The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure (review)

The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure.By Elizabeth Lesser. New York, NY: Villard, 1999. 436 pp. $15.95.

When I first agreed to review this book, it was titled The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide. As someone interested in the ways contemporary North Americans think about and practice "spirituality," I decided to take on the review. By the time the book arrived a year or so later, the order of phrases on either side of the colon had switched and were slightly altered, with the new lead title giving up a modest "a" for a more definitive "the." The result, The Seeker's Guide, is more of a self-help manual than an assessment of the ways spirituality finds its way into American culture. The author, Elizabeth Lesser, writes from the position of a seeker herself, but one far enough along in her adventure to have advice to offer others.

The book is divided into five sections, the first one examining the "American landscape" in terms of spirituality, and the other four considering the "landscapes" of the mind, the heart, the body, and the soul. Each section combines autobiography, advice, social commentary, and in the case of the last four sections, techniques to embark on the path of spiritual adventure. According to Lesser, fearlessness, psychology, and a liberal borrowing from a variety of traditions characterize the new spirituality of American adventurers on their "brave search for the truth of existence" (29, 64, 400). Lesser also defines this new spirituality negatively: "spirituality is not religion or cynicism or sentimentality or narcissism" (30). She argues that a spiritual path must be individually specific and not beholden to hierarchical authority. At the same time, she raises concerns about what she calls, after Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa, "spiritual materialism" or the way that Americans have "of avoiding the disciplined work of real spirituality through an unrealistic and wasteful pursuit of shallow happiness" (53). In tacking betweenthe individual seeker's right to draw from whatever spiritual path she chooses and the dangers of overweening narcissism, Lesser endorses a version of spirituality that she insists must be socially conscious, responsible, and at times very difficult to live out (30). Unfortunately, in my view, she misses important opportunities to grapple with the thorniest dilemmas of the spiritual hybridity she lauds; she buries the tough questions of cultural and religious appropriation under a celebration of American "diversity" that is both ahistorical and exceptionalist--points that I will address later on in the review.

Lesser is at her best when telling the stories of her own life. She draws from a wide range of experiences including her life as a mother, daughter, and wife, her time as a home birth midwife in a Sufi-based intentional community, and her work as the cofounder of the Omega Institute, a New Age foundation in New York State. Some of her stories, like that of the death of her friend Ellen in mid-life, the memorial service for her elderly father held beside a waterfall, and the high school graduation of her eldest son are especially moving. She sets the scene with care, and without being maudlin conveys the range of emotions provoked in letting go as a friend, a daughter, and a mother. She offers her stories in fragments as a way to illustrate larger points, such as "opening to pain" (170) in the face of death or embracing change through rites of passage (298). Reading her book as a mother, a daughter, and a woman in the North American "spiritual landscape" I found many of her stories illuminating. She writes with intelligence, sensitivity, and skill--and these are all reasons that, when reading as a scholar as well, I wanted the book to do more.

From the title it is clear that the author (or publisher) seeks a popular audience...