Feature

The Capitalist Spirit

And that’s it. She stands, knees cracking, shakes herself out, and takes a seat on the floor beside me. She bites her lower lip.

“So, you can take your time coming back.”

Rose wiggles her toes. We sit in silence.

Rose opens her eyes. She’s crying.

“He’s with you,” Sondra says. Derek? Sai Baba? Jesus?

“I saw him,” Rose whispers, finally moving to rub her nose.

“I know.”

“It’s so hard. To say good-bye. I flew back. To Australia. And, and, I didn’t get there in time.”

Rose pulls herself up. Sondra moves to a seat beside her, wraps an arm around Rose’s shoulders.

“My brother,” Rose says. She shudders with tears.

Rose’s brother had been sick; she’d flown home to be with him; he’d died before she could get there.

“When I saw him, I didn’t want to come out of it,” Rose says.

“I didn’t want to come back. Here.”

She looks up at Sondra. “Did . . . did James”—Rose’s friend, Sondra’s client—“did he tell you about my brother?”

Sondra shakes her head. She doesn’t lie. “I didn’t know,” she says.

Jim Farah, a Corcoran real-estate agent, sits with perfect calm as Sondra squirts holy water—tap, blessed by her, dispensed from a pink plastic spritzer—on the carpet, ceiling, and walls of a Kips Bay apartment he’s been trying to sell. It’s a one-bedroom in a doorman building, with an open terrace overlooking a dazzling, gold-domed church and the East River, and it’s priced very reasonably—$680,000—but it’s not moving. Farah, a sober, dignified man with neat gray hair, a black jacket, and a gray sweater, “baptized Episcopalian,” a former retail executive with no supernatural experiences, called Sondra. Now she’s standing in the living room, her eyes fluttering and her shoulders twitching as she calls in a full congregation of minor and major gods.

“Jim,” I whisper. “Does this—is any of this kind of, I don’t know, hard to swallow?”

Farah shakes his head and offers the best defense of New Age I’ve encountered. “Absolutely not,” he says. “To some extent, it’s a language of its own.” The terms, he says, may be peculiar, but the ideas at hand—that spaces reflect their inhabitants (“bad sex energy,” Sondra had diagnosed this property), that faith goes by many names, that all rituals, “true” or “false,” cohere around metaphors of our own creation—are perfectly ordinary.

Sondra slumps, hangs like a puppet on strings, straightens, and leaves the apartment. She needs to get some distance, so she can draw a magic circle around the newly cleansed space. Neither seller nor buyer will consciously budge an inch on the basis of this invisible shield. Farah, like most brokers, won’t even mention the procedure. I look at him, hands folded in his lap, waiting for Sondra to return. It’s then that I understand: He has purchased this spell, the details of which do not concern him, for his own peace of mind.

Around them, Sondra and Derek have a magic circle that seems to serve, at the least, the psychological needs of their students. And beneath it all, they have the perfect small-business model—especially since they continue attracting students and training a corps of healers, who then go on to win new adherents and train more healers.

It’s Amway without the hooks, a pyramid scheme without a catch. According to the social critics John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (themselves sort of New Age sociologists), American corporations spend $4 billion a year on New Age consultants. IBM provides employee seminars in the I Ching. On a smaller scale, the Soho branch of Corcoran invited Sondra to address a group of 80 brokers. And in the everyday, we all fill our lives with uncountable, tiny totems, gestures toward the unseen. Not just candles and incense and Buddha key chains, but also commodities as ordinary as juice. Ever had one that claimed “anti-oxidant” properties, a scientific impossibility? Welcome to the New Age.

Both the right and the left despise this phenomenon, for the same reasons many in both camps hate New York. The right thinks New Age is, literally, demonic, or at least shallow. The left thinks New Age is consumer capitalism at its most dishonest, and—yes—shallow. And they’re right, all of them. The Christian crusaders and the intellectual scolds and even the New Agers themselves. Not because truth is relative, but because faith, by definition, always is. If it had an empirical basis, it wouldn’t be faith; it’d be the humdrum, material world for which people turn to faith for meaning.

September 11, 2001, a date around which Sondra’s own spiritual biography revolves, is a case in point. After weeks of conversation, Sondra exploded the chronology of her own story. “You know,” she said, “I was checking my records, and I realized it wasn’t 2001 that I met Derek. It was a year later.” She mentioned this in passing, as if it changed nothing.

How could she mine September 11 for personal drama? The answer, of course, is even more obvious than the question. To make a story of loss is to alter the reality of the dead to suit the needs of the living. Yet, take another look at your crucifix, listen to the stories of the patriarchs, open your Koran at random—that’s what faith does. That’s what we do. Rightly or wrongly, we search for a whole whenever we find a hole in our lives.

One of the rules attending the drawing of the Prema Agni is that the recipient must give at least $7 to a good cause. One day, I told Sondra I’d given my $7 and then some to tsunami relief. Sondra agreed that counted. But the tsunami didn’t really register for her as it did for most of the world.

“If you want to know the truth, my guides told me it was gonna happen about a year ago. That’s why I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, the tsunami! The tsunami!’ ” And she won’t be shocked by the next disaster. “It’s already written in the karmic book, the Book of Life,” she said.

The “karmic book, the Book of Life”—in a phrase, Sondra assimilates Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism. But these awful fated events “can be erased,” Sondra said, if we’d all just learn “compassion.”

There’s that grammar of faith: “if,” the offer, the deal. Theologians dismiss such negotiations with the divine as elementary, nothing more than a phase in the spiritual development of the soul. But money knows otherwise. That “if” is the prerequisite for the awesomeness of faith in a globalized world, the sovereignty not of a god but of the consumer. An entrepreneurial New Age faith like Sondra’s can serenely pigeonhole terror attacks and global disasters, regardless of why—or evidently when—they actually occur, because their meaning can be recast instantly, according to the spiritual need of the moment. It’s simple, really: Home Depot sells the idea of home, Circuit City sells a wired world, the new New Age sells “spiritual health”—while the right of the sovereign consumer to acquire it purchase by purchase is praised as the law of nature: an orthodoxy of a thousand choices, an infinitely marketable economy of belief.