'In the midst of life we are in death': the Prayer Book against the tyranny of toxic positivity

#NoBadDays #GoodVibesOnly #ChooseHappy

In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'The Philosopher's Zone', US philosopher Mariana Alessandri - author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods (2023) - provided a critique of "the tyranny of toxic positivity", the omnipresent platitudes of the self-help industry summarised in the above hashtags.

While Alessandri seeks to encourage an understanding of darker moods and experiences through Existentialism, the interview did make me think about how the Book of Common Prayer also rejects "the tyranny of toxic positivity", taking up into prayer and devotion, thought and meditation, the darker moods and experiences. As Alessandri notes, toxic positivity is an attempt to deny that the darker moods and experiences are inherent to the human condition, thus rendering us "emotionally illiterate" when confronted with them: hence the need for a view of the human condition which does not attempt such denial, such toxic positivity. 

How might we consider this from the perspective of the offices of the Book of Common Prayer?

The delusions of toxic positivity are exposed at Morning and Evening Prayer. Think of the words of the opening exhortation:

Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our heavenly Father ...

Any notion that we can cheerily type each day #ChooseHappy is swept aside by a robust realism, which we acknowledge the General Confession:

And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.

It is a recognition of the reality of the malice, anger, resentment, pride within us, and how this wounds and undermines our relationships. #GoodVibesOnly is nothing less than a foolish delusion, an abject failure to recognise the realities of failures, wrongdoing, and emotions which inflict hurt upon those around us and ourselves, which turn us away from the One at the heart of all being, who is Life, Goodness, and Truth.

In the monthly praying of the Psalter at Matins and Evensong, the emptiness of toxic positivity is likewise exposed:

My soul also is sore troubled ... my beauty is gone for very trouble (Ps.6, Day 1 evening); Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps.23, Day 4 evening); For I acknowledge my faults and my sin is ever before me (Ps.51, Day 10 morning); My heart is smitten down and withered like grass (Ps.102, Day 20 morning); I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost (Ps.119, Day 26 evening); Therefore is my spirit vexed within me: and my heart within me is desolate (Day 29, evening).

Day by day, the ancient prayers of the Psalter set before us the deep reality of darker moods and experiences, all within the context of God's abiding covenant love.

In the Litany, we hold before God those darker moods and experiences, the failures and the hurts within our own life and the lives of others:

Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins ... In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our wealth; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgement ... to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to raise up them that fall ... forgive us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances ...

At the Holy Communion, in the Prayer for the Church Militant, the reality and frailties of mortality are acknowledged. In so praying for others, we are also recognise this as our lot:

And we most humbly beseech thee of thy goodness, O Lord, to comfort and succour all them, who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.

The opening words of Holy Baptism, amidst the joy of the community being blessed with a new life, remind us that this child will know moral failures and will do wrong, calling us all to our common need for divine forgiveness, and our duty to exercise forgiveness in all relationships:

Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin ...

At the Signing with the Cross in the Baptismal rite, the reality of the duties of the moral life - of what it means in this earthly life to be called to love God and neighbour - are recognised:

and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end.

The good life requires much more, and is much more substantive, than #GoodVibesOnly.

At Confirmation - which often occurs in teenage life, with the responsibilities of adulthood approaching, the opening words of the prayer accompanying the episcopal laying on of hands echo the Signing with the Cross at Baptism:

Defend, O Lord, this thy Child ...

We live in a world, we exercise our duties, vocation, and responsibilities in a world in which, yes, we require heavenly defence and grace, amidst our temptations and failures, amidst the ambitions and deceits of others, before which #ChooseHappy is worthless banality. 

The Prayer Book's Solemnization of Matrimony too, with its great joys, has a sober realism which banishes toxic positivity. The preface to the rite declares that the marriage covenant is "in prosperity and adversity"; the vows of matrimony are "in sickness and in health". 

Similarly, while The Churching of Women gives voice to joy and thanksgiving for the birth of a child, it also recognises "the great pain and peril of child-birth"; a physical and emotional reality for women routinely obscured by hashtag-driven social media celebrations of birth.

When the Prayer Book ministers to the sick, in place of the emptiness of #GoodVibesOnly there is recognition of the realities of illness and mortality:

grieved with sickness ... the sense of his weakness ... in great weakness of body ... thy afflicted servant.

And then there is death. The tyranny of toxic positivity is also evident even here: the requirement for a 'celebration of the life'; the supposed necessity of jollity; the disapproval of mourning customs. Against such toxic positivity, the Prayer Book Order for the Burial of the Dead opens with Psalm 39:

Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long : and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.

For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain : he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.

At the graveside, as the moral remains of a loved one, a friend, a neighbour are committed to the ground, we hear words which plainly state the reality of death, grief, mortality:

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death ...

It should not surprise us that the Book of Common Prayer - rooted in Scripture and sound doctrine - also provides an understanding of this mortal life which aids 'emotional literacy'. As Benjamin Whichcote declared, "God, as the author of Nature and of Grace, does agree perfectly with Himself". The "means of grace, and the hope of glory" cohere with and are not contrary to our well-being and flourishing in this mortal life. And so the Prayer Book liberates us from the tyranny of toxic positivity, gathering up, through prayer, in grace and mercy, the darker moods and experiences of this transitory life, neither denying them as with the banal delusions of the self-help industry, nor abandoning us to those realities, but sustaining us through them, until we come, by the grace of God in Christ, to the life everlasting.