Am making my way through this 2006 memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has been a recent No. 1 bestseller on the New York Times list. It's about Gilbert's search for herself and for God, following a failed marriage and a depression whose symptoms included crying her eyes out every night on her bathroom floor.
After receiving what was obviously a hefty book advance for what would become "Eat, Pray," she took a year-long sabbatical to Italy, India and Indonesia. In that order.
I'm in the "Pray" section. This is when she's in India, staying at her Guru's Ashram.
I'm having a difficult time relating to this part, being a Westerner (as she is). Part of my discomfort with the practices in the Ashram is theological. For instance, the participants rise at an ungodly hour (3:30 a.m.) and begin praying soon thereafter. She has a difficult time at first with the long periods of chanting and meditation, but eventually adjusts.
She writes of meeting a woman who practices an ultra-orthodox form of Buddhist meditation called Vipassana. "Basically, it's just sitting," Gilbert writes. "An introductory Vipassana course lasts for ten days, during which time you sit for 10 hours a day in stretches of long silence that last two to three hours at a time. It's the Extreme Sports version of transcendence. ... It's physically grueling, too. You are forbidden to shift your body at all once you have been seated, no matter how severe your discomfort."
While I get the point of learning to live with our discomforts in this life, fighting the reflex to be pampered all the time and being undisciplined, I'm not sure prayer or meditation has to be this way. (And also I'm aware that we Americans could learn from this, since most of us have the attention span of gnats.)
Yet, what does this extreme practice say about our view of God, and our relation to God? That God hears our prayers and sees our meditations only when we are suffering through them? Or that we must torture ourselves to be heard? This is the part that gives me the willies.
What do you think?
And also, if you were to write a book about your life, or summarizing a period of your life like Gilbert did, what three verbs would you use?
Today, mine would be Eat, Cuss, Pray. Or Spin, Shower, Eat.
Click here for an interview Gilbert did about another book with Powell's Books.
1 comment:
What a great post. I laughed as you wrote about Gilbert's experience in the Ashram. We Episcopalians "suffer" from kneeling during services but God (so to speak) forbid anyone expected us to sit still for 10 hours. Not to mention getting up at 3:30.
They may reach heaven that way, but eat, read, pray sounds a lot better to me.
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