Faith: Marianne Williamson Is Full of It
She is the high priestess of pop religion. Millions buy her books and tapes. Fans worship her. As for critics, she warns, "Laugh at all this at your emotional peril."
In a matter of hours, Marianne Williamson will take the stage in cascading taupe and have 1,000 disciples eating out of her delicate hands. She will ask them to pray for peace, for prosperity, for the deliverance of a prostitute. She will urge them to save America from spiritual bankruptcy, and they will nod and murmur and consider her call to action. A young man will stand to ask advice about a friend and sit down smiling after she proclaims his attitude "enabling."
She will hold the lecture at Los Angeles' Wilshire Ebell Theater, where she is a frequent headliner. But right now, the wildly popular feel-good guru is tucked in the corner of a couch, and the voice that can be as seductive as a clear stream is gaining force and intensity. First one finger starts wagging, then both nicely muscled arms are in the air. Williamson doesn't like questions about her power as a priestess of the New Age, doesn't much like being questioned about her path to enlightenment. Skepticism is met with run-on sentences, cynicism with a silent stare. "Laugh at all of this at your emotional peril," she warns in her 1993 book A Woman's Worth, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
"See, I find it interesting. I find that I'm in the only career that I know of [where] the more successful you are, the more suspicious you are," the 45-year-old Williamson says. "Like I have these slavish followers. In any other field, if you've got a large audience, people would say you must be good at it. I have an audience. Barbra Streisand has an audience. I don't have followers."
Maybe so. But the millions of people who buy Williamson's books and cassettes, the thousands who attend her monthly lectures on love, relationships, or whatever is on her mind, speak of her with an adoration bordering on worship. Those who "get" her, revere her. At her behest, they clasp hands with the strangers seated beside them. They close their eyes in meditation, leaving purses and packages unattended. On the eve of the Fourth of July, they sing "God Bless America," and they do it in key. They sign up for her tape-of-the-month club; scan her Web site (www.marianne.com); and make religious pilgrimages with her to India, Stonehenge, and Ireland. As Jim Muccione, a college administrator and devotee, explains before one of Williamson's summer lectures in her home base of Los Angeles, "She's a warrior of the heart -- I'm the pilgrim, and I consider her a teacher."
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Well, let's see ,anyone who says anything positive about her must be a drooling adorer, so there'e no way for me to avoid ad hominem criticisms. I like her because she is my age and from my hometown, Houston, Texas, and she explains things well. I've met her once in person and like that she treats people as equals, not like she was some spiritual superstar. I acknowledge that she is popular, but I've never seen the "adoration" among her admirers that you decribe, although I have observed a few detractors that were fairly disturbed by her popularity. When I saw her in Dallas, Texas, she waited after her talk to speak to every single individual that wanted to speak with her, not rushing anyone. As for the part of the crowd leaving perhaps impatient with the "emphasis on something other than themselves," how do you know? Do you follow them all home? I'm proud when I read the stats for the hours of contribution to the Network Ministries in my neck of the woods. The highest contributors of their time are from one of those "selfish new age" churches.
We all have the responsibility to create our own personalized religion. Anyone or anything that inspires us along the way is valuable to our individual quest for meaning and purpose.
