ's acceptance of pain produced everlasting Goodness. That's what "overcoming" means. It is not about good times and pleasure, it's about overcoming evil and pain. In the process, we integrate, or accept, the painful experiences into our conscious mind as part of our reality, the reality of our life story.

Prayer and the practice of virtue will also return to our personalities the energy we use to defend and maintain our false-self and its selfish attachments. This will not necessarily be apparent during the dark nights, but will be manifest once they have completed their work and the successful dismantling of the false self.

The saint is one who looks at all the misery, suffering, and evil in the world, and in his own life, without giving in to the temptation to self-pity, criticism of others, and constant complaining. If you find that you are a complainer, or are constantly criticising those around you, you must think about St John of the Cross's comment, "a complainer is not even a good Christian." We must learn to overcome our attachment to belittling others who do not live up to our perfectionistic expectations by encouraging them as much as we can. Do we have Christian love for them, or do we have attachment to worldly performance standards? We must learn to encourage others, rather than criticise them. As a Christian we're supposed to carry the Cross ourselves, not pass it around for everyone else to carry!

Like St Paul in the midst of the world-class weight of his suffering connected with the birth of the fledgling Church, along with his personal pain from chains, beatings, attacks, and stripes, we must "press on," continuing to carry the cross, and looking to the Light of the Goal, rather than the negative realities that surround us. We must let our hope in God lift our life, and our personal spiritual warfare, from the negatives in the visible natural dimension, to the positives in the supernatural dimension. And we must do this whether the natural dimension of our life is good or bad, or changes very much, in terms of what we would wish it to be.

And in this connection, nothing is more important than our attitude. For "negative" people and events in our lives are very real. Such negatives as the carelessness, the neglect, the rejection, the lack of respect, the bad habits of others that irritate us, the snubs, the unfair criticism, the bullying, the lack of concern for things that are important to us, the failure to carry an equal share of the load, are all very real sources of pain and irritation.

From our earliest childhood to the present,some of us have accrued enough negative experiences to fill the Grand Canyon. And the memories of these negative experiences form complexes which give birth to our current attitudes, and such internal conversations as, "I'm a failure! I'm no good! I'm ugly! I'm unloveable!" These thoughts arise in our mind and produce negative feelings of depression and misery. We must get to work to change these false underlying assumptions about ourselves. For God loves us totally just as we are. God sees the beauty, goodness, and loveableness in each of us, no matter what our thoughts are saying. We must change our internal thought patterns to bring them in line with the Absolute Truth. There's no room, and no reason for a serious Christian to have self-pity. Through ongoing prayer and the practice of virtue, God's Spirit joins our spirit in a love affair that brings gladness to the hearts of angels, and which, in its perfection, makes us victorious in every worthwhile activity of our existence. This is no pie-in-the sky. Take another look at the lives of the saints in case you've forgotten!

In regard to the negative experiences of our life, many of us have found the Wonder and Goodness of God by reason of this very fact. We were blessed to find a Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in the Superntural because we lived in a world where we never found it anywhere else. That's why radical conversion to a Godly life often results from a "crisis" or failure of the people and events in the natural world around us. We can't live without love, and when we cease to find it in our false-self attachment to worldly success and through the adulation of other people, we finally turn in desperation to the One Source that has always been there for us. And this Source of Love will never fail us!

With a negative turn of mind, the natural man lives at the level of life's dissatisfactions, even as he relives them, over and over in his memory. A negative mental outlook exaggerates the normal friction between persons in marriage, at work, and in the neighborhood to levels of paranoia and dissatisfaction impossible to bear. One with such a point of view joins the unending line of chronic complainers that now comprise a large body of those who live on planet earth. His ego demands that he be "a man of steel" in all situations, never "turning the other cheek." The law courts, the divorce courts, and the psychiatric couches are filled beyond capacity with volumes and volumes of negative self-righteous complaints from such as these. Some of them arise from people claiming to be religious. The newspapers are filled with stories each day that manifest the terrible rage and crimes of which man is capable as a result of normal, negative thinking. At the global level, it becomes the border disputes, and the criticism, and even hatred of one country for the country that happens to be its neighbor. Negative thinking feeds racism, class warfare, and every manner of division between human beings.

So the problem is radical. And therefore, the solution must be radical, too. Why are there so many millions of books sold on positive thinking and so many seminars about it if it is not something different from what's going on in most people's lives. Why is the message always the same: "We must change ourselves! We must find this "postive" ground in the midst of the negatives in this life." And why do we always fail to do it?

The reason we can't do it lies in what it entails. It entails suffering on our part as we give up our attachment to our self-centered worldview. It usually involves accepting criticism from our peers, and from other people who live by the world's standards of behavior. It involves giving up what we now perceive as "our rights." It involves breaking our attachments to our traditional lifestyle, and not having everything the way we would like it, even when we know, and everyone else knows, "we are in the right on this issue." It doesn't mean we cease to work to make necessary changes, or to perfect the world around us, it just means we change our "attitude," and refuse to become a complainer and a negative thinker as a result of external circumstances. If we are unable to change things with our best efforts, we learn to "let it be," and let God handle it.

This, of course, involves taking God and spirituality seriously. It involves the perfection of faith, hope, and courage. It involves making a personal commitment to live life ever conscious of the admonition of John Paul II to "Fear not." It involves a refusal to exercise negative natural powers, i.e., anger, complaining, or violence, in those situations where experience tells us that natural efforts will just produce more misery and suffering, and that something supernatural is called for in this particular situation. And we must be able to live with the reality that, in the eyes of the natural man, who has no understanding of the supernatural, and who believes in the regular employment of anger, complaining, and/or violence, this is seen, in us, as a "weakness." and a refusal to bravely resist. And thus, in the eyes of worldly peers, the true Christian is condemned for failing to be a "team" player, and to measure up according to natural "team" standards, when he refuses to participate in destructive, self-seeking, team behavior. And there will be many times when he must stand completely "alone," and lose face, and suffer material loss, in the face of the derision and contempt of those who have opted to "cave-in" to immorality in the face of powerful peer pressure.

And so, this radical approach to negative realities includes the exercise of virtues at an heroic level, such as meekness and humility, which give birth to a full blossoming of Charity out of the natural events and circumstances which cause suffering in our lives. And, as a result of all of the above litany of spiritual challenges attached to this positive solution...very few are doing it! We'd rather get divorced to solve our marriage problems! We'd rather "sue our neighbors" than work out a peaceful solution with the one who infringed on our legal rights!" We'd rather get our way when there is a difference of opinion, because everyone knows we are right, and, after all, it's only fair! But the truth is, the Christian life is often very unfair! Just like the Passion, Suffering, Rejection, and Derelection of Jesus Christ was unfair. And He voluntarily accepted pain and suffering, which belonged to others, so that something greater could take place, and a higher purpose of His Life could be fulfilled.

And what was that purpose? It was to manifest the Victory of Positive, Supernatural Love in the midst of rejection, torture, and powerful, life-taking peer-pressure. It was a refusal to be a "team-player" with the worldly, "whited-sepulchers" and "hypocrits" who loved to be seen by all as righteous, spiritual paragons, but inside were full of "dead-men's bones." In the fullness of the natural dimensions of terrible pain, humiliation, and "in your face" evil, that every man who ever lived could understand, by his own participation in the sufferings of human life, "this man manifested an "Overcoming, Positive Power" never before seen in the land of holy men and prophets. This man did something that fell off the radar screen!! This man destroyed all the rules of the natural playbook underlying human understanding, and became a shock and a scandal!!!

For this man, for all time, became " the Stumbling Block," that didn't fit in the world's round holes. For in the midst of his pain and misery, He turned away from the expected attitude of violence, anger and hatred, and, with a few kind words: "split human history down the middle!" For this man, Jesus Christ, looked up from the midst of His agony into the eyes of the Roman Centurion watching Him and said, "Forgive him, Father, he knows not what he's doing!" And as the Centurion fell, dumbstruck, on his knees in sorrowful remorse..."the Earth quaked!" "the sun was covered in darkness!"...and there was rejoicing in heaven as the Centurion was born to Eternal Life through the Positive Power of Overcoming Love!" And not many years later, the whole Roman Empire followed him in conversion to the same crucified Jew, this Jesus Christ. And He is calling upon all Christians, today, now over one billion strong, to manifest this same quality of "Positive, Overcoming Love" in the midst of all the sorrow and negative situations we find in today's world, and in our own lives

So we must begin today to keep track of our attitudes and the internal thoughts that arise in our mind. We must practice detecting the negative thoughts that are producing our sadness and dissatisfaction with life. One by one, we must replace them with a positive thought because we have every right to be happy and to feel good while working at the spiritual life. For we are intimately loved by the Wonderful, All-Powerful God Who created the Universe. And He wants to light up all the dark corners in our life through His Son, the Light of the World, Jesus Christ. And that's reason enough to be positive about everything in life. That's reason enough to start expressing our gratitude to Him for the gift of faith, and contemplative prayer, which feeds us with His Loving Spirit while so many in a loveless world seek for love from broken cisterns, which, instead of love, give only misery and despair.