During the second night of the first Democratic debate, the New Age teacher Marianne Williamson brought her Course in Miracles lessons to the table.

She first adopted her spiritual principles in New York City and has lived here for the last couple of years before moving to Iowa. She has regularly given lectures at Marble Collegiate Church (Donald Trump’s former religious home!) and at Deepak Homebase, located in a loft in ABC Carpet and Home store garnished with New Age touchstones like Buddha and the Hindu god Ganesh.

At every opportunity on the June 27th broadcast by NBC-TV, she told the other Democratic candidates that they were just opting for a shallow understanding of the nation’s problems. Her teaching to the politicians was often interrupted by cheers from the audience.

The next president, she said, needs to understand that Donald Trump has harnessed fear in the national psyche for political purposes. New plans upon plans, superficial fixes, old stale thinking, and insider DC talk can’t beat Trump’s derangement of the moral core of the nation. She said that only someone like herself, who has made it a life’s work to harness inspiration to overcome hurts and fears, can bring a new wholeness to the American society. Only then, Williamson claimed, will we be able to solve our problems without a national mental breakdown.

 

 

Williamson first found her interest in politics from her father. Then, after a life of personal failure, she found inspiration in a New Age bible called A Course in Miracles, authored by a Columbia University psychologist.

The presidential candidate was born in 1952 to a Jewish family living in Houston, Texas. She attended mega-synagogue Congregation Beth Jeshurun. Although the rabbis at the synagogue adhere to Conservative Judaism, the Williamson parents were more cultural Jews, according to their daughter. Their politics were anything but “conservative.”

Williamson explained to a close friend, interviewed by A Journey reporter, her political upbringing, “My father didn’t want the military-industrial complex to eat my brain and convince me that war was okay.”  Her father was a cross between the radical lawyer William Kuntsler and the zestful Zorba the Greek. He decided that he would take his wife Sophie Ann and their children to Vietnam to see the horrors of the war.

He also idealized John F. Kennedy as the last great American political leader, someone whom his daughter invoked during the presidential debate. Williamson said that the Democratic president was “back in the day when politics included the people, included the imagination and included great dreams.”

As a teenager, Williamson was a spiritual seeker. She joined the Jewish club at Bellaire High School and found solace at a New Age bookstore near Rice University. She has called Houston “a hotbed of seekers.” She told New York Jewish Week that every night, she recited the Shema (which includes Deuteronomy 6:4-5: Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”)

“I’d have a conversation with God. I’ve always had a thing about God,” she said.

In the summer of 1969, Williamson went to New York City to see a production of “jacques brel is alive and well and living in Paris.” Williamson was inspired to go back to her Bellaire High School in Houston to direct her own production of “jacques brel.” She placed herself in the starring role. The experience in the musical revue changed Williamson’s life.

Williamson honed her high school drama teacher’s disciplined moral approach to theater. Williamson has written that she learned the importance of treating the script and the audience with radical honesty. She has also applied that to herself.

She discovered her strong suit of belting a cabaret talk-song.  She then used her budding talents to lead the “smart students” on an anti-war strike at her school.

Williamson’s experience in New York sparked her desire to be free of family restraints. So, the high school graduate set out for California to study drama with Stanley Crouch of Pomona College. Williamson demonstrated against the Vietnam war and started reading the I Ching and texts about spirits and ghosts.

In common with others of her generation after the 1960s, the great searches for truth were replaced by the relentless hedonism of the 1970s. During her two college years, Marianne Williamson left a trail of broken relationships that corrupted her spirit. Part of the closeness many feel for Williamson derives from the bonding that occurs between sufferers of the same curse.  Lynda Obst, roommate and later producer of movies like “Flashdance” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” said that she and her close friend Williamson did a lot of boy talk during their time together. “We’ve learned more, and we’ve f*cked it up more profoundly,” she wrote.

Williamson recalled her college age years as a “move from relationship to relationship.” Obst said that Marianne and she “were deeply sixties people together as we still are in many ways…  It was a time of wanderlust, and she was very much in the mode of doing that.”  Marianne left college for love, which was disappointed over and over. Albert Goldman, biographer of John Lennon and Elvis Presley, who later hired Marianne in New York City, remembers her as the warmhearted girl “who cried all the time” over failed love. Marianne’s fall pushed her toward an eventual nervous breakdown. She has mentioned going to two therapists for help.

Frenetic lifestyles were followed by searches for peace. Consequently, religion was sometimes thrown in as a life-saver. 

Williamson returned to New York in 1973 to try to break into the cabaret scene. In 1975 Williamson hooked up with Jeff Olmsted to form a singing duo.  She wasn’t very successful and was “always torn up emotionally,” according to Albert Goldman, a New York-based writer.

At about the same time, Williamson picked up A Course in Miracles off a friend’s coffee table during a party on Manhattan’s West Side. Eager to explore anything that would counter her depression, she was curious about the book; but seeing the Christian language, she left it on the table.

The story is that A Course in Miracles was channeled by Christ through automatic writing to Columbia University psychologist Helen Shucman, another inhabitant of the West Side.

Sometime later, Williamson found the Course left on her dinner table by a boyfriend. This time she picked it up and started reading. She was smitten. It seemed miraculous that the book looked like her “path out of hell,” she wrote. She studied its workbook of 365 lessons like a menu about life.

The immediate result of Williamson’s new path was her break-up with Jeff Olmsted and a move back to Houston for a few years. There, she ran a New Age bookstore where she discussed A Course in Miracles.

Williamson finally recovered enough to head out of Houston back to California in 1983.

While working at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Angeles, she started to lecture on her studies in A Course in Miracles. She was very open about her suffering and failures while communicating acceptance and real warmth for people who had gone through similar things.

After the wild life of the ‘60s and ‘70s blew apart, many movie and theater people had gravitated to a program of discipline and salvation called est, founded by mystagogue Werner Erhard. It is a hard-edged “take responsibility for your life” approach.

Erhard had woven various Eastern religions together with American can-doism into a Zen-like discipline under his leadership that had elements of a boot damp drill sergeant and a captain of industry. For a price, est would peel back your personality to the essentials with a focused discipline. However, in Hollywood, the plague of AIDS moved people to look for something more comforting and guilt-dispersing.

In this context, Williamson’s soothing lectures fueled her career as high holy teacher to the stars.

“She is a very compelling person who attracts the lost, the shadowy people like the gays, singles, New Agers, the Vanity Fair reader crowd and Hollywood guru followers,” said a former teacher, who worked with Williamson in those years. Stars like Cher, Barbara Streisand and Oprah Winfrey were attracted to the magnetism of this novel New Age teacher.

Williamson then took her lectures to New York City and met similar success.

Soon, Williamson would fill the lecture halls on both coasts, coming to New York once a month.

Nancy, a former associate of Williamson who wishes to remain anonymous, remembers the charismatic attraction of Williamson in the 1980s.

“I first met her and found her to have extraordinary warmth. She has beautiful skin. She used to wear the chicest outfits.” Though small, Williamson’s energy and look combined into an impressive Dynasty presence.

“She is such a solacing person.  Her words of hope are moving.”  It was just what many wanted to hear.

Williamson had gone through so much pain in her own relationships, and she connected with her audience by sharing the pains mixed with a little hope and a sparkle of charisma.  It was like a vaccination and antibiotic mixed in one brew. She helped the pain of others by sharing hers and made her fellow sufferers laugh by pulling some of the bitterness out.

Williamson was also “one of us theater people. She and her boyfriend at one time, Jeff Olmsted, had mucked around the Village as a singing duo when she had discovered the Course.”

In her charming, almost squeaky voice with a slight Texas accent Williamson joked, charmed and, most importantly, released her audience from the skyscrapers of guilt that were falling onto their hearts. “Sin is an illusion,” Williamson told one listener after the meeting.  “We are not really sinful.” We just accuse and destroy ourselves with it. “She advised me to read the Course and to meditate,” the listener recalled.

The teacher was also a doer. Through the non-profit Project Angel Food, which she founded in 1989 in Los Angeles, she was responsible for an organization that claims to have fed over 10 million sick and homebound people, particularly those who were suffering at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Her former boyfriend Jeff Olmsted also made a tape on men’s issues using A Course in Miracles. The network of believers was tight, and Williamson was always at the center of it.  “She was a part of our lives, always,” Nancy recalls.

Williamson went back and forth between coasts. When she was in New York, her friend Nancy recalled that she would trade the latest gossip with close friends about boyfriends. “We would talk about, who have you seen? Have you a boyfriend? We were more like girls in a gossip circle.”

Her 1992 bestseller A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles taught how to get rid of “negative things” like fear, guilt and sin. Once rid of the negatives, Williamson wrote that the cosmic spirit, named Christ for some, can miraculously fill one with peace and love.

Oprah Winfrey promotion of the book skyrocketed Williamson to national fame. Williamson’s lectures in Town Hall just off Times Square were attended by sell-out crowds.” Williamson and her followers became a whirlwind of activity. In New York City, she started the Manhattan Center for Living as a hospice for AIDs patients in a Village loft on Broadway. There, patients could get massages, crystal workshops and the like. Some singers came together to launch “Healing Singing.”

Those sessions used singing to help overcome fears of dying (about three-quarters of the attenders had AIDs) and guilt. The sessions had no judgement. Singing was a very healing thing for a person to let out one’s sorrow and sadness. There was no discussion of bad things, how one’s disease was.

The Manhattan and Los Angeles Centers for Living became linchpins in Williamson’s evangelistic efforts to snag big attention and big money. Williamson’s best friend Rich Cooper says, “She created this context in which everyone could heal either by volunteering or by being a client.”  AIDs had blasted fear through the acting and singing community. Here was a way that they could help. Mike Nichols, Carly Simon and Judy Collins showed up to support the New York Center.  Hollywood’s first billionaire mogul David Geffen put up matching amounts to donations.

Williamson’s public career was soaring, but one friend recalls that she still “had a great deal of pain and was tremendously needy.” She always asked for reassurance before doing shows. Consequently, Williamson’s mistakes on a stage could set off explosions behind the scenes.  A Mother Theresa up front Williamson could be a coarse-talking Leona Helmsey backstage.

Charlotte Patton, who assisted Williamson in New York, recalled that Williamson would say, “Sometimes, I can be a bitch.” She would also disappear and go into a funk. Then, she would come back and go into grins.

This reporter witnessed this dark side when Williamson thought that a New York lecture audience was too small to support the venue rental. She had a keen sense of costs and profits that flared into anger when money was mishandled.

No matter how high Williamson went she always felt insecure. She was an actress who was having a great run in a role. She sought larger audiences and recognition.

At least by the early 1990s, Williamson hoped she could bring her show onto the White House stage. She started doing lectures in Washington, D.C.

“She fancies herself political,” a close friend of Williamson says. “She wanted to do lectures in DC so badly to speak to the politicos. But she was naive. She didn’t get a big crowd in DC. She gave a speech to Washington and thought she had Senators in the house. None were there. Just other New Age people.”  In February 1992 Williamson scheduled the first stop of her book tour for A Return to Love in Washington. In 1997, she published The Healing of America, a political script for the nation, but its sales didn’t take off.

In her politics, she supported Clinton. During Clinton’s first term, the President and his wife promoted Michael Lerner’s “the politics of meaning” as their leitmotif and invited Williamson to give them counsel.

Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, hoped that liberals could rally around a politics of meaning much like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had successfully promoted a “politics of hope” after World War II. Critics say that the “meaning” seems to be an empty sack to be filled with “meaningful gestures,” moving speeches and vague regrets.  New Age religion tends to drift to “hope” or “meaning” without definition. Williamson also had the travails to empathize with the Clintons in their troubles and counseled Hillary.

Williamson’s politics on abortion comes out of her own experience. She has a deep personal sympathy for young women who are morally conflicted over abortion. They may carry the pain of an abortion for years. However, she believes the woman should have the option not to carry the child to full term. Her feelings over abortion were fraught with a fear of not having children of her own.

However in 1990, she was briefly married and had her only child, India Emma (the daughter has moved to London and practices a more traditional Judaism, according to her mother).

At one public lecture in 1991, she was confronted with a question about what were her credentials to give advice on how to handle the problems of life.

After de-emphasizing here formal credentials, Williamson whipped out an astonishing claim to credibility, “Further, this woman you see before you is an unwed mother.”

One attender of the meeting recalls, “We were all shocked and surprised. The whole crowd went crazy. She hadn’t talked about this with anyone.”

Williamson told Vanity Fair, “To me there’s nothing sinful about having a child out of wedlock.”  

Perhaps, one weakness of the Course in Miracles is that it tends to release regrets without the effectual use of forgiveness. So many of the people interviewed for this article referred to their feelings of guilt and shame that they had rinsed through the Course seminars only to find those black spots coming back to haunt them. This happened to Williamson, too.

“She had pain all the years I knew her,” Nancy sadly recalls. Another New York former initiate to the Course observes, “I don’t think the Course got to her. She has a vast emptiness.” Williamson has broken so many trusts and been left by so many that she sometimes feels adrift, according to friends.

In 1998, Williamson moved to Detroit to be near her dying friend Les Brown, a motivational speaker and estranged husband of singer Gladys Knight. She also expressed a desire to get her hands dirty again by dealing with the nitty gritty of every day people’s problems. Detroit also had a history of favoring the off-beat connections to religious history.

From Detroit, she took groups on pilgrimages to the Egyptian pyramids, with her brochure advertising “the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity…to actually lie down in the sarcophagus…and connect to the spiritual experiences once available only to Egypt’s highest initiates.”

Williamson also served five years as Minister at Detroit’s 2,500 member Christian Church of Today, a non-denominational member of the Association of Unity Churches. After a dispute about the direction of the church, Williamson left for California. In 2010, she toyed with running for Congress but decided that the support and money was not there.

However by 2014, she launched an unsuccessful run for Congress in the 33rd District of California. She was endorsed by the likes of Silverman, Kardashian, singer Katy Perry, and reality TV star Nicole Richie. In her early days in politics, LA Magazine reports, Williamson was known to refer to herself as “Obama 2.0.” 

Now, the girl from Texas, resident of New York City, is living her political dream on the big stage.

♦♦♦♦♦

Marianne Williamson for President

Quotes by Lynda Obst, Albert Goldman, Rich Cooper, Charlotte Patton and Gary Donzig are taken from Elena Oumano. 1992. Marianne Williamson. Her Life Her Message Her Miracles. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks.

 

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