THE LOST SPIRITUAL WORLD

The Gospel of Mark, as run through a New Age blender and puréed into an ecumenical smoothie.

Artist-designer Rimm offers her own version of the parable of the sower: that of the scuba diver, who drifts through murky waters, beacon (but no spear gun) in hand. The scuba diver could be you, who “may have probed the waters of religion before but walked away with an aching thirst.” For Rimm, “miraculously, I found God when I jumped from the boat of Unbelief.” In this rendering of St. Mark, surrounded by bits of wisdom from other times and traditions and by the author’s overflowing, enthusiastic commentary, Jesus–that is, the Cosmic Christ, who is evidently an aspect of Cosmic Creative Energy–comes off as a rather chatty fellow who, we suspect, makes finger quotes when he talks: “Whoever among you who wants to be ‘number one’ must be everybody’s slave.” Occasionally, he sounds like the current president: “Whoever is not against us is on our side.” Rarely does he show any of the elegance of the old King James Christ, but his expressions are more elegant than talk of “the undigitized self” in “the Christ Zone”–or of the Passion as a metaphor for curbing fear in the name of Cosmic Awareness, and so forth, even if such formulations are advanced with relentless good cheer and with a big-tent willingness to entertain other ideas.

A physically attractive if idiosyncratic presentation, likely of interest to readers not immediately scared off by effusions such as, “the God of the Cosmos, who is an infinite Sea of Love, who can transform us into higher spiritual beings.”