Salvation in Aisle 3

 by 

Crispin Day

“Spirituality”: the million-dollar word. Everybody wants it.  Everybody seems willing to pay for it. And if you’ve got it, you can sell it. Just ask Oprah.  She’s collecting her millions hand over rake.  And so are countless other self-made gurus, from TV personalities to New Age spiritualists, dotcom start-ups to soft drink makers.

Now if somebody could figure out what the hell the word means. 

The term has garnered more hushed reverence than his holiness, the pope, and still managed to give her slightly-less-than-holiness, Madonna, two decades of edgy personality. Try it yourself.  Use the word “spirituality” in conversation as often as possible.  Simply drop the word like a shiny dime into any English sentence, and you will become the author of that which is vague, confusing, impossible to challenge, and mysteriously important all at the same time.

LA is the perfect place to test the theory.  For all you aspiring actors out there, here’s a fresh challenge:  Take an afternoon in one our city’s high-foot-traffic areas or cafés and represent yourself as any one of the following characters: practicing shaman, witch-in-training, pastor, priest, monk, prophet, espouser of wisdom in general, cult leader, and/or enlightenment junkie of any conceivable kind (be creative.  Invent your own title).  Talk with certainty.  Use big words.  Loosely throw out your opinion about the soul, the afterlife, personal power, and God.

What will happen?  You’ll find yourself in the company of every response from awe-struck follower to the nonchalant, “Cool, I’m a dentist.”  However, across the spectrum, no one will have any more of a clue what your “spirituality” actually signifies than you do.  Whatever you do, don’t explain it (that just ruins it for everybody).    

Why is it that despite all the polished pulpits, street corner prophets, enlightenment centers, secret scented séances, reading rooms, pay-too-much seminars, quacks, cracks, and scam artists, spirituality is still a buyers market?  Are we the eternal suckers?  Are we wrapped in a flaky crust and filled with cream cheese?  Is God pointing his finger at us and laughing?

Is  there encouragement to be taken even amidst the mess and confusion of our culture’s free market spirituality?

That we are awakened to the possibility of spirituality—that has got to be somehow positive.  At very least, it is refreshing to know that we have come to the point as a culture where many agree there is more to “existence” than meets the eye.  Sure we’ll never agree what more there is, but at least we have a starting place. So as flaky, empty-souled, and empty-headed as LA spirituality can be, can we at least agree that hope has its place?  So what if it’s not always readily apparent. 

Take, as an example, my recent escapades through the realm of the sacred and profane on Santa Monica’s Promenade.  My habitual strolls down this four block stretch have brought a collage of encounters with “spirituality” and it’s endless stream of pundits.  For the most part, the conversations these encounters have spawned have left me anything but clued in to what the world of the “Other” is all about. 

In that four block stretch, I have experienced all of the following: 

First, I listened to a presentation from a milk crate podium about “Jesus”, the get-out-of-hell-free card for a sinful LA, complete with a diagram of a brontosaurus and open-mic invitations through squelching and crackling speakers. Not long afterward, I allowed myself to be taken a block or two away to what I can best guess was a Zen center of some sort.  I was sat down at a cafeteria style table where a seemingly swell fellow struggled to communicate the grammar of eternity with me through a language barrier thicker than a winter parka.  After a little more that a half hour, I finally understood he wanted to me to watch an informational video with him and his cohorts.  I politely declined.

I have also found it impossible to walk the tourist-packed shopping street without being hunted down and handed postcard after postcard with action photos of celebrities.  Turning these postcards over, however, one will find an 8 point font printed manifesto espousing the “real” nature of the universe, and what you need to do to be a part of it.  Of course, the tract lacks any sort of literary integrity or logical flow.  Only a person of extraordinary spiritual ability would be able to read through right to the end, and wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?

For me, none of these experiences compared to being approached by a complete stranger, apropos of nothing, who told me that I project a good and positive aura.  Reminiscent of the character “Phoebe” from Friends, now in perpetual television reincarnation AKA syndication, she went on to explain what this means, complete with instruction on how to maintain that aura as if she were giving instruction on how to clean and wax a car with a new paint job.

Everybody seems to have a hand in it. The songwriters try to represent answers through music, the standout adherents of Krishna consciousness offer “free” books (which seem impossible to acquire without a donation), the sign board wearers wear, the palm readers read, the tarot card renderers render, the astrologers predict, the authors promote their new books with costly seminars, and the general market of ever-appearing adherents of spiritual solutions with ever multiplying cosmological sounding labels appear.  Does that cover everybody? And this is just one street.

Everybody’s got spirituality.

But the more I observe my LA surroundings, the more I become convinced that someone needs to wade through all the references to “Otherness” and tell it like it is, once and for all.  Someone who will hold on to hope, but won’t be afraid to employ the spiritual gift of cynicism in this land where, “All rivers flow to the same ocean, man.”

It is in this spirit that I present myself, willing to take up the mantle of spiritual advisor, guru, and prophetic voice—ready to help wayward souls in their journey for enlightenment, salvation, and/or universal harmony.  Oh sure it’s the blind leading the blind, but what have we got to lose?      

WRITE IN

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