It seems everywhere I’ve turned in the past few months, people have been talking about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, a travel memoir of self-discovery, mostly raving about how wonderful it was. So when I came across a used hardcover version for $1, I figured I’d hitch a ride on the bandwagon. I decided to choose her book as the first selection for a women’s reading group I’ve started at my church, a reason for me to bump it up in my reading queue, and I thought it would provide ample discussion points for the varied group of women who joined the club. I won’t even go into the details of the book itself, since most everyone has read or knows about this book by now, but here are some random thoughts:

• I inserted sticky tabs for any passages that struck a chord with me or stood out in some way. After reading it, I counted to see how many tabs I’d placed in each country. Italy had 1, Indonesia 4, and India had 8. Hmmm … I expected more from the land of pasta and romance, but connecting with many of the spiritual sentiments expressed in the Indian section was no surprise.
• Now I want to travel to Italy and India even more than I did before reading about them through Liz Gilbert’s experience. I really enjoyed her conversational style of writing something so personal and meaningful to her, and appreciated her willingness to share not just the good, but also the bad.
• I really wish I had the talent to make my living traveling the world and writing about it.
• During her time in Italy, a friend tells her that every city – and every person – has a word. I think mine would be seeker.

Some of my favorite quotes:

On the unpredictability of life: I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. (p. 75)

On meditation: I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. […] When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn 1) bored, 2) angry, 3) depressed, 4) anxious, or 5) all of the above. (p.132)

On faith: … the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be–by definition–faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. (p. 175)

On prayer: Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. […] What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. (p. 177)

AND … It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments. (p. 260)

On finding your way to God: I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever to which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s the history of mankind’s search for holiness. […] You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. (p. 208)

AND … God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn’t ineterested in watching you enact some performance or personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. […] To know God, you need only to renounce one thing–your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character. (p. 192)

AND … keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship–just so long as those prayers are sincere. (p. 206)

On God’s love and forgiveness: … this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine–just imagine!–what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept. (P. 328)

And as for the reading group, it was an auspicious beginning with a book that generated a lively, provocative discussion. I hope it’s the first in a long line of such evenings.