Dear God,

“There is no question that here is a living and convincing truth, a deep mystical experience of the mystery of God our Creator Who watches over us at every moment with infinite love and mercy… It is highly practical, realistic, profoundly religious and set in the right perspective of direct relationship with the All-Holy God.” Merton is writing of Sufism to Abdul Aziz, a Pakistani bureaucrat who spent his free time in a rigorous, lifelong study of Sufi mysticism and spirituality. He was encouraged to write to Merton by a mutual friend. Merton speaks to him as “one spiritual man to another.” Over the course of the years of their communication, they share books and ideas, never having met in person. In one letter Merton tells Aziz that they must, “be brothers in prayer and worship no matter what may be the doctrinal differences that separate our minds.”

Now I know that people are sheep God. Nietzsche was at least right on that point (and I believe on many others). And I know that the crowd is untruth. Kierkegaard was at least… You get the point. Nevertheless, I wonder what you think of all this.

The problem, at least as I see it, with trying to connect all the world religions is that, in our day and age of consumer capitalism, you often end up with a smorgasbord of what fits our personal desires best. We’re like Baudrillard’s Americans, picking different products from different brands and combining them in a way that makes us feel that we’re constructing a genuine self — in this case a genuine spiritual self — all while only acquiescing our agency (assuming we actually have the capacity for that) to marketers and trend setters. The problem here is not only the lack of agency, but that the spiritual life — no matter which religious brand you follow — has never been about consumer preference. If it’s about anything at all, then it’s about releasing the self, the dissipation of the ego, finding the true self only in and through the other. And yet, in our day and age of globalized capital and the shrinking of time and space through the speed of travel and the internet, there is no genuine way to construct a spiritual identity without engaging with difference, including the difference of the world religions. This is a great gift, but it leaves us back where we started — with the smorgasbord.

Should we find some wise woman or man to follow? Or does that make us only sheep? Must we be sheep for some time in order to become the wise woman or man ourself? This is, obviously, the only option for slow learning mortals stuck in time. And yet, who is the wise woman or man? In our day and age of religious hucksters and guruistic hacks it’s hard to find one’s footing. Obviously, I’ve chosen Merton for now.

My prayer today is that, assuming you’re there and listening, you will help guide me into truth. This is what Christ promised in his upper room discourse before he was executed by the Roman state (so strange that many Christians are fans of capital punishment, fucking idiots don’t realize it claimed their messiah) — that he would send his Spirit to lead us into all truth. If you wouldn’t mind sending a little more of that Holy Spirit juju, we could definitely use some these days.