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Eat well, pray well

Eat, pray, love has been accused of having a shallow spirituality, but as I continue to read I am finding more and more points of interest.

Liz Gilbert plans a year of travel: four months in Italy, four months in India, four months in Bali.  Her thinking is that in Italy, she will explore the art of pleasure, specifically amazing Italian food.  In India, she will visit her guru's ashram and devote herself to prayer.  In Bali, she will go back to visit an elderly medicine man she met on a work trip, hoping that he will teach her how to balance pleasure and prayer.  Gilbert explains that she does not want to become like a monk, renouncing the world of material pleasures, but she does want to draw close to God.  She wants to live in the world and enjoy its delights as well as to connect with the spiritual world.

I found this really interesting.  Sometimes we can get the impression that truly religious people are ones who never watch TV, eat ice cream or hang out in coffee shops, because they are beyond such superficial amusements.  In his book Cafe Theology: exploring love, the universe and everything, Michael Lloyd describes the fear he once had that, in becoming a priest, he would have to give up all worldly pleasures and devote himself to doing 'religious things'.  However, when he came to understand the incarnation of Jesus better, his fears melted away.  Christians believe that, in Jesus, God became fully human; he took on human flesh and lived a human life, becoming fully part of the material world, eating and drinking, doing all the ordinary everyday things we do.  For this reason, the idea of 'spiritual' things like prayer, meditation, Bible reading, churchgoing etc. on the one hand, and things like eating, drinking, gardening and doing DIY on the other, is a false division.  Jesus took on materiality and ordinariness and therefore there is no part of life from which he can be kept out.

That's not to say that it's fine for Christians to be unrelenting pleasure-seekers; there are more important things in life than coffee and donuts (hard though that is to believe at times), and seasons like Lent can perhaps redress the balance in our lives when these material pleasures have taken too prominent a place.  But there is nothing irreligious - or, at least, there is nothing unChristian - about Gilbert's reluctance to let go of simple earthly delights.

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