On Manifesting

I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season and are manifesting a life giving 2024 for you and your loved ones. 

So began an email that I received this morning. Which, I confess, kind of put me in a bad mood. What kind of an idiotic greeting…?! I spluttered in my brain. Whatever I was “manifesting” at the moment, it would likely not have been very life-giving for myself or for my loved ones. Hopefully nobody was within the blast radius of whatever corner of the universe my thoughts were commandeering at that moment.

What is “manifesting,” you might be wondering? Well, according to Rebecca Jennings, who wrote an article on the phenomenon for Vox a few years ago, it is “the practice of thinking aspirational thoughts with the purpose of making them real.” The Cambridge Dictionary says that to “manifest” is “to make something happen by imagining it and consciously thinking that it will happen.” If you think it, it will come, I guess. Or, if you think it hard enough or intentionally enough, or aspirationally enough or imaginatively enough or… well, I’m pretty sure the key word is ”enough.”

Jennings speaks to the appeal of “manifesting” language:

In a moment where all any average citizen can really do, ultimately, is hope for a better future than the one we’re all currently living in, it’s no wonder the practice of manifesting has exploded… [M]anifesting feels like a way to accomplish something we have control over in a time when we’re mostly powerless to effect any real change. There is also a lower barrier to entry than almost any other activity: All you need are your dreams, and to think about how nice it would be if they all came true.

It’s easy to make fun of “manifesting.” Probably too easy. After all, how different, exactly, is this from how some people approach prayer? How different is directing petitions to “the universe” than to “God?” It’s not hard to imagine that some people might see prayer as pretty similar to “imagining it and consciously thinking that it will happen.” The object to which our dreaming is directed may be different, but who’s to say it’s not just metaphysical semantics? Whether the universe is finally clicking into gear because your thoughts have massaged it correctly or you’ve managed to bend God’s will to your own, the psycho/spiritual dynamic can certainly seem roughly the same.

And yet, I do not think that manifesting is the same as praying. Not even remotely. Yes, some people approach prayer as little more than a mechanism to make their dreams come true. But a genuinely Christian version of prayer is quite a bit more robust than a technique to get what you want. Prayer is far more about bending our wills to God’s than God’s to ours. It is a spiritual discipline whereby we train (and retrain) our appetites, where we worship the God who is wholly other, and where we enter into the suffering of others. Yes, we ask for stuff. But we do so, at our best, acknowledging that the stuff we want might not be good for us or might not be what God wants for us. Indeed, if we are approaching something like spiritual maturity, we might even acknowledge that God might allow our dreams to go unfulfilled or even to be crushed, that we may even be called to in some mysterious sense “participate in the sufferings of Christ.”

And speaking of suffering, well, not to be too blunt about it, but in the end, nobody avoids it. You can’t manifest your way out of pain, no matter how aspirationally or earnestly you try. And this is among the more sinister problems with all this “manifesting” language: it very easily turns suffering into failure, something that ultimately you’re responsible for. If things aren’t sliding into place, if the things you want don’t seem to be happening, well then clearly, you’re the problem. You’re not doing it right. You have to manifest better or harder or more intentionally or something.

Again, people can very easily adopt this approach with prayer, too. I’ve seen it. Suffering is often reduced to a failure of holiness or piety. If you had just done better or been better, God would have answered… But I would say that this represents a profound misunderstanding of both prayer and the nature of of suffering. This is prayer as less—far less—than it should be. I’m not sure how “manifesting” escapes the charge. In the world of manifesting, it’s all up to you.

I spent part of yesterday morning with a young indigenous man who asked to speak to a chaplain at the jail. His story was an awful one. Abandoned by his mother at four, his father descended into addiction, and this young man has bounced around between chaotic and abusive situations ever since. Predictably, he began using early and he’s struggled with it ever since. His life is saturated with violence and conflict and neglect and poverty and dysfunction of pretty much every kind imaginable. I spent part of this morning with two Ethiopian women who wanted to share with me the story of a village back home with lack of water, few educational options for children, chronic lack of infrastructure and healthcare. They are doing what they can to raise funds to improve the situation, but the need is dire. And the reality of political chaos and war threatens all of their best efforts.

I am trying to imagine what would happen if I said to either my young indigenous friend or these two Ethiopian women, “I hope you are manifesting a life giving 2024 for you and your loved ones.” My guess is that they would look at me blankly. Uncomprehendingly. Maybe even angrily. And they would be right to do so. They might tell me to shut up and pray. And they would be right to do so. They need far more than “aspirational thoughts,” after all. They need the intervention of the living God, “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20).

(You may be relieved to know that in both cases above, I did, in fact, shut up and pray.)