The Gospel according to Oprah

The Gospel according to Oprah Winfrey


Daniel Carey

THE internet is a repository of many weird and wonderful ideas. Last week I discovered the website www.livingoprah.com. The woman behind it is a a 35-year-old writer, performer and artist living in Chicago who is spending a year living life in accordance with advice dished out by American chat show host Oprah Winfrey. In truth, the concept is funnier than the execution – although perhaps those who spend their weekday afternoons glued to TV3 will get more out of it than I did.
A more amusing variation on a similar theme came from AJ Jacobs, author of ‘The Year of Living Biblically’. Jacobs, a secular Jew from New York, spent a year attempting to follow every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible. At the beginning of the year, he wrote down every rule, guideline and suggestion he could find in the Bible, a list that ran to 72 pages. Some he successfully kept without difficulty, such as the demand in Leviticus 18:18 that ‘You shall not marry your wife’s sister’. “It helps,” Jacobs mused wryly, “that my wife doesn’t have a sister.” Some were more difficult to comply with, including the call to put to death those who commit adultery. In his defence, Jacobs writes: “I did manage to figure out a way to stone adulterers. One adulterer in particular. A grumpy seventysomething man I met in the park. I used pebbles.”
Jacobs previously chronicled his successful efforts to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in his book ‘The Know-It-All’. Presumably at least some of the 44 million words he came across as part of that project dealt with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, so he may have heard the story of Willus Britt. A former boxer before he turned to managing fighters, Britt sued the city of San Francisco after the earthquake for damage done to his property. When the city attorneys argued that the earthquake had been an act of God, Britt countered that this could not properly be true, since several churches belonging to Him had been destroyed.
One can guess what the Buddhist monks of Phnom Penh in Cambodia would have made of such opportunism. The monks live to a strict code. They were allowed to watch football matches during the 2006 World Cup, but had to do so in silence. “Screaming and cheering with an angry face or happy feeling are the acts of street kids,” explained Supreme Patriarch Non Nget. “Laughing, cheering or making noise inside the pagoda violate Buddha’s rules.”
One man said to have violated multiple rules was the British politician George Brown. While on a visit to South America, the former Foreign Secretary is reputed to have approached a figure clad in red to request a dance. “I will not dance with you for three reasons,” he was told. “Firstly, you’re drunk. The second is that the band is not playing a waltz, but the Peruvian national anthem. The final reason is that I am the Archbishop of Montevideo.”