SOUL FOOD: People do the darnedest things

“A really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa,” Reed College professor Kathryn Lofton said of Oprah Winfrey in a May 2006 USA Today article written by Ann Oldenburg.

In the piece, headlined “The Divine Miss Winfrey?” Oldenburg hailed the über-talk show host as “a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.”

A year earlier Westminster John Knox Press had published Maria Z. Nelson’s “The Gospel According to Oprah.” Back cover blurbs lauded Winfrey as a “high priestess of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos” and as a spiritual figure able to “hold her own with St. Francis of Assisi.”

But when it came to Winfrey’s credentials as a spiritual leader and reportedly half the nation’s notion of her as an oracle, I could only think, gag me with a spoon. God forgive me, but every time I tune in to her afternoon show or check out a copy of “O, The Oprah Magazine,” (with Winfrey on the cover, of course) she comes across as so full of herself I figure that alone could account for much of the weight she’s always battling.

So why would I read anything titled “Oprah’s Memo to God”? Just below “To: God” “From: Oprah” the subject line hooked me.

“Would love to have you on the show,” it read. Its tongue-in-cheek tone, to my ear, was pure Winfrey. Smooth as a televangelist huckster pitching for free-will love offerings, she quickly makes her observation that God’s power is waning.

His all-powerfulness, as a matter of fact, is lagging far behind hers. And in this she divines a sign: It’s time for him to step down; it’s time for her to step up.

This is big, she grasps. “Bigger than Tom Cruise’s moon bounce on my couch,” she writes to her flagging Creator.

With characteristic gratitude, she invites him to make a guest appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Enrapt, she signs off, “Imagine Peace.”

The parody written by Judy Gruen and first published last year just before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, cost the humorist some fans. “Atone,” she told me recently, “I did.”

She got e-mails so blistering, she said, she thought her computer might “burn up on the spot.” Thoughts of enrolling in the federal witness protection program crossed her mind.

But now the essay and some four dozen others are part of “The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement,” published by Creative Minds Press. Gruen is a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a homemaker — the reason, I surmise, the collection is tagged as a “women’s” title.

All the same, if you’re a man, don’t write it off. If you doubt my judgment, consider this opinion left by a man on Amazon.com.

“I thought a man’s point of view might be in order,” he wrote, “since this book may be mistaken for being merely a ‘chick book.’ Believe me, it isn’t. ‘Forward This E-mail Or I’ll Break You’re Kneecaps’ had me laughing out loud in a way I had not since first reading Woody Allen’s ‘Getting Even.’”

Surely, “When Bad Contractors Happen to Good People,” has to speak to any gender. And how about “The Taxman Cometh, but I’m Still Looking For My Receipts”? Read the chapter titled “Guys Do the Darnedest Things” and tell me you don’t recognize someone you know.

A passage from one piece was printed on grande-sized Starbucks cups as quote No. 238 in its “The Way I See It” series. It reads: “Have you noticed that dogs are the new kids? You take a walk with your kid and your dog, but nobody says, ‘What a cute kid!’ Instead they say, ‘What a cute dog! What’s his name? Is he a rescue?’ Maybe if a put a collar on my kid someone will notice her.”

Gruen skewers many of our social vanities and excesses. They “jump out” at her against the backdrop of her Orthodox Jewish values, which, she says, “emphasize deep personal growth

overcoming our weaknesses, keeping our egos at bay, and developing a closer spiritual connection to God.”

She finds fodder in the siren calls (she hears them, too) of costly “must-have” designer purses, exotic anti-aging creams, and the obsessive desire to wear a size two. From the well of material shallowness that we all can fall into, Gruen draws humor.

And humor is what “The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement” is at its heart. It’s not likely to be nominated for the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century list.

In the fabric of these essays, religion is more woof than warp. Yet in stories like “My Two Papas,” — about the place of Gruen’s two grandfathers, one atheist and the other a Conservative rabbi, on her journey to Orthodox Judaism — the fabric would be threadbare without it.

Elsewhere, Gruen’s faith and values are more present in what is not there. She steers clear of “explicit references to sex or other personal matters” as well as profanity. She keeps it clean.

In “The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement,” I found only one exception in “When Bad contractors Happen to Good People.” Out of the mouth of a plumber named Joe proceeds the (I take it verbatim) exclamation “Holy mother of God!”

It’s a quote. I suspect from the perspective of her Jewish Orthodoxy, it never registered with Gruen as profane.

Given that, it’s hard not to forgive. Especially if bad contractors have ever happened to you.