Suzanne Clores was one of those blase, disaffected Generation X-ers who had everything: an expensive diploma from an Ivy League college, a meaningful job, an adoring boyfriend, loving parents and an apartment in a trendy East Village neighborhood in New York. Slender, with waist-length brown hair and flashing green eyes, Clores also had drop-dead good looks.
And yet, something was missing. For Clores, that something was God. To fill the void, Clores embarked on a spiritual quest. Her new book “Memoirs of a Spiritual Outsider” (Conari Press, $23.95), is the story of her journey.
A “lapsed Catholic,” Clores had accompanied her parents to Sunday Mass while a child and had attended a Catholic high school in her New Jersey suburb. After two years there she dropped out, gratefully returning to the secularism of public school.
“I learned that Catholic school couldn’t do anything for me beyond fluffy slogans like `Jesus Loves You.’ That meant nothing to me,” she says, during a recent interview here. “I knew that it was essential to me that there be a personal relevance to the divine.”
Clores, who is now 30, says, “I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I didn’t tell my parents I was frightened or longing for divine connection.”
She kept her search secret also because she was afraid of what her cool, hip friends might say.
“The belief in something invisible is unacceptable among my generation,” she writes in the book.
At first, she thought her discontent was merely “generational malaise–a malady specific to the millions of Gen X-ers who supposedly can call in sick, toast an English muffin, and channel-surf while logging online.”
Clores felt guilty for being dissatisfied; she told herself she should join a gym or visit more art museums in her spare time.
Then one day, she suffered a panic attack while watching five lanes of rush-hour traffic inch around Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan. “I began to worry that the forces that put me there could take me out of there,” she explained.
That was when she realized she needed something deeper, more spiritual, than a thrice-weekly aerobic workout.
Eschewing Judaism and Christianity, Clores set off on a different journey. “I saw organized religion as a physical place or a mass structure that was not attuned to an individual experience,” she says.
Instead, she was attracted to the far-flung and ancient practices of Buddhism, yoga, shamanism, Sufism, voodoo and Wicca, or witchcraft.
Not content simply to pick up an armload of books from the library or surf the Web, Clores undertook a pilgrimage around the country. In each of her forays, she attached herself to a young woman who acted as her spiritual guide.
The book opens with her Wiccan adventures. Clores receives a “witch name” and learns about crystals from a witch named Arianna.
She delved into shamanic healing, learning from a woman named Gina, who had contacted a shaman–someone skilled in “negotiating between human beings and spirits”–“as a last resort” to cure her recurring migraines.
Later, she attached herself to a young woman named Uma, a yoga instructor whose classes drew up to 50 people at a sitting. But Clores was offended by the commercialization of an ancient practice.
“In my heart I had trouble with the exchange of money for access to such an intimate experience like this,” she writes. “I felt like I was buying love.”
In her examination of the African-based spiritual system called voodoo, Clores traveled to New Orleans, where she met an African-American nun who taught African spirituality and literature. The nun tried to help Clores find God, and was just one of a handful of women who opened themselves and their lives to her while asking little in return.
“She moved me profoundly, because she was so generous with her giving,” Clores says. “She was available to me, but was not trying to fix me.”
Clores’ experimentation with Sufism, which she defines as “the mystical aspect of the Islamic religion,” was made easier by the discovery that a female cousin was living in a Sufi community. But after so much interfaith dabbling, Clores says she felt “spiritually fatigued.”
“Like the Brady Bunch’s [Marcia] when she signed up for too many clubs in high school, I’d spiritually fractured myself,” Clores writes. “I was someone who wanted something, anything–a clue, a line into peacefulness, a role model, a Barbie doll.”
While trying out Buddhist meditation, Clores looked back on her searching and found that the words of wisdom each of her teachers/role models had passed on to her was that “God was within.”
“After receiving all that information, I ended up cultivating an interior space for my feelings,” she says. “I found that the space was filled and that I’d found a comfort zone. It was OK for me to relax a little bit.”
Turned off by the proselytizing of groups like the Hare Krishnas, Clores resolved never to share her faith unless someone asked. But the secrecy “kept me separate, as though I lived a life removed in a monastery I’d built out of odd bricks and found objects,” she writes.
Looking for generational and spiritual community, she traveled to Burning Man, a yearly gathering in the Nevada desert in which thousands of 20-somethings burn a 50-foot wooden effigy, symbolically torching their woes, faults and failures. It was billed as “spirituality for Gen X.”
Clores, a self-described teetotaller, found herself unmoved by the experience.
“Perhaps if I’d taken lots of drugs, I too would have trusted the other 20,000 participants enough to feel fulfilled and heartened by the chaos we created in the name of self-expression,” she wrote.
She says she still wonders if there are others out there like herself, quietly carrying out an individual spiritual quest.
“Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I wanted company,” she says. “I sort of wrote this book thinking it could be a companion for someone else.”
Clores says her peers are more tolerant than antagonistic toward religion.
“I don’t believe they can’t relate,” she says. “My world just got a lot bigger, through spirituality, and my friends see that in me.”
Much of her life now is taken up by spiritual issues. She also is writing a television documentary on alternative religions. As for spiritual endeavors, Clores meditates daily and practices yoga.
But she says she doesn’t consider her quest behind her.
“I’ve finished the first part. I’m not looking outside myself,” she says. “Now I know the path is within me.”
