Sermon Library
“Eat, Pray, Love”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
November 22, 2009
Service Theme: Christ the King Sunday
Christ the King Sunday November 22, 2009
Eat, Pray, Love
By Gregg Anderson
Eat Pray Love, a best selling book by Elizabeth Gilbert, is about the balance between eating, praying and loving or pleasure, piety, and personal fulfillment. Feeling despair about her life and unfortunately her marriage as well, the book begins with her sobbing on the upstairs bathroom floor of her big house in the suburbs of New York for the forty-seventh consecutive night at three o’clock in the morning. Then suddenly, she found herself praying in a way she has never prayed before.
She writes, “What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: “Hello, God, How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you. I’ve always been a big fan of your work. I’m sorry to bother you so late at night, but I’m in serous trouble. I’m sorry I haven’t ever spoken directly to you before, but I do hope I have always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings that you’ve given me in my life.” This thought caused me to sob even harder. God waited me out. I pulled myself together enough to go on. “I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help me? I am in desperate need of help. I don’t know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do.”
Suddenly she stopped crying. She continues, “I was just alone, but not really alone, either. I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence – a silence so rare that I didn’t want to exhale, for fear of scaring it off. I was seamlessly still. I don’t know when I’d ever felt such stillness. Then I heard a voice. It was not Charlton Heston, nor was it telling me to build a baseball field. It was my own voice, but a voice I had never heard before.” The voice simply coaxed her back to bed. There was much she needed to do and her journey would not be easy, but for now, get some rest and go back to bed. Something happened that night she prayed through her tears that changed her life. This was the beginning of her religious conversion. She writes, “The first words of an open and exploratory dialogue that would, ultimately, bring me very close to God:” a magnificent God of supreme love as she added in her book.
I suspect the popularity of her book begins with millions of people identifying with her great despair and confusion. We also have had times of desperation to reach out to God, no matter where our faith may be at the time. I believe we have an innate desire to be in relationship with that which is greater than ourselves as well as that which is personal. One of the things I admire about Elizabeth and her book is her deep honesty about her self and her faith.
Like Elizabeth, we speak to God and we have had moments of that still small voice within, but we are never really sure. I appreciate how she expresses it after she has now arrived in Rome and continues her conversation with God in a way which is most natural for her – she writes. She writes in her journal. “I need your help.” Then I wait. After a little while, a response comes, in my own handwriting: “I’m right here. What can I do for you? Here in this most private notebook, is where I talk to myself. I talk to that same voice I met that night on my bathroom floor when I first prayed to God in tears for help, when something or somebody said, Go back to bed, Liz. In the years since then, I’ve found that voice again in times of code-orange distress. I’ve been surprised to find that I can almost always access that voice no matter how black my anguish may be. Even during the worst of suffering, that calm, compassionate, affectionate and infinitely wise voice – who is maybe me, or maybe not exactly me – is always available for a conversation on paper at any time of day or night.”
She continues, “I’ve decided to let myself off the hook from worrying that conversing with myself on paper means I’m a ‘schizo.’ Maybe the voice I am reaching for is God, or maybe it’s my Guru speaking through me, or maybe it’s the angel who was assigned to my case, or maybe it’s my Highest Self, or maybe it is indeed just a construct of my subconscious, invented in order to protect me from my own torment. Saint Teresa called such divine internal voices ‘locutions’ – words from the supernatural that enter the mind spontaneously, translated into your own language and offering you heavenly consolation. I do know what Freud would have said about such spiritual consolations. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.”
She writes back to herself from that voice which she wonders about, yet trusts. “I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
In keeping with what Elizabeth just wrote in her private journal, which of course she has since made very public, I cannot help to quote here this earth shattering and profound declaration from the Apostle Paul in the book of Romans. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Elizabeth Gilberts is a writer, a journalist, an autobiographer. She is not a theologian or even a religion major, but somehow she expresses herself with a spiritual sophistication which has become quite attractive to not only many other spiritual seekers, but clergy as well. At first, I thought that I was really being out-there again in speaking on a Sunday morning about this book entitled Eat Pray Love. After making my own correlations, I then Googled “Eat, Pray, Love, Sermons” and found a hundred sermons which have utilized and quoted Elizabeth Gilbert’s book. Elizabeth has not only connected with many people in their own journey today, but has contributed to clergy’s need to connect with congregants.
Perhaps this is an indication of a spiritual direction of which I have been suspicious for some time, that there needs to be a closing of a gap between clergy and so called lay people – simply other people. Martin Luther initiated this reform 500 years ago, but I think it has taken us awhile to really actualize his projection of the “universality of priesthood.” Perhaps, such a paramount paradigmatic change takes a half-a-millennium or more to actually take place. Personally, I have always sought truth wherever truth may supposedly be found. Elizabeth Gilbert speaks her own truth.
I wish to add quickly that her truth is not one that is new, but has been pursued for centuries, particularly in the earliest centuries of the teachings of Jesus. What she writes is really nothing new, but is an ancient and innate desire to know God personally and to humanly embrace the divine. She surmises, “I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.” This is an eternal question.
The most unfortunate answer is that the world and God have somehow become separated in the first place. This is based on an ancient if not prehistoric concept that God and earth and the universe are somehow separated. God is up there and we are down here. The truly good of the world, however, can be the truly good of God. If God is creator of creation then we need to listen to the first words of the Book of Genesis after each act of creation and reiterate, “And God said it was good.” This is the first chapter of Genesis and amazingly so, it is part of the purpose of her popular book today.
One of the truths Elizabeth learned in Italy is that the experience of one’s senses can be as strong if not stronger than one’s sense. She states, “Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors. In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business – not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into rhetoric and plot.” “Appreciation of pleasure [or that which is good] can be an anchor of one’s humanity.” (p. 115)
We have been plagued with a prehistoric world view which has separated God and people, the mundane and the divine perhaps. Elizabeth discovers that “True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise [or balance], see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy – men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral – they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance. ‘Our whole business therefore in this life,’ wrote Saint Augustine, rather ‘yogically,’ ‘is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.’” (p.122 – 123)
Elizabeth seeks God in an Ashram in India. There are moments in which she comes closer to God there and seemingly more moments that are simply left as “I don’t think this is it.” She meets a Texan there who becomes a friend and sometimes a conscience. His name is Richard. They become close enough for him to confront her about her “control issues.” She admits that she wonders about this, but doesn’t think anyone else notices. Richard lets her know that Ray Charles can see her control issues. Richard gives her spiritual advice about “letting go.” She learns the difference between quiet mind and monkey mind.
Buddha had stated that most of humanity has eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, while there are others who naturally see quite clearly. Then there are those whose eyes are just slightly caked with dust and can be helped. The Buddha decided he would become a teacher for those of little dust.
Elizabeth hopes she is merely one of the “mid-level dust caked people” and there is hope.
She writes, “Letting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well – that would be the end of the universe.” But Richard encourages her to let go and sit quietly for now and cease her relentless participation. “Watch what happens,” he told her. “The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood.”
Elizabeth considers, “I hear this argument and it appeals to me. I believe in it, intellectually. I really do. But then I wonder – with all my restless yearning, with all my hyped-up fervor and with this stupidly hungry nature of mine – what should I do with my energy, instead?” Then, like before, an answer is given to her. The answer is “Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.”
This Thursday we have the pleasure of celebrating Thanksgiving. It is a holiday or holy day of faith and freedom. We mostly celebrate thanksgiving by eating and praying. For many families it is the only time of the year that they might offer a prayer before they eat. There is great pleasure in eating and there can be great pleasure in praying as well. Eating and praying together in a loving gathering is even more pleasurable. It is a time when heaven and earth meet in pleasure and prayer.
We can even get caught up in monkey mind getting ready for thanksgiving and making sure all the trimmings and stuffings are in place. But when you finally sit down, where ever you may be remember quiet mind and say a prayer before you eat. Give thanks to God for all the blessings we have at the very moment we begin to eat. Give thanks to Jesus and to Buddha for teaching us that the way to find our life is to lose our life – to let go and let God.
And be as earnest in your prayer as you will be in your eating. Elizabeth also learned to speak Italian just because she wanted to. She learned the phrase Parla come magni which means “Speak the way you eat” or “Say it like you eat it.” Pray for God, seek God, listen for God in the same way you will eat your thanksgiving meal. As Elizabeth says, “Just lay it all on the table.”
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Drive
Aspen, Colorado 81611
http://www.aspenchapel.org