Dynamo in the Vineyard

Nowadays, it is smart to be spiritually alive. It is old-fogyism to be ignorant of that happiness-producing transformation which people everywhere are enjoying at this time.

Above the spray of white gladioli appeared the plump, beaming face of the pastor, the smile serving as a minor sun to the shining flowers. For a moment he stood silently, "just loving the audience," as he once put it. Then the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale began to preach. He had preached the same theme many times before, not only from the pulpit but at countless business-club lunches, on TV, in newspaper columns, magazine pieces, and in a book (The Power of Positive Thinking) which has been at the top of the bestseller lists for almost two years. The Rev. Dr. Peale and his overflow audience of 2,400 were celebrating the 100th anniversary of Manhattan's famed Marble Collegiate Church, whose pastor he has been for 22 years. No old fogy, and spiritually as alive as they come, Pastor Peale was at his happiness-producing best.

Everyone, said Dr. Peale, can live a magnificent, effective life--if only "he is right with God . . . You have to get in tune with God and tell yourself at the start of each day, 'Another great day has begun'. . . You can be what you have pictured, and accomplish what you want your life to be . . . The formula for good days ahead is to pray hard, work hard, believe hard--and picture hard."

7.5 Billion Headaches. The tireless preaching of this message has won Dr. Peale one of the largest followings of any American preacher. He reaches an estimated 30 million people a week. His TV program, What's Your Trouble?, is heard over nearly as many stations (130) as Bishop Fulton Sheen's. His radio program, The Art of Living, with its 125 stations, does better than John Cameron Swayze's. His celebrity-studded monthly magazine, Guidepost, has a circulation of 656,000, or more than The New Yorker. And his nationally syndicated column, Confident Living, runs in more papers (146) than Leonard Lyons'. A statistical-minded friend of Dr. Peale's once calculated that the U.S. suffers from 7.5 billion headaches a year, and the pastor's great message is that religion can cure almost all of them. He sees in Christianity not so much redemption by suffering as an easy way to "rise above sorrow."

Says Pastor Peale: "God and the doctor, that's what I give them. Anxiety is the great American disease. Take businessmen. They are a wonderful group of people, but they are so high-strung and tense. I watched a friend being carried out after a heart attack, and he said, 'Use me as a warning.' People have lost the secret of inner peace."

Coue in 3-D. The Power of Positive Thinking (Prentice-Hall; $2.95) is Dr. Peale's guide back to inner peace. So far, it has sold about 800,000 copies, has been abridged for teenagers, recorded in an RCA album, and put on film. It takes Dr. Coue's famous autosuggestive jingle ("Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better") and puts it in 3-D. The added dimensions: religion and psychology. The book is filled with "psycho-spiritual" advice that makes personal salvation a kind of do-it-yourself project. Samples:

P: "Collapse physically. Practice this several times a day. Let go every muscle in the body. Conceive of yourself as a jellyfish, getting your body into complete looseness. Form a mental picture of a huge burlap bag of potatoes. Then mentally cut the bag, allowing the potatoes to roll out. Think of yourself as the bag. What is more relaxed than an empty burlap bag?"

P: "Ten times a day repeat these dynamic words: 'If God be for us, who can be against us?' (Stop reading and repeat them NOW slowly and confidently)."

P: "Every morning before arising, lie relaxed in bed and deliberately drop happy thoughts into your conscious mind . . . While dressing or shaving . . . say aloud a few such remarks as the following: 'I believe this is going to be a wonderful day. I believe I can successfully handle all problems ... At intervals during the day ... let mental pictures of the most peaceful scenes . . . pass across your mind, as, for example, some beautiful valley filled with the hush of evening time, as the shadows lengthen and the sun sinks to rest."

P: "Should a negative thought of defeat come into your mind, expel it by increasing the positive affirmation. Affirm aloud: 'God is now giving me success. He is now giving me attainment.' "

P: In case of sickness, "form a picture of the loved one as being well. Visualize him in perfect health. Picture him as radiant with the love and goodness of God."

Picturize & Pasteurize. Author Peale cites dozens of before-and-after case histories of people who have followed such advice with good results--the despondent businessman who kept repeating a Bible verse until he could "square his shoulders and walk out into the night"; the high jumper who made it after he was told: "Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow"; the gym proprietor who kept a sign on the wall reading A P R P B W P R A A (for "Affirmative Prayers Release Powers By Which Positive Results Are Accomplished"); the woman who could not find a husband because she was too domineering ("You have a very firm way of pressing your lips together," said Dr. Peale on that occasion. "[You should get] those too-firm lines out of your face . . . Perhaps it might help to get your hair fixed up a little. It's a little--floaty").

No matter how mundane his advice may sometimes sound, Dr. Peale always returns to the need for prayer--and "prayers that have plenty of suction." To Dr. Peale, "prayer is a sending out of vibrations . . . In our brains we have about two billion little storage batteries. The human brain can send off power by thoughts and prayers." The big rule is "1) PRAYERIZE, 2) PICTURIZE, 3) ACTUALIZE." Much of the book's advice falls under a fourth possible heading, PASTEURIZE, e.g., "A mind free of negatives [will] produce positives, that is to say, a clean mind will deliver power."

Little negatives like "I'm afraid" and "I doubt" are the termites in the house of "right thinking" that Peale has built. "Doubt closes the power flow . . . Get interested in something. Get absolutely enthralled . . . Get out of yourself. Be somebody. Do something. Don't sit around moaning about things, reading the papers and saying 'Why don't they do something?' ... If you're not getting into good causes, no wonder you're tired. You're disintegrating. You're deteriorating. You're dying on the vine."

How to Grow Christmas Spirit. Norman Vincent Peale himself is flourishing in the vineyard. Born the son of a Methodist pastor in the untroubled turn-of-the-century town of Bowersville, Ohio, Peale studied at Boston University's School of Theology, held pastorates in Brooklyn and Syracuse, N.Y. before coming to the Marble Collegiate Church in 1932. There Dr. Peale faced empty balconies and a congregation of about 200. Now membership is some 4,000, and attached to the church is a clinic with seven staff psychiatrists.

Dr. Peale is a small, round whirlwind of a man. In a typical recent week, he raced from speech dates in Racine, Wis. (manufacturers' association) to Columbus (Property Insurance Agents of Ohio) to Pittsburgh (mass meeting "for crippled children or some such") to Cincinnati (H. S. Pough department store "to give the employees a little chat on how to fill Pough's with Christmas spirit") to Louisville (National Sales Executive Club).

A devoted family man, Dr. Peale manages to spend about three days a week with his wife and youngest child, Elizabeth, 12 (son John, 18, and daughter Margaret, 20, are both away at college), finds time to watch Roy Rogers, one of his favorite TV shows, and help his younger daughter with her homework. He works late into the evening on his newspaper column and his regular page in Look Magazine, "Norman Vincent Peale Answers Your Questions," which is often concerned with the kind of family problems that are close to his heart. (To a mother troubled because her teen-age son keeps pin-up girls on the wall, Dr. Peale recently wrote: "Ask the sports celebrities to autograph photographs for him. He will shift to a manly interest and away from the so-called glamour cuties. Give him a beautiful picture of his mother for his wall.")

Visit from Mother. If he ever slowed down, says Dr. Peale, he would simply "pass out." Not that this holds any terror for him, for he is convinced that "there is no death." He is particularly sure because, after his mother died 15 years ago, she appeared to him one day: "It was like music, like a song without words, and she was saying, 'Everything is all right, Norman. I am happy. This is a wonderful place . . . This is better than anything you have ever dreamed.' "

At 56, Dr. Peale is still very much in the here and now. He believes that his success as a soother and pacifier in an age of anxiety is a sign of the times. Dr. Peale is already thinking of a follow-up to his book, perhaps to be titled More Positive Thinking or The Techniques of PT. Meanwhile, PT No. 1 continues as a major phenomenon in the publishing world. Not long ago Dr. Peale dropped into a bookstore and asked how his book was doing compared to the Kinsey Report. Peale's was way ahead. "You know," said the salesgirl, "religion is much more popular than sex this year."

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