Deepak Chopra on Jesus?

"Dear Amazon.com Customer," the email read, "as someone who has purchased religion and spirituality titles from Amazon.com, you might like to know about these new and notable titles, including Deepak Chopra's The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore."

I was underwhelmed by the allegedly notable list. In all fairness, Amazon's computers don't have enough data to guess my preferences accurately. As to the flagship pick on that list, Deepak Chopra's new effort, in my book it's a non-starter from the get-go, not least because Chopra's title implies to this erstwhile English major that if "Jesus three" cannot be ignored, then the same cannot be said for "Jesus one" and "Jesus two." What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Some few admirers of Chopra who wander through the pixelated acreage where I post these mutterings will probably think me obtuse for taking exception to literary filigree. Chopra does not mean that Jesus has been reincarnated, or discovered brothers with the same name. He means to say that Jesus has human, institutional, and mystical dimensions. Chopra further contends that Christianity has lost -- or perhaps never had-- touch with the mystical side of its founder. Needless to say, it is that mystical ("third") side of Jesus, with its attendant "God consciousness," that Chopra finds most compelling.

I get all that, but refuse to follow Chopra down the primrose path because his premise depends so much on a farfetched assertion. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to believe that mysticism has been steamrollered by doctrine and dogma, you have to shut your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and sing "la la la" rather loudly. A bias against dogma may be all the rage among the cool kids, but in my preferred precincts, dogma does not inhibit or suffocate the ineffable, any more than understanding the circle of fifths inhibits an ability to play music. Rather, dogma is what gives us the vocabulary with which to think cosmically.

It is refreshingly concrete to be able to anchor Jesus in history by saying that He suffered under Pontius Pilate. Any religion that had lost touch with its mystical side could not likewise proclaim as Christianity does that "we walk by faith, and not by sight."

Moreover, it's a good bet that both Chopra and his editors ducked the chance to explain how there can be a "third" Jesus if, as Christians believe, the original is still with us. Any trope so misconceived as Chopra's ought not inform books that Amazon actually wants me to read.

The reviews to which Amazon points do not help Chopra's cause, either, coming as they do from the likes of John Shelby Spong, who commends his friend for writing about a "Christ Consciousness" that "can be identified neither with the Jesus of history nor with the Jesus of the creeds."

Yo, Spong! If Christ Consciousness exists but can't be identified with Jesus Christ, then what, pray tell, can it be identified with? And how is it any different than a Buddhist invocation of "lovingkindness"? Aye, there's the rub!

Assuming Spong's paraphrase of Chopra's work is accurate -- an admittedly dicey proposition -- then Chopra is simply playing at mysticism, and his book doesn't deserve shelf space next to bonafide classics like Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle."

Modernist nuns can and do swoon because "Deepak offers the amazing suggestion that the same God consciousness embodied in the human Jesus is present in all of us individually and collectively. " The "amazing suggestion" is not an original one, however, and the fact that one nun is so taken with it argues that she's forgotten Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or suffers from the misapprehension that Saint Peter was crucified upside down for a "Christ consciousness."

Me, I'm old school, which to at least one reviewer in the Chopra collection implies that my Christianity is neither literate nor mainstream. I do not consider the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed "stultifying." I prefer to read thoughts about Jesus from a man who actually trusts the gospel.

All that said, I should perhaps be more charitable about what appears to be a good faith effort on Chopra's part to share a glimpse of the "Cosmic Christ." Something tells me, however, that the mystical sage of Chopra's imagination is a singularly undemanding "Spirit in the Sky" who preaches tolerance rather than repentence, and not the sort of fellow whose divinity is startlingly apparent even in the Beatitudes, as Pope Benedict wrote last year.

Regular readers know my weakness for working song lyrics into strange places. I do not as a rule have a problem with reducing Christianity to "come on people now, smile on your brother / everybody get together, try to love one another right now," provided we toughen that lyric with the assertion that Jesus's death and resurrection make that love possible, and add the Yoda-esque caveat that "there is no try; there is only do."

Chopra, however, appears to be hand-rolling whatever he's smoking, and the result admits either a malign or a benign interpretation. In the malign interpretation, Chopra's lip-syncing with Mick Jagger on lines like "Pleased to meet you; hope you got my name." In the benign interpretation, he's writing "I thought that they were angels, but much to my surprise, they climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies."

I like both songs, but either way, Chopra can't be trusted, because his scope is too narrow rather than too wide, and his so-called "third Jesus" looks and acts remarkably like Chopra himself.