The Washington Post recently ran a long article on Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign. It was the first acknowledgement of Ms. Williamson's political efforts that I've seen in the mainstream print media.
The article was written by Anna Peele who not only introduced her readership to Marianne Williamson. She also indicated how Ms. Williamson offers an essential element no other Democratic candidate can possibly supply.
In fact, Marianne Williamson's candidacy addresses the psychological and spiritual concerns at the root of voters' issues regardless of their party affiliation or religious orientation including those self-identifying as "spiritual but not religious" and even agnostic and atheistic.
By doing so, Williamson effectively rescues for the left the power of spirituality that has been the exclusive province of right-wing Republicans for the last 50 years and more. Unlike Republican Christians who use religion to defend the status quo, Ms. Williamson links profound spirituality and critical consciousness at their deepest levels. The consciousness ends up distancing itself 180 degrees away from our country's reigning ideology about history, economics, politics, and personal responsibility.
At the beginning of her article, Ms. Peele admitted she had never previously heard of Marianne Williamson, whom she first understood in terms of a "self-help author and motivational speaker" as well as the spiritual advisor of Oprah Winfrey. Peele was intrigued by Williamson's own job-description as "creating miracles" something the author admits she wanted to believe in, especially given the state of our nation and world under President Trump.
Seeking that miracle, Peele confessed during her first encounter with Williamson that she was anxious about our country's future. She mentioned her own anger and fear.
She was surprised by Williamson's response. It was in summary: "Toughen up. We're not porcelain dolls, you know. We need to get real and absorb with courage and endurance the hard knocks delivered up by Trump's kind. After all, we're following in the footsteps of Civil Rights heroes and the suffragettes who risked their lives resisting the old policies currently resurrected in today's Oval Office. It's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work!"
Peele's admits that she found that initial exchange actually inspiring. It bordered, she said, on the very miracle she had been seeking. The journalist's vision, she says, had changed of both Marianne and her campaign. (And that by the way, is what the term "miracle" means in Williamson's vocabulary a radical transformation of perception. It's about developing critical consciousness.)
From there, Peele's article describes Williamson's January 28th formal announcement of her candidacy and her basic theme. It's that America's real problem is not with the likes of Donald Trump, but with us, our juvenile preoccupations with our personal lives, our resulting political disengagement, and our surrender of political terrain to corporations and the one-percenters. "It is time for us to rise up, the way other generations have. Cynicism is just an excuse for not helping. Whining is not an option . . . We need to identify the problems in this country. Then we need to identify with the problem solvers."
Williamson identifies herself as one of those problem solvers. In fact, she portrays her upbringing and 30- year career as a spiritual teacher as uniquely qualifying her for addressing the fundamentally spiritual problem underneath our country's current dysfunction. No one else, she says, demonstrates that qualification or of even recognizes the problem as such.
Now 66 years old, Williamson comes from a Jewish family headed by a stay-at-home mother and by a father who practiced immigration law. When his daughter was just 13, Mr. Williamson took his entire family to Vietnam during the height of the war. His intention, Williamson says, was to "make sure the military-industrial complex would not 'eat my kids' brains'." She never forgot that childhood lesson about the reality of war and its horror. It made her but a life-long anti-war activist.
But Marianne Williamson is not just some aging hippie activist with a past devoted to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. That was only part of it, she quips. "The rest of the day, we stopped a war."
In 1975, Williamson's activism found its theoretical grounding in what has since become a spiritual classic, A Course in Miracles(ACIM). The book was allegedly "channeled" by Helen Schucman, who described the dictating voice as that of Jesus, the Christ. Williamson calls the book "basically Christian mysticism." (I would call it a course on developing critical consciousness.) In any case, the book changed her life. On its basis, she began a spiritual practice that gave her that earlier-mentioned radical vision of the world.
Eventually, Williamson composed what she calls "ACIM Cliff Notes" A Return to Love.
Oprah Winfrey loved it. It became a New York Times best-seller. And Williamson's new career as a spiritual teacher was born. However, her spiritual teaching distinguished itself from others like Eckhart Tolle (whom Williamson considers an enlightened spiritual master) and Deepak Chopra by its continued commitment to the brand of anti-war social justice deeply instilled by her father.
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