I remember reading the Celestine Prophecy about 15 years ago. The reason I remember it is because it was the only book that all four of my then teenage children picked up and read cover to cover. But, in the process of life, I lent it out and it never returned to me. Until the other day, and in the form of a DVD.

I have to say that the movie is a pretty fair rendition of the book. Some books just lose something in translation when they are made into a movie, and this is one of them. I think the reason is because the book requires the reader to maintain a continual inner dialogue, or a kind of four dimensional shift of consciousness, that the movie cannot inspire. But, nonetheless, the movie is well written and gets the point across. James Redfield, like Neale Donald Walsh, with his Conversations with God books, is a pioneer on the spiritual front.

The western world has basically lived on a canned diet of spirituality for the past hundreds of years. I remember that when I was in school during the sixties, you were either a Catholic, Protestant or Jew. We all stood for the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge to the Flag. If you didn’t believe the prayer, you either sat through it and were considered a rebel, or you just stood in stony silence while those around you said the words.

Our Priests, Rabbis, and Pastors were generally men who read you the riot act on a Sunday and sent you home to “think” about those words for the rest of the week. Grace was said before a family meal, and God was always present at sporting events and public gatherings as we all stood and bowed our heads again for the ever present Lord’s Prayer. Religion was simple back then. It was based on the reciting of words, adherence to the rules of the church, and not taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Until somewhere out there, a few people began to question the “rules”. The Eastern philosophies, religions and modalities like Buddhism, Zen, Yoga, Reiki, and Feng Shui started to find their way into our culture. A few people began to bring “back” the earth based concepts of the ancient civilizations within the structure of modern day neo-paganism. These new ideas, concepts and philosophies were clumped together and labeled “new age,” even though the thoughts they represented were actually systems of belief that had been around much longer than the “canned” religious systems of the west.

Change is never an easy thing to accomplish and it takes a lot of courage to fly in the face of convention and introduce something new into a culture that is based on rote rules and rituals. James Redfield is one of these courageous pioneers. The Celestine Prophecy is just one more doorway through which we can get a glimpse that something else exists above and beyond our pre-conceived notions of what “religion” should encompass. That something is a spirituality that everyone can share, regardless of age, race, gender or creed.

As we open up in the western world to a diet which consists of fresh and inviting spiritual food, consisting of delicacies from all the various cultures worldwide, presented on a platter of unity, we can’t help but start to push aside the old canned diet of rote and ritual. We can, however, keep the parts of that diet that sustain and nurture us like those old standby comfort foods of soup and sandwich. I think that we are lucky to have such a rich and varied smorgasbord to choose from. And, I am thankful for people like James Redfield for providing us that opportunity as one of the first to bring in these new and soul expanding tidbits of spiritual nourishment.