Flirting With the Divine

Tell me, is there any January pleasure quite so cozy as retreating to the couch with a blanket and a good book? Here’s one that made me particularly happy as I lounged:  Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine by Eric Weiner. A former foreign correspondent for NPR, Weiner began his search for God after a health scare landed him in the emergency room. “Have you found your God yet?” asked a nurse with motherly concern, a question that is no doubt a terrible breach of hospital protocol but one that set Weiner off on a whirlwind religious quest.

In the book Weiner takes an around-the-religious-world-in-80-days approach to spirituality, diving into faiths that include Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism as well as the lesser-known Taoism, Wicca, and Raelism (a UFO-inspired religion whose Las Vegas convention involved bare breasts and cross-dressing but inexplicably no caffeinated beverages). He works alongside Franciscan monks in an inner city homeless shelter, learns tai-ji in China, studies Torah in Israel, and tries whirling with Sufi dervishes.

Weiner is quick-witted and breezy—I particularly enjoyed his description of shaving his legs during the Rael convention—but he’s a genuine seeker and makes some surprisingly profound points in between quips. Here, for example, is his description of why he set out on his quest:

I was—and still am—a rationalist. I believe that reason and its offspring, science, are good. I question, though, whether reason alone is sufficient for a happy, fulfilled life. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever reasoned herself to a state of pure bliss. Reason is an excellent tool for solving problems but offers little guidance in identifying which problems we should solve and why. Reason makes a wonderful servant but a poor master. Reason cannot account for those moments in life that “bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart,” as G.K. Chesterton observed.”

That’s lovely, isn’t it? But the book is worth reading for this little anecdote alone:

I also believe in words, in the power of words, and for decades my philosophy, such as it was, mirrored that of the great student of myths, Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, “I underline books.”

Yes! That’s what I do, too. And surely we get celestial credit for underlining, don’t we? Isn’t that in the Bible somewhere?

I enjoyed Weiner’s earlier book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, but I like his newest effort even better. Perfect reading for the couch: theology served with a dash of sass.