This past Friday night, I donned my reporter hat and joined the estrogen-fueled pilgrimage to the theater for opening night of Eat Pray Love. After all, when an Oprah-endorsed, best-selling author named one of Time magazine's "100 most influential people in the world" headlines at the box office, it is worthwhile to see what she stands for. Spoiler alert #1—the self is god.

The audience included a variety of ages and degrees of weepiness. Sony Pictures made sure to target beyond the largely thirty-plus bastion of staunch Eat Pray Love fans by selling aggressively to twenty-something and teenaged audiences, running trailers with Sex and the City II and the latest installment of the Twilight saga.

The preternaturally beautiful Julia Roberts plays New York authoress Elizabeth Gilbert, putting her famous smile into full effect. Despite Roberts' natural appeal, a sizable and ever-expanding streak of narcissism shines through our heroine's character. Dissatisfied with her dedicated husband, whose mere existence appears to be an unwelcome hindrance to her wanderlust and self-discovery, our wistful protagonist breaks her vows, along with her husband's heart, and falls in lust with a young raffish actor named David played by the irresistibly scruffy James Franco. The self-described "crunchy", angsty and seductive David takes Liz to a guru-worship meeting where a group of New Yorkers seek refuge from the "ordinary" by chanting to a small portrait of their Hindu guru in India. When the David fling falls flat, Liz devises a three-pronged self-help tour that falls nicely into place: eat in Italy, pray in India, love in Bali.

In Italy, undeniably svelt Roberts makes 'carbicidal' eating vicariously enjoyable, especially to a diet-crazy American audience ridden with suppressed desires to dive into a tantalizing pile of pasta. Some Catholic detractors rightly point out that it is somewhat curious for a "spiritual seeker" like Liz Gilbert to ignore the history and significance of the Vatican and opt instead to study an Italian language tutor (ahem, study some Italian language) and work on growing into a pair of "big-lady pants". Ironically enough, during a series of convivial gatherings with a local family of a large clan sort, she seems particularly touched by the enduring and selfless love she observes—perhaps she views it as a quaint old-world relic? It becomes clear that the time-honored values of faith and family have little lasting appeal for Gilbert.

Cut abruptly to destination number two: the ashram in India. In a humorous twist, the guru is not present as she is on a trip to enlighten her New York fan club. The India compound is colonized by a transient and colorful group—most notably a salty and regret-ridden Texan who calls Liz "groceries" on account of her Tuscan-trained appetite. The dwellers seem content to go about their business seeking private peace and enthroning their imperial inner selves. Elizabeth Gilbert explains:

One of my guru's most helpful instructions is to 'become a scientist of your own experience,' which I take as an invitation to explore every possible line of human spiritual thinking. The world has been blessed with some extraordinary teachers over history—use them! That said, studying can only take you so far. At some point you have to lay aside the books, hope that your mind has actually absorbed some wisdom, and just sit there in silence, letting your soul ascend to its own leadership.

As for Gilbert's own afternoon of enlightenment in India:

Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in the rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way—not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I was just part of God. In addition to being God, I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size of the universe.

Wow! Complete understanding of the universe along with limitless peace and wisdom? It sounds like we all should start praying to Liz Gilbert. Maybe Liz can be our guru and we should follow her? Spoiler alert #2—that's coming next.

Gurus claiming to be channels and other embodiments of divinity garner sizable followings of spiritually hungry and ungrounded people. Liz herself fell into this category before her pilgrimage to India and her profitable realization that she was the god she was seeking to find. There is an ample supply of possible customers with strong spiritual inclination and weak spiritual knowledge—the perfect market for a clever, charismatic, opportunistic, up-and-coming spiritual celebrity. Even Julia Roberts claims to have taken up a spun-off rendition of 'Hindu' practice after filming this movie. Oscar winner Julia Roberts is an Elizabeth Gilbert convert! See how easy this can be?

Cut once more to act three: Bali, dubbed the place where "everyone has a love affair." Our newly enlightened Liz lands in paradise for an icing-on-the-cake experience that belongs in a fairy tale or romance novel. She runs into the passionate-yet-reliable Brazilian, or rather he runs into her bike with his car, and they fall in love. For a moment, she is ready to sacrifice her new love for the sake of her personal balance, but is set right by the charming wisdom of Ketut, the sweet, toothless medicine man who gives her good-natured advice: smile with your mind, smile with your face, and smile with your liver.

While this story hardly seems to be original, the book Eat Pray Love took America by storm. Since its 2006 release, devotees have fallen over themselves to replicate the Gilbert pilgrimage to self-fulfillment. The New York Post article, "Eat Pray Zilch" tracks stories of enlightenment seekers who have been taken for a ride - financially and otherwise. The article cites Gita Mehta, author of the 1979 journalistic expose "Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East," in which she chronicles the first big wave of naive Westerners seeking instant enlightenment. "People who are coming to us, by and large, think the guru is the whole idea of India…That's where it gets dangerous. If your guru is a con man and you think of him as a father figure, then you're certainly going to be in trouble." Horror stories of disillusionment, financial ruination, and worse forms of harm abound.

How can this guru-driven, 60's throwback of a fad hold today? Perhaps we can find a clue in Christian Smith's description of American de-facto mainstream religion dominated by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—a creed that recognizes a god who wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught by the Bible and by most world religions; and sets happiness and feeling good as the central goals of life.

Such a bland, knowledge-bereft version of Christianity, depicted in Christian Century's August article "Faith Nice and Easy," is a close cousin to Liz Gilbert's self-worshipping search for peace and happiness. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism's pink-crayon version of faith lacks the wherewithal to resist a slide toward the self-centered happy-feeling-chasing proselytized in Eat Pray Love. What is left when subjectivity becomes god? Eat without guilt, Pray to yourself as god, and Love without commitment--not a hard sell in our hyper-individualized modern culture.

Eat Pray Love's final dénouement, after the credits have run and the royalty checks have been cashed? Liz has mostly abandoned her spiritual gig, although she still enjoys biweekly yoga. It seems that her wormhole experience was more of a subjective high than a truth, and now she has followed the feeling tunnel to a new topic--marriage, of all things!

The film Coyote Ugly is based on Liz Gilbert's account of tending bar in NYC

"Happy endings to taxing—if fascinating— journeys are the 39-year-old author’s trademark. She was raised on a Connecticut farm milking goats and wearing clothes her industrious mother made by hand, only to move to New York City and tend bar at the classic East Village dive Coyote Ugly, where a friend once called her “the Queen of the Gutter” because of all the “miserable and pathetic” drunken customers there who adored her. At 27, she turned the experience into an article for GQ that was later optioned by Disney and made into a movie."

Elle

http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Movies-TV-Music-Books/Elizabeth-Gilbert/Elizabeth-Gilbert

"My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face," Gilbert writes, in her book, of the first time she saw a photo of the guru. "Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced, ‘I want a spiritual teacher.’"

Elizabeth Gilbert

"As a reader and seeker, I always get frustrated at this moment in somebody else’ spiritual memoirs – that moment in which the soul excuses itself from time and place and merges with the infinite. … I don’t want to say that what I experienced that Thursday afternoon in India was indescribable, even though it was. I’ll try to explain anyway. Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in the rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left my room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way – not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God’s thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God, I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe."

Elizabeth Gilbert

Marta Szabo discovered the same charismatic guru as Liz Gilbert, but she ended up broke and disillusioned

Eat Pray Zilch

"Getting a guru: For Gilbert, this decision was a lifesaver. For Szabo, it derailed her life for more than a decade. And for thousands of women entranced with the Eat Pray Love phenomenon — the movie, predicted to be a major box-office contender, has spawned more than 400 retail tie-ins — it could fall somewhere between overpriced self-help and good old-fashioned fraud.

'If you see an organization that’s personality-driven, focused on this individual leader who members seem enthralled with, and who can do no wrong, you may be dealing with more of a cult than enlightenment,' warns cult expert Rick Ross, who’s spent more than two decades chronicling the dark side of so-called spiritual salvation."

"Szabo, who moved from those regular meditation sessions to an eventual staff position in India as Gurumayi’s personal assistant, says ashram attendees often end up broke, and broken. Rather than using their inner-peace revelations to spur them on to happier lives, they become enlightenment junkies, spending all their time and money in pursuit of what they come to believe is the path to happiness: more and more meditation and guru worship.

'People would charge accommodations and bookstore items and courses up on their credit cards that they couldn’t afford,' says Szabo, who now resides in Woodstock, NY and chronicles her ashram years at the-guru-looked-good.blogspot. com. 'There was always the sense in the ashram that money you spent in the ashram — even if it put you in debt — was money well spent. The guru would handle the consequences. She would be there for you since you’d put your faith in her.'"

New York Post

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/eat_pray_zilch_i9geyDJpY1z16Maa31JTYI

Oprah fueled the reading frenzy of Eat Pray Love

"And then there’s Oprah. 'I haven’t been this excited since Bono was here,' she effused at the first of two (yes, two) Gilbert appearances in late ’07. The second show featured fans of the book who, inspired by Gilbert, made either mini life changes (an art gallery owner threw a birthday party featuring food from all the EPL countries) or major ones (dropping out of law school, taking off for their own trips to Italy or Bali to sample the pizza, meet the medicine man, try the same multivitamin lunch special 'Liz' did)."

Elle

http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Movies-TV-Music-Books/Elizabeth-Gilbert/Elizabeth-Gilbert2

Author Elizabeth Gilbert, seen here attending the world premiere of 'Eat Pray Love' at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Tuesday in New York, will head to Capitol Hill next week to lobby for a change in immigration laws to allow gays and lesbians to sponsor their partners from other countries.

AOL News

Researchers Christian Smith and Melinda Denton coined the term: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism after extensive study of the religious lives of American teenagers and emerging adults

"Smith and Denton claim that MTD is "colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness." This, they add, is a moral indictment not of American teenagers, but of American congregations. They go on to say:

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is, in the context of [teenagers'] own congregations and denominations, actively displacing the substantive traditional faiths of conservative, black, and mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in the United States. . . . It may be the new mainstream American religious faith for our culturally post-Christian, individualistic, mass-consumer capitalist society.

While Smith and Denton refrain from describing how this "colonization" affects other religious traditions, they are blunt about its influence on Christianity: "A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that it is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into . . . Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

In short, the study provides a window on how American young people have learned a well-intentioned but ultimately banal version of Christianity that's been offered to them in American churches. Most youth seem to accept this bland view of faith as all there is—as something nice to have, like a bank account, something you have in case you need to draw from it in the future. What Christian adults have not told them is that this account of Christianity is bankrupt. We have not invested in their accounts: we "teach" young people baseball, but we "expose" them to faith. We provide coaching and opportunities for youth to develop and improve their pitches and their SAT scores, but we blithely assume that religious identity will happen by osmosis and will emerge "when youth are ready" (a confidence we generally lack when it comes to, say, algebra). The result? Teenagers who don't have the soul strength necessary to recognize, wrestle with and resist the symbiotes in our midst—probably because we lack this strength ourselves."

Kenda Creasy Dean

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