"I'm a Sufi," she explained

What a pleasure to read Rebecca Mead's "Talk of the Town" entry in the current New Yorker, detailing conversations she had at a Manhattan cocktail party to honor the actress Ellen Burstyn, who has just written a memoir, and the New Age author Marianne Williamson. The pleasure is to read what passes for religion among these overprivileged celebs. Example:

Burstyn, who was to appear that evening at the 92nd Street Y with Williamson, stood under Duke’s black ceiling and explained that her memoir, “Lessons in Becoming Myself,” concerned her life’s spiritual journey. “I’m a Sufi,” she explained, with a beneficent smile. “I like the expression ‘I am one cell in the mind of God.’ ” Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” was telling Parker Posey that she had recently bought an eighteenth-century Presbyterian church in New Jersey to live in. “It’s very Yankee, with fifteen-foot wavy-glass windows,” Gilbert said, before adding that Julia Roberts had signed on to star in the movie version of her book. Gilbert said that she had asked her sister, a historian, whether she should beware of ghosts: “She said, ‘Presbyterians won’t bother you, with your yoga and your Buddhas and your cursing. It’s not like they’re Methodists.’ ”
“I’m a yogi, and I meditate,” said April Kramer, who has been married to Joey Kramer, the drummer for Aerosmith, for twenty-eight years—“One of the original wives,” she said—and who was wearing on a chain around her neck a diamond-studded white-gold peace symbol. “The women I know are all gravitating to a much more spiritual place,” Kramer said, at which her friend Myra Scheer, who raises money for the Rainforest Foundation Fund, laid her hand on a pearl peace-symbol pendant that she was wearing over her Dolce & Gabbana suit. “I went to a Kabbalah course, and it said that women have to bring light to men,” Scheer said. Among the men to whom Scheer had brought light was Billy Joel, who wore a pendant like hers onstage at the last Rainforest Foundation Fund benefit. “Though he didn’t wear pearls—he wore Swarovski crystals,” she said.

Delicious, yes? I would give my next paycheck to hear a drunken Christopher Hitchens give a dramatic reading of the entire column.