It's All God -- Amen, Om, Whatever

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted December 6, 2008.

You have to admire his honesty. His own close encounters with "a long list of spiritual masters" left him feeling "essentially nothing" -- as if, he muses, he has "missed the point."

"If I look truly honestly at my own spiritual path historically," he writes, "every experience I've ever had that felt like 'it' has passed so by definition wasn't really it." (Yet still he searches, undaunted.) But Sobel's saga -- shared, apparently, by a hefty percentage of college-educated intellectual Westerners born during and after World War II -- is also a manual of multiculti pick-and-mixing, blithe duty-free shopping for deities. I have done it myself. Forgive me, Father, for I have intoned Buddhist chants while burning braided sage and I have languished in a sweat lodge invoking a santería goddess. Plus I took a yoga class. But hey. Never ever venturing outside one's own natural-born culture or heritage is provincial. It implies incuriosity at best and xenophobia at worst. And it's wimpy. Why not look around? But in this era of identity politics, what do we say of the white middle-class Westerner who arranges her furnishings based on feng shui, gives himself a new Native American-sounding name, adorns an altar with Tibetan tingsha chimes and big-headed Ghanaian Akua'ba figures, or habitually greets people by pressing palms together, head inclined, in the pose that Hindus call namaste and Japanese Buddhists call gassho? Do such ventures signify sensitivity, integrity, audacity -- or colonialism, patronism, fetishism? Is it immersion or pretension? Respect or theft?

We've all seen it. Oooh, I'd like some of that nirvana. Do you take Visa?

Brought up Jewish, "being of a shamanic bent," and ever searching, Sobel has sampled the spiritual smorgasbord: "My exposure to so many paths and traditions has left me with a not-uncommon New Age amalgamation of a spiritual life in which the Brahma of Hinduism, the Unnamable God of Judaism, Buddha Nature, Islam's Allah and the Christian Father in Heaven are all one and the same, exactly, identically, and all equally existent or non-existent, so I am simultaneously a born-again Hindu, a Jubu" -- that is, a Jewish-born Buddist -- "a contemplative Christian, a singing Sufi, and a secular humanist."

Amen. Om. Whatever. (Is it any surprise that another book published a few months ago is Jewish Dharma: A Guide to the Practice of Judaism and Zen?) He led Chanukah menorah-lightings at Sai Baba's ashram in India. To a Brazilian church whose libation was nauseating, mind-altering ayahuasca -- "the nastiest-tasting stuff available" -- Sobel brought along a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and even tefillin, biblical scrolls encased in tiny leather boxes used as a prayer aid. "I decided to wear my yarmulke kind of like a Jewish good luck charm," while singing hymns under the cross with the congregants. 

During a stint as a hospital chaplain, this self-described "Zelig of religions" -- a reference to Woody Allen's 1983 film about a human chameleon who transforms into whatever type of person he's near -- performed Catholic prayers for the dead over one patient, gave another a Native American-flavored recitation, and baptized a brain-dead infant using a cup bought at Bodh Gaya, India, near where Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi Tree. For the baptism, Sobel sprinkled water over the newborn's head and "blessed him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and offered his soul up to Jesus." 

I stopped being an active neopagan because, as I practiced it then, it was an organized religion that required saying and doing the exact same things at the exact same time as others. That's great in principle, but my personal aversion to performing anything in unison has made me a spiritual exile, sensing the divine only sporadically and in unexpected settings, such as Dumpsters. 

Sobel, on the other hand, is sociable. Forty-day solo retreats aside, he delights in the group experience, as do most God-seekers. He writes vividly of confabs where templesful and hotel ballroomsful of participants wept together, worshipped together, took Ecstasy together, and danced themselves silly -- following the leader's instruction: "Sweat your prayers!" At that Brazilian church, he and the congregation spent several days, for six to twelve hours at a stretch, "doing a simple two-step dance movement in perfect unison." (While the native Brazilians had only good reactions to the ayahuasca, Sobel watched his fellow visiting northerners "drop like flies" -- upchucking, freaking out and even "defecating in their pants, right there in the church. I couldn't help but think to myself that this was madness. What kind of path to God required bringing along a change of underwear?") For over a year, he made several visits every week to primal-therapy sessions in a "dark, padded room, filled with patients lying on mats crying and screaming their guts out" as "the air filled with wailing and screaming, piercing shrieks and heartbraking sobs. Sometimes people threw up. Sometimes they took their clothes off." He describes two million people from all over the world converging on a single Indian ashram to celebrate Sai Baba's 65th birthday. The rest of the year, the ashram hosts tens of thousands at a pop.

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Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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