A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson (HarperCollins, 1992, 260 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
The year was 1965, the midst of the Aquarian love decade. Marianne Williamson was a 13-year-old Jewish girl in Houston. In New York, Helen Schucman, Jewish and an atheist and psychologist, began to write purported dictation of Jesus that would be copyrighted in 1975 as the 1,200 page A Course in Miracles, and published by a California parapsychologist. By the time Williamson found a copy on a coffee table in 1977, she had studied theater, Zen meditation, and esoterica and had worked as a cabaret singer and secretary. She was impressed by what she read and began to teach the Course in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, even though Schucman herself, according to The New York Times, “ultimately rejected what she had written”. (February 19, 1992) Today Williamson is, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “a New Age guru, gorgeous and successful, connected to some of the top names in Hollywood”. Her book is No. 1 on The New York Times self-help bestseller list.
Not surprisingly, both her book and its Course-base are psycho-flavored renditions of New Age sympathies. They have appeal in the spiritually relativistic Zeitgeist, in what Newsweek calls this “spiritually famished time”, as well as in the philosophical and theological illiteracy of Americans and the failures of organized Christianity to live the biblical good news of God’s grace. Her popularity with the gay men who pack her audiences is enhanced by her attention to the AIDS crisis through her Centers for Living that provide meditation, massage and meals to people with AIDS.
She makes a few good observations (e.g., “Our self-perception determines our behavior” and “the myth of ‘Mr. Right’ stems from our glorification of romantic love”). But whatever help these may be, scattered among erroneous and even silly ideas, the base out of which she claims to preach (the channeled dictation of Jesus) is something else. Though foisting a pop-Zen redefinition on all her uses of Christian terms, she is emphatic: “Jesus is his name. There’s no point in pretending that his name is Herbert”. But she might as well call him Herbert – or Gee-Whiz or Jiminy Cricket or Judas Priest or any other euphemism – since her Jesus is more like Herbert than the Jesus of the Bible (the basic historical source on Jesus). Her Jesus is not God’s only Son and intimate Word made flesh, through whom and for whom all things were created and by whom, as Savior and Lord of all, everyone will be judged. At odds with the Transfiguration, for example, her Jesus “is a face. He is definitely a top of the mountain experience, but that’s not to say he’s the only one up there. … ‘one begotten Son’ doesn’t mean that someone else was it, and we’re not. It means we’re all it. … You and I have the Christ-mind in us as much as Jesus does.” How can she be so intellectually dishonest? The same way Humpty Dumpty was. “Words are just words”, she says, “and new ones can always be found to replace ones that offend”. Says Christopher Lasch: “The New Age replacements for religion soothe the conscience instead of rubbing it the wrong way.”
Monism (all is one) and pantheism (all is god), what C. S. Lewis called “the permanent natural bent of the human soul”, underpin her preaching that we’re all Christ-mind, God, and each other. “There’s actually no place where God stops and you start, and no place where you stop and I start. … at our core, we are … actually the same being. … there’s only one of us here.” She’s apparently oblivious to the fact that monism forms an ontologically impossible foundation for the major themes for which her fans flock to her: relationship and love. If there’s no one else here – no other – there’s no one with whom to have relationship, no one to love or be loved by. Said Teilhard de Chardin: “Pantheism seduces by its vistas of perfect universal union. But ultimately, if it were true, it would give us only fusion and unconsciousness; for, at the end of the evolution it claims to reveal, the elements of the world vanish in the God they create or by which they are absorbed.”
She says her “Christic” teaching appeals to “people who seek Jesus, but without the judgment, the guilt, the punitive doctrine”. But the guilt remains. Hers is a trendy version of the old Pollyanna liberalism that Yale’s Richard Niebuhr brilliantly critiqued as “the story of how a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”. Contrary to Jesus’ teachings on what G. K. Chesterton said was the most demonstrable Christian doctrine, i.e., sin, Williamson says we are “by nature psychologically incapable of sin”. Where’s she been? She says we’re merely “mistaken”. Condemning “traditional forgiveness” as judgmental, she claims, in judgment, to abjure such. “Forgiveness” for our “wrong-mindedness” is “right-mindedness” – the enlightenment of Zen. Our problem, she says, is guilt feelings brought on by the “illusion of sin” and “correction of our perception is called the Atonement”. However, seasoned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wisely noted: only in acknowledging our real sin can “we diminish our long-drawn-out indirect self-reproach which despairs, but repairs nothing”. Our sins, he well observed, “are greater than symptoms and …a burden greater than [we] can bear”. Sadly, it’s perhaps the very ineffectiveness of her perspective-solution in coping with sin and guilt that comes out in her reputation as “a latter-day Leona Helmsley … unnecessarily cruel and very controlling” (Newsweek, People) – so at variance to her preaching on love.
In Jesus, God came “to seek and to save the lost”; Williamson’s god “seeks out our innocence”. Instead of posturing the way of the Course, Jesus went the way of the cross, where God’s love and judgment met. That was the hard and necessary road to our return to Love.