Eat, Pray, Love

I have many friends in New York who are not religious people. Most, I would say. Either
they fell away from the spiritual teachings of their youth or they never grew up with any God to
begin with. Naturally, some of them are a bit freaked out by my newfound efforts to reach holi-
ness. Jokes are made, of course. As my friend Bobby quipped once while he was trying to fix
my computer: “No offense to your aura, but you still don’t know shit about downloading soft-
ware.” I roll with the jokes. I think it’s all funny, too. Of course it is.
What I’m seeing in some of my friends, though, as they are aging, is a longing to have
something to believe in. But this longing chafes against any number of obstacles, including
their intellect and common sense. Despite all their intellect, though, these people still live in a
world that careens about in a series of wild and devastating and completely nonsensical
lurches. Great and horrible experiences of either suffering or joy occur in the lives of all these
people, just as with the rest of us, and these mega-experiences tend to make us long for a
spiritual context in which to express either lament or gratitude, or to seek understanding. The
problem is—what to worship, whom to pray to?
I have a dear friend whose first child was born right after his beloved mother died. After
this confluence of miracle and loss, my friend felt a desire to have some kind of sacred place
to go, or some ritual to perform, in order to sort through all the emotion. My friend was a Cath-
olic by upbringing, but couldn’t stomach returning to the church as an adult. (“I can’t buy it
anymore,” he said, “knowing what I know.”) Of course, he’d be embarrassed to become a
Hindu or a Buddhist or something wacky like that. So what could he do? As he told me, “You
don’t want to go cherry-picking a religion.”
Which is a sentiment I completely respect except for the fact that I totally disagree. I think
you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in
God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across
the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It’s nothing to be em-
barrassed about. It’s the history of mankind’s search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in
its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of
cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take
whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.
The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread,
and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads
are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history
and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea,
assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn’t become Tibetan Buddhists in or-
der to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan
Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most un-