Is eat, pray, love the truth about discovering God?

Elizabeth Gilbert's book eat, pray, love is a New York Times bestseller. She's an ace New York journalist, and her tale of a year spent in Italy learning to speak Italian and eating the best pasta in the world, then months of meditation at an Ashram in India eating vegetables and pursuing spiritual devotion in hours of meditation, and culminating in gorgeous Bali where an ancient Yoda-like medicine man and a beautiful medicine woman guide her to balance the extremes of pleasure and austerity encourage a lot of wives in their thirties in unhappy marriages to at least dream of liberating themselves from their husbands and flying away to exotic places. Of course the romance heats up at the end when Elizabeth meets a mature, gorgeous Brazilian business man.

Elizabeth pours out a powerful, witty, and revealing personal testimony. She is definitely open. She hears the voice of god in the midst of her meaningless. She divorces, has an affair, plunges into depression, and then begins the long salvation journey to self discovery. Through meditation she connects with the great transcendent supernatural powers that teach her the spiritual truths that everyone can accept:

Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple--get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbor, respect yourself and others, master your cravings. (P. 175).

If faith were rational, it wouldn't be --by definition--faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. (P. 175).

I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in the universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. (p. 328).

She admits at the beginning of her book that she's only culturally a Christian. She does love "the great teacher of peace who was called Jesus." She reserves the right to ask herself in trying situations, What would Jesus do? But she can't swallow "that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God." (P. 14)

Before you rush full-speed into the dark and join your local meditation class or take off for an Indian Ashram, it might be wise to read carefully in the historical documents from the first century about the one who referred to himself as the Light of the World. As you read the first four books of the New Testament ask yourself what the historical Jesus actually did do--things like giving sight to the blind, enabling lame legs to walk, and raising dead people. After an agonizing death on the cross, all four Gospels claim that he rose again--a feat that none of the other religious leaders that Ms. Gilbert lumps Jesus with were able to pull off. Jesus was hardly just another great teacher of love.

It always bothers me when Jesus is presented as this hippy like guru of love potient number nine. Why would the Romans crucify a Mr. Rogers wearing first century Jewish clothing? Now someone generating a messianic movement claiming he was God's Son, the promised Messiah from the Old Testament Scriptures, and backing it up with some wondrous divine miracles--now that's a cause that could effect a Roman response.

Speaking of eating, the historical Jesus did quote Moses, "Man shall not live by bread alone," and then went on to claim to be the Bread of Life. Prayer? Jesus didn't give us a mantra to get us out of our conscious mind. He taught us to ask the Father to forgive us our debts because things like breaking our marriage vows, fornication, and the idolatry of thinking that we can get our lives together through our own devotion and discipline do make us guilty enough to face a deserved judgment. Jesus challenges us to face the true guilt because of real personal evil that has infected all of our lives.

I heard on the Internet that Ms. Gilbert is going to marry her Brazilian lover. I pray that the Son of God who turned the water to wine at the marriage of Cana of Galilee will pour His real wine of amazing grace into her life and her husband's. Sexual, human love can only take us so far, then we need the life and love that only the true Lover of our soul can give.

"In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loves us and sent his Son to be the propitiation ( Look it up) for our sins." 1 John 4:10