Ken Baker - The Ken Commandments: My Search for God in Hollywood

S ome might begin their spiritual journey in a church, sanctuary, temple, or some other traditional house of worship. Others might kick-start their spiritual quest by reading books, going on a retreat with a guru, starting a meditation or yoga practice, or perhaps participating in a Bible study with a rabbi or pastor.

Not me. My search for God begins in Las Vegas while I am keeping up with the Kardashians.

This is not a joke. This really is my life. So how did I get to the point where I am on my knees crying in a hotel room near the Vegas Strip, praying to God for the first time in seemingly forever in an effort to bring a troubled reality star out of a coma?

Ill start my explanation for my peculiar spiritual behavior with a description of what I do for a living: I am the senior correspondent for E! News and E! Online. While my former professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism might throw up a little in their mouths knowing that Im using my degree to report on the frivolity of Hollywood entertainment and celebrity, the truth is that the Kardashian clan is the most important beat I cover. My journalistic identity has become so intertwined with Kris, Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kendall, Kylie, Rob, Caitlyn, and the cast of satellite family characters that my E! News cohost, Jason Kennedy, has razzed me on the air by calling me Ken Kardashian.

Ive been an entertainment journalist for twenty years. Its been a mostly amazing, sometimes maddening (more on that later) career that has taken me from my mid-1990s debut as a wet-behind-the-ears correspondent for People magazine, to an Us Weekly writer and editor, to a correspondent at E! Newsthe ultimate celebrity-obsessed news organization. Along the way, Ive managed to get married, have a son and daughter (and coach both their hockey teams), and succeed (thanks to that anti-tumor medication) in keeping a skull-base pituitary gland tumor I had removed in 1998 from growing back. I also have written many books, one of which was a memoir that was made into the movie The Late Bloomer. One of my younger E! coworkers recently observed, Ken, on paper you have it all.

But paper is easy to shred, burn, or crumple. Only in Hollywood does paper make a soul.

While it may be true that my personal and professional rsum isnt filled with the stuff of crisis, my spiritual rsum tells a much darker story. That document, if I had ever actually spent the time to reflect on the subject long enough to write it, would look more like a maze of meandering lines, dead ends, and blank spaces marking the years that I stopped even pondering my spiritual self, let alone seeking deeper meaning.

A job hazard of doing what I do (really of just leading a busy, modern life like so many other people do even in places far from the Hollywood sign) has been focusing on others rather than on myself.

Despite all my professional accomplishments and personal adventures, all the incredible life experiences Ive racked up, all the people Ive met who have influenced my lifehighest among them two exceptional children, Jackson and Chloe, and the greatest mom for them in my wife of sixteen years, Brookefor far too many years my spiritual cup has been evaporating.

My current state is no ones fault but my own. Ive chosen to dedicate myself to a strange TV career in which I get paid to gossip about celebrities, live in a hyperactively car-clogged city, and pile on book-writing projects that make me money and give me creative satisfaction but that probably also make my hair fall out.