When Condell Medical Center in Libertyville first arranged a talk by Sarah Ban Breathnach, it scheduled the event at the community hospital’s conference center.
All 200 seats sold out in one morning.
The talk was moved to the largest auditorium the hospital could find, Carmel High School in Mundelein.
All 800 seats sold out in four and a half hours.
So many women kept calling that Condell started a waiting list. The hospital cut the list off at 450 names.
When Ban Breathnach stepped onto the school’s stage on a wintry weeknight, the slight blond woman in flowing black velvet encountered a packed audience of women who listened raptly, murmured in recognition and gave her a standing ovation.
Who, and what, provoked such an impassioned response?
Ban Breathnach (the Irish name is pronounced Bon Brannock) is the author of “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy,” which since it was published in 1995 has sold more than 2 million copies and spent 21 months on the New York Times bestseller list.
“Simple Abundance” is a women’s guide to spiritual growth and tranquility on a path that passes from time-honored truths–appreciate the simple things, smell the roses–to a concept of inner peace through domestic order.
It is not conventional religion. Ban Breathnach offers everything from quotes by Carl Jung to advice on clearing out junk from drawers: “When in doubt, throw it away.”
Her thoughts on achieving inner peace through domestic beauty ring of theology by Martha Stewart: Arrange a pretty bouquet. Put half a dozen white votive candles on a tray in your bedroom. Brighten your living room with throw pillows.
But the goal is not the bouquet or brighter room. It is the serenity that Ban Breathnach says comes from being surrounded by order and things that make you feel good.
Make a journal giving thanks for five things you are grateful for every day, she counsels. Express gratitude, and before long you will feel it. See the beauty around you. Make time for yourself. Have lunch with a friend. Live life slower, and appreciate it more.
The message may be simple, even obvious. But it has fallen on ravenous ears.
“I saw her on `Oprah,’ ” recalled Truedy Falvey, 38, an at-home mother from Wadsworth who attended Ban Breathnach’s talk.
“I called my library immediately. The librarian said, `You must be watching “Oprah”; you’re the 10th caller I’ve gotten.’ I got the book and walked to my neighbor’s house, and said, `Just sit down and read this.’ “
“I’m reading it day by day,” said Patricia Austin, Condell’s vice president of outreach services. She went through a divorce in the last year and credits the book with “keeping me positive and upbeat during a time that’s been very stressful and sorrowful.”
“There is a certain amount of cynicism to me at this point in life, but I really love this,” said Deloyce Wright-Porrata, 50, of Glenview, a guidance counselor at a Pilsen public school. “It is just a quiet place I go to in the evening. It’s like counsel from a trusted friend.”
Ban Breathnach holds out the promise of transformation.
“In two months, you won’t recognize your life,” she told the audience at the Condell talk. “In a year, you will not be living the same life.”
It is a telling commentary on women’s lives that so many welcome the prospect.
Martha Hacker, 49, of Green Oaks, the development director of a Lake County battered women’s shelter and a mother of two, surveyed the crowd filing out after the talk.
“You can tell the condition that women are in that they flock to this,” she said.
That condition is exhausted. Women’s days and nights are filled past capacity with cooking and carpools and volunteer work and soccer and housework and making dental appointments and keeping veterinarian appointments and PTOs and grocery shopping and —
And everything but time for themselves.
“We’ve all just run ourselves ragged,” Hacker said. “You completely lose touch with what your needs are. If you find yourself with free time, you don’t even know what to do with it.”
But tired as they are, women are searching for something more in life. The book has tapped into a deep yearning for a sense of meaning and contentment.
“You think, Who are you anymore, besides So-and-So’s mother, So-and-So’s wife?” said Toni O’Leary, 38, a part-time special projects analyst for a manufacturing company and mother of two from Gurnee. She read “Simple Abundance,” then got too harried to keep reading or follow its advice.
“I was a person before I got married and had these kids, but I don’t remember that person very well,” she said. “I think that’s sad. As much as I love my kids and want to spend time with them, somehow I get lost in the shuffle.”
Men don’t get lost, O’Leary said. “They still take time for themselves, even in little ways like sitting in front of the TV when there’s a game on.
“Even if the kids are all fighting around them, somehow they can block that out. I envy that. What is it with women that we can’t just say, `I’m important enough to do that’?”
For women who can’t say it, Ban Breathnach has done it for them.
“I gave women a 500-page permission slip to take care of themselves,” said Ban Breathnach from her “Simple Abundance” suburban office near Washington.
It was permission she first gave herself. “Simple Abundance” is the acquired wisdom of the interior journey taken by Ban Breathnach, who wrote about Victorian decoration before a feeling of general malaise set her to searching for herself.
The permission was received gratefully. Ban Breathnach receives as many as 500 letters a week. Of an office staff of five, two handle mail exclusively.
Many of the letters are lengthy and intensely personal, as if written to an intimate friend. The outpouring of response is evidence of how desperately many women are longing for that kind of friend.
Part of the pleasure in reading “Simple Abundance” is “just to know that somebody is out there, and it’s like just you and your friend,” said Roberta Rekus, 49, a mother of four from Mundelein.
“You are not alone.”
Women’s hunger for spiritual guidance has helped fuel an explosive growth in publishing and sales of religion and spirituality books.
Sales took off in the late 1980s. The category became the fastest-growing in publishing this decade, said Lynn Garrett, religion editor of Publishers Weekly, and remains the strongest adult trade book category.
Between 60 and 70 percent are bought by women, who are considered more open to change and personal growth than men.
And the most popular books by far are on spirituality.
“Spirituality we call the 800-pound gorilla of religion,” she said. “Every season, we see 25 or 30 lead titles from publishers that fall into the spirituality category.”
The explanation is partly demographic, Garrett said.
“Baby Boomers are reaching middle age,” she said. “They’re at an age where they are asking ultimate questions because they are having experiences like the death of a parent, the death of a spouse.
“Also, there is a certain amount of disillusionment with the rampant consumerism and careerism of the ’80s. People are feeling an emptiness.”
That was what real-estate developer Rosalie Gouletas was feeling. She was earning a six-figure income and living in a half-a-million dollar home. It was not enough.
“I was so busy working that I was never in my home to enjoy it,” she said. In the last year, she sold her house, got divorced, quit her job and moved in with a girlfriend and her two children on the North Side.
“I just have so much more time now,” said Gouletas, who turns 40 in January. “I have less money, and I’m a lot happier.”
She was struck by the message in “Simple Abundance” that she had found in her own life, that acquiring possessions leads not to happiness but to frustration and envy.
“No matter what you get, it’s just a momentary pleasure,” she said. “None of it ever lasts; you just have to get more and more and more.”
Rather than turning to traditional religion, many people are creating what Garrett calls “a kind of salad bar spirituality.”
“People today feel very free to cobble together their own belief system, using parts of several belief systems,” she said. “It’s very much an individual search.”
The search leads them to books. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to go to the local bookstore,” Garrett explained, than to go around interviewing clergy people.
Many women read “Simple Abundance” and other devotional books daily, as people have traditionally read the Bible. Conventional religion does not satisfy their yearnings.
Ban Breathnach thinks that much religion is irrelevant.
“You go to church on Sunday or to temple, and you’re given a sermon, 99 percent of which have nothing to do with what is going on in our lives at that moment,” she said. “It does not deal with the 25 different directions a woman is pulled everyday. It’s not personal.
“I don’t think church is where you find God. I believe you find God, the sacred, in the ordinary.”
This personal approach to God is worrisome to some clergy.
“I am hearing more language of `my personal faith journey,’ ” said Jeffrey Doane, pastor of the Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church. “I had one family leave my congregation, saying, `I really don’t relate to these things; my personal faith journey is leading me elsewhere.’
“I struggle with this,” he said. “In my tradition, you don’t have spirituality without community.”
The entire trend toward a personal women’s spirituality seems a double-edged sword to Jane Crosthwaite, who chairs the religion department and women’s studies program at Mt. Holyoke College.
“At its worst, it can be a withdrawal into self, spiritual navel-gazing,” she said. “To recommend that to women is also to ask them not to be dealing with issues that are international, cultural, economic. It is a handicap.”
On the other hand, Crosthwaite said, spiritual withdrawal may help women fulfill their goals.
“The question is whether this allows them to actualize who they are, or if it’s a matter of helping them wait around and not ever do anything,” she said. “I don’t know that answer.”
Ban Breathnach sees her message as encouraging women to follow their dreams.
“You can,” she told the women in the Condell audience. “You are not too old. You are not uneducated. You do have resources.”
With her own now-considerable resources, Ban Breathnach, the mother of a 15-year-old daughter, helps others. Through the trust she founded, she gives 10 percent of her earnings to charity. In the first half of this year, $550,000 went to organizations including Habitat for Humanity and the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
As for the promise of transformation, a number of her readers say it has come true. Amid lives that are still hectic, it has brought them a measure of peace.
“I look at things differently now,” said Falvey. “Cleaning your house, getting your kids up, getting their lunches–it’s not a chore. It’s an act of love.”
