Crazy, But True
by Marion Fernandez-Cueto in Reviews on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:00 AM
Eat, Pray, Love
I’m late to the party, but my appetite’s unspoiled.
You see, that book—and the international fixation it spawned—still gets me. I saw the movie last week in an irritated attempt to rout my own fixation for good, and though I was relieved to find myself yawning (twice!), there’s something about Eat, Pray, Love I can’t quite shake. Like a familiar old temptation, it still appeals and repulses and frustrates.
The appealing part needs little explanation: for the uninitiated, it involves abandoning a dreary suburban existence for the mouthwatering smorgasbords of sun-dappled Italy (eat); soothing meditation in an Indian ashram (pray); and romance with an oh-so-attentive Brazilian hunk under the swaying palms of Bali (love). If that doesn’t entice you at least a bit, either I’m describing it wrong, or you can stop reading now.
The repulsive part—that Gilbert dumped her husband and their family plans at the start of the saga, had a wild fling on the rebound, secured a book advance before her “search for meaning” even commenced, and then eloquently navel-gazed her way around the world to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars—is also self-evident.
A Gorgeous Lie
It’s the frustrating aspect of Eat, Pray, Love that’s harder to pin down.
Catholics more grounded than I have been able to roll their eyes at the book’s self-indulgence (“I mean, c’mon—Oprah recommended it!” one friend sniffed) and redirect their attention without one backward glance.
Not me. Because while the self-fulfillment celebrated in Eat, Pray, Love is essentially a lie—100-proof narcissism, straight up—it’s a gorgeous, top-shelf lie, with a narrow twist of truth to it, and it goes down easy.
It’s that gorgeous, truth-twisting part that keeps frustrating me: all that beauty … wrapped up in a lie.
“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” says the Psalm, and the “fullness” described by Gilbert—the entrancing beauty of South Sea sunsets and gelato on the piazza, of delightful new friends in exotic cities, hushed contemplation in unspoiled valleys, and the sensation of falling helplessly in love, is real. Real and true and unspeakably lovely. Beauty, in fact, is everywhere in Eat, Pray, Love, and it has God’s signature all over it.
But the ugliness is just as ubiquitous. There’s infidelity, promiscuity, selfishness and idolatry of every kind—all that St. John refers to as “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and pride of the world.” Things not of the Father, but of the father of lies.
And yet it is these things the author hails as her salvation.
Salvation Without a Savior
For me, the great tragedy of the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon is that, like every seduction, it makes a promise it cannot fulfill: A woman overwhelmed by the awful, clawing emptiness of her life sets out on a quest for answers and meaning, and returns with counterfeit solutions: love without faithfulness or sacrifice; forgiveness without repentance; enlightenment without truth, redemption without the Cross, and salvation without a Savior.
“God” she decides in India, “exists in me, as me,” and that mantra perfectly epitomizes the problem with Eat, Pray, Love: It might sound true … but it’s crazy.
My heart aches for the author, and for her countless admirers who have embarked on replicate searches for gurus and soul mates. They have all been given a stone instead of bread. Because that terrible, infinite, God-sized hole that exists in our lives can only be filled by Something equally infinite. All of the yearning God’s beautiful creation stirs up in our hearts can only find a home in Him. As Simone Weil wrote, “The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation [and] the Incarnation alone can satisfy it.”
Of course, I often forget that reality, concupiscent creature that I am. As a stay-at-home mom with wistful memories of my own pre-family travels, I still struggle to accept the fact that my life may never again involve cappuccinos in Rome, baguettes in Paris, hikes in the Alps, processions in Lourdes, or resorts on Caribbean islands. I miss those things, and I miss them terribly. And yet I am tormented less and less by the suspicion that I am missing out on life by serving my family here in suburbia.
Because I have found the Bread of Life, and He alone can feed my restless hunger.
Encounter With Christ
I know now that it would be possible for me to travel to India and Bali and every other fabulous destination, explore the wonders of the world till I am glutted, and somehow return even emptier than I left. That fact hardly surprises me anymore.
What I find endlessly astonishing, and no less true, is that I can encounter the living Christ by merely making dinner for my kids, greeting a neighbor, whispering a prayer, or smiling at my husband—if only my heart is open to His presence. Because of the Incarnation, I can draw near to the meaning of the universe, indeed, the Master of the universe, right here where I am, performing the largely unglamorous routines of work and home and liturgy. And this ongoing encounter with Christ—it alone—has the capacity to become “a spring of water within, welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)
To say it is enough to find God in life’s ordinary circumstances is not a smug retort to the likes of Eat, Pray, Love. It is a stunning truth. When, through grace, we unite our hearts (however fickle) and our daily activities (however mundane) to God, the source and summit of all love, truth and beauty, we are allowed to touch something of eternity, something of what it means to “know with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, [and to] be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:19)
Only God is enough, as St. Teresa said—and we have Him. When we partake of the Eucharist, we eat, pray to and love the only true Savior, the One who “came that they might have life, and have it abundantly”; a God who pours Himself out in selfless love to the point of death, and shows us we can only find lasting happiness and freedom by doing the same for others.
It might sound crazy … but it’s true.
—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX. She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.
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