Like every other lazy (and/or honest) human being out there, I'll gladly take the easy way over the hard one any day. So when I happened upon the utter amazingness that is Spiritual H2O (water, for those of you who, like me, skipped Chem 10), I fell to my knees and gave praise to the Lord Almighty.
Before I go any further, check out this training video, and see for yourself the glory that is: The Spiritual Water.
According to their incredibly comprehensive (and user-friendly!) website:
The delicious Spiritual Water can meet the demands of discerning and health-conscious consumers by offering purified water that also delivers purified thoughts and actions for a totally positive and wholesome lifestyle.
All products feature beautifully rendered artistic labels that depict full-color images of holy person or symbols, with prayers in English and Spanish and/or inspirational words and messages. The Spiritual Water comes in 11 different versions - each with its own uniquely paired message and image (freedom bottle have no image). Each time you drink you benefit from the soothing, appropriate prayers, for added uplifting inspiration.
The Spiritual Water can make me holy? The Spiritual Water can get me into heaven?? Talk about an (eternal) life-saver! Also, let's be sure to give them credit where credit is due: consistently referring to it as The Spiritual Water gives it that extra oomph! and sure does make it sound extra special and extra-extra spiritual.
But, for the moment (and just the moment), let's be serious. Bottled water is a bajillion dollar industry -- American's drink 50 billion bottles of it every year! -- so it's smart of Spiritual H2O founder Elicko Taieb to want to get a piece of that plastic pie. And spiritual water -- why not? Every product needs a gimmick, and if Madonna is spending $10,000 a month on water blessed by Kabbalah rabbis, then why can't Taieb save our souls one spiritual sip at a time?
All this talk about water and I'm sure you're thirsty, so let's get down to the splishy-splashy of it. Like, what's the stuff taste like? And does it actually work?
Well, the water was a little harder to come by than I had imagined. The Spiritual Water is meant to be sold by individual distributors - think Avon or Mary Kay, but with a Mercedes convertible instead of a Pink Cadillac. And, unfortunately, there were no distributors (yet!) in the New York area. But, the makers were generous enough to send me my own little case of bottle, so that I could sample all the different types of holy, from Formula J' (heart-warmingly adorned with a crown of thorns and professing mercy on my soul) to Focus, gently encouraging me (via a haloed Mary's hallowed arms) to believe in myself.
So, I drank. I drank, and I drank, and I drank some more. Because not only do I love water (I do!), I'm on a spiritual journey, people! And the water tasted good, and the water tasted, well, like water. But, to be fair, it tasted like good bottled water, you know, the kind that tastes just like tap water! Not like that hoity-toity Evian crap. If I'm going to pay $2 for a bottle of water, I want to make sure it tastes like nothing.
So the water tastes like water, but does the holy feel like holy? The long answer? No. It feels schilly, contrived, and over-marketed, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. (I, after all, love the Smart Water, and not because it makes me feel smart, but because of the happy little goldfish they have swimming around the bottle. Also - let it be noted that The Spiritual Water has done a clever little marketing number in not-so-subtly ripping off the bottle-shape and font of Glaceau's top selling product. Just sayin'.) I'm also not a practicing Christian. I don't feel Christian on a daily basis, let alone on a yearly one, so it doesn't shock me that a half-liter of Christian water didn't do all that much for me.
But it might do something for that person that works really hard not to stray from God and to keep Jesus in their thoughts at all times. There's enough going on in the world that they don't need yet another heart-wrenching and sin-inducing distraction.
Let them, at the very least, drink their water in eternal peace.