Marianne Williamson, like Rhonda Byrne, Oprah Winfrey, Mary Baker Eddy, and so many others defy Jesus. No matter how you look at it, The New Age defies Jesus Christ. Jesus, and only Jesus can save us and we are His creation, nothing more.
In part, I agree with what Steve says below in his GRIP, we need to replace all of those in the government and especially Congress. But with people that stand up for Jesus.
That leaves out the Democrats and most of the Republicans. They should make all the Democrats live in Detroit and Washington State.
Williamson thinks that we are the “light of the world” when actually we are the “salt of the world,” but either way, our actions today will be reflected upon in the end.
Therefore, tomorrow we’ll look at…
2 Corinthians
A Confident Ministry
1 For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
“Earthly house of this tabernacle” – our present body (see 2 Pet 1:13).
2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven:
“We groan” – because we long for he perfection that will be ours when we put on the glorious spiritual body.
3 If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.
4 For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.
5 Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.
“God, who also hath given unto us…the Spirit” – the Holy Ghost, poured out by the risen and exalted Savior, applies the benefits of Christ’s redeeming works to the believer’s heart and makes the resurrection power of Jesus a reality of his daily experience.
6 Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord:
It should not matter what happens to us on earth, if we are with Jesus nothing else matters because earth is temporary.
7 (For we walk by faith, not by sight:)
8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
9 Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.
If you are a true believer you live the way Jesus lived and it does not matter how small or great your deeds are for Him because you are accepted by Him.
10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.
This scripture is misunderstood by many and also used by some to sway people away from Jesus. Many say that it doesn’t matter how good we are now because we have all sinned and Jesus is going to punish everyone.
This is not true, once we accept Jesus and repent our sins are forgiven, as God said:
“The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous” (Ps 1: 4-5).
“The LORD executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed.
The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.
For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.
As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgression from us” (Ps 103:6, 8, 11, 12).
Yes, we will all stand before Jesus in the end, but only the non-believers and those that abuse the name of God (Ex 20:7) will be punished. The believers will be rewarded:
“And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me to give every man according as his work shall be” (Rev 22:12).
This is also verified in v. 17 below.
11 Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are made manifest unto God; and I trust also are made manifest in your consciences.
12 For we commend not ourselves again unto you, but give you occasion to glory on our behalf, that ye may have somewhat to answer them which glory in appearance, and not in heart.
13 For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.
14 For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead:
15 And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.
16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.
17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
When you accept Jesus and repent you change your ways. Not necessarily your ways of thinking, just your behavior.
I say this because Jesus gave me a new heart. I accepted Jesus a couple years before Obama became president and I still despise him.
Until my acceptance of Jesus Christ I didn’t like or dislike Oprah, but now I can’t stand her only because she is a false prophet.
Yet, even though they and people like them anger me, I still pray for them because they are still God’s children.
18 And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation;
Back to v. 10 above, if we are reconciled with God why would He punish us for our past actions? He wouldn’t and He won’t.
19 To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.
20 Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.
21 For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
God Help Us
Marianne Williamson’s campaign
to save America’s soul,
starting with
California’s 33rd Congressional District
I find the following article humorous, but also very sad. It is sad because Williamson appears to be a very kind and caring person.
Yet, it doesn’t matter how helpful we are to each other if we stand against Jesus. Even if we don’t realize that we are in opposition of Him, that is our fault, not God’s.
As they say, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and hell is where we would spend eternity.
Los Angeles
In case you were wondering, things in California just got a little weird. Okay, maybe not “just.” Let me be more specific:
The congressional election in California’s 33rd District, a coastal tract encompassing some of the wealthiest, most liberal quarters of Los Angeles County – Bel Air, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills, to name a few – just got a little weird.
On January 30, Henry Waxman, the district’s long-serving and notoriously cantankerous representative, surprised everyone by announcing he would retire at the end of this term.
Since arriving in Congress in 1975, Waxman has been a dogged champion of progressive causes and a frequent irritant to Republican administrations.
During George W. Bush’s term alone, Waxman, from his perch on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, launched investigations into everything from the handling of Hurricane Katrina to government contractors in Iraq to Republican National Committee email ethics.
She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program that serves homebound people with AIDS in the Los Angeles area, and the co-founder of The Peace Alliance, a grass roots campaign supporting legislation to establish a United States Department of Peace.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Results organization, which works to end poverty in the United States and around the world.
Generally speaking, he has been a pain in the collective GOP hindquarters for nearly 40 years.
But with Waxman bowing out, how will things change? A television producer named Brent Roske has declared his candidacy, but it’s purely symbolic, and he’s not actually campaigning.
Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who made a name for herself by complaining that the Jesuit school’s health plan didn’t cover birth control, floated her name as a possible candidate and then decided against it.
There is a possibility that conservative Bill Bloomfield, who gave Waxman a run for his money in 2012, will give it another shot, but he has yet to announce (Waxman beat him 54-46 in a district Obama carried 61-37).
The field remains wide open. In fact, at the moment, there is only one candidate running anything approaching a real campaign.
Well, maybe “campaign” is the wrong word. It’s more a vision quest. If you live in Waxman’s district, Marianne Williamson doesn’t just want to represent you. She wants to save your soul.
His district includes much of the western part of the city of Los Angeles, as well as West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.
Though perhaps not a household name, Williamson is something of a celebrity: Her self-help books have earned her national recognition, and her weekly lectures on spirituality have made her a fixture in Los Angeles for over 30 years.
Back in October, having at long last grown tired of politics as usual, frustrated with the Democratic party of which she has been a member all her life, and armed with a large grassroots following (she claims more than 400,000 Facebook fans and 200,000 Twitter followers), she announced her independent candidacy for Waxman’s seat and has been kissing proverbial babies ever since.
New Age spiritual teacher, guru to movie stars, friend of Oprah—she is both self-actualized and self-made. Born to a Jewish family in Houston in 1952, by the late 1970s, Williamson confesses, “I was a total mess.”
After bouncing “from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, looking for some sense of identity or purpose,” she found herself living in New York, “seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract myself.”
She wallowed in this depression until stumbling across a book that she credits with transforming her life.
That book was A Course in Miracles, a 1,300-page spiritual manual (complete with student workbooks and instructions on how to teach it) written by New York psychologists Helen Schucman and William Thetford and published by the Foundation for ParaSensory Investigation (now the Foundation for Inner Peace).
Williamson heeded the book’s call to become a “miracle-worker.” In 1983, now living in Los Angeles, she began lecturing on The Course (as she calls it) at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz.
By the end of the ’80s, she had helped to found the Los Angeles Center for Living and Project Angel Food, both nonprofits providing assistance to people suffering from HIV, AIDS, and other life-threatening illnesses.She developed a large following, particularly among Los Angeles’s gay community, which was then being ravaged by the initial outbreak of AIDS.
A few years later, she had to resign the leadership of Project Angel Food after a controversy erupted when she fired several employees for their attempts to unionize.
His district includes much of the western part of the city of Los Angeles, as well as West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.
To know more go Here: Skull and Bones
In response to numerous media reports of her explosive temper and overbearing management style, Williamson, ever ready to embrace her own weaknesses, nicknamed herself “The Bitch for God.”
In 1992, she wrote a self-help manual, A Return to Love, expounding on excerpts from The Course.
A Return to Love’s overall spiritual lesson is that we as human beings are in fact all one being, not under but with God, that all of our minds are actually one mind, and that we have tricked ourselves into thinking we are separate from one another, thus creating fear, which dominates us and throws us into collision with everyone else, who, we need to remember, are really also us.
According to Williamson, there is only one way out of this destructive cycle, and that is (spoiler alert) a return to love.
Both her book and The Course make liberal use of Christian theological terms, but deploy them as merely symbolic of universal spiritual truths.
“The concept of a divine, or ‘Christ’ mind,” we learn, “is the idea that at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being.”
Christ, you see, “is a psychological term” and “‘Accepting the Christ’ is merely a shift in self-perception. We awaken from the dream [that] we are finite, isolated creatures, and recognize that we are glorious, infinitely creative spirits.”
And, not to leave anyone out, Williamson’s book also includes a smattering of references to other religious and cultural traditions:
In Taoist philosophy, “yin” is the feminine principle, representing the forces of earth, while “yang” is the masculine principle, representing spirit. . . . In Christic philosophical terms, Mary symbolizes the feminine within us, which is impregnated by God. . . . Through a mystical connection between the human and divine, we give birth to our Higher self.
And so on. And so forth.
Despite its mealy-mouthed pan-denominationalism, Williamson’s counsel is not, as these things go, all that bad: We should try to think of others more than ourselves; we should try to treat people with kindness; we should try to replace our selfish and fearful thinking with love.
It is all just fuzzy enough about specific directives to appeal to spiritually minded folks who might be turned off by having to do anything, besides think happy thoughts, to achieve enlightenment.
Perhaps as a result, the book spent 39 weeks on the New York Times self-help bestseller list and brought Williamson national attention (not to mention a lot of money).
In the intervening years, she has published nine more books (five more bestsellers), including, in 2000, Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens.
Arnold Schwarzenegger are in the same type of arena, and we all know what a great governor he had been.
The book is really a political manifesto, glorifying the protest politics of the 1960s and lamenting,
“The invisible order that shot our heroes [i.e., JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.] did not keep shooting, but began providing goods and services as quickly as possible to distract a grieving generation from our psychic pain.”
The result of this materialist conspiracy, Williamson feels, has been a disengagement from politics, and Healing offers a broad indictment of the American voting public’s apathy and ignorance.
“Today’s average American is more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedoms,” she declares.
“Today, most Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders’ courageous repudiation of injustice.”
The overarching message is that we need to slough off our materialistic chains and apply our great spiritual wisdom, above all our innate love for one another as human beings, to the political problems of the day. All we need, in other words, is love.
I wonder if she is related to Manson in some way?
On my way to meet Williamson at a restaurant in Brentwood, I’m not quite sure what to expect.
She first came to public attention when, in February 2012, Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee refused to allow her to testify to that committee on the importance of requiring insurance plans to cover birth control during a discussion on whether medical insurance should have a contraception mandate.
She later spoke to only House Democratic members.
I’ve never seen a guru before, let alone had lunch with one, and my East Coast prejudices are already starting to get the better of me.
I’m half-expecting her to glide into the dining room in flowing saffron robes and to answer my questions in New Age hypno-babble.
To be honest, I’m kind of hoping for it. But I find her sitting at a corner table dressed neatly in a black pantsuit, mundanely sipping a cup of coffee.
Clearly, Williamson is not your straight-from-central-casting hippie-dippy-California spiritual type. She is tall, brunette, beautiful, and quite squarely put together: sharp features, a strong chin, a firm handshake. Her bearing is businesslike and utterly without pretension.
The spiritual life has clearly been good to her. She speaks confidently, rapidly. She is relentlessly on message, and her message is simultaneously aggressive and unifying.
“I think there’s a basic disintegration in our democratic foundation which is not being addressed by either major political party,” Williamson tells me.
“Part of the problem I have with the status quo is that they only speak to the selfish interest of the American people, and I believe the American people are better than that.”
Her primary concern is that “Americans are feeling locked out of the system.” When I gently point out that the 33rd District, locus of countless Obama fundraisers and home to some of L.A.’s richest, most famous, most beautiful souls, ranks fairly low on any scale of locked-outness, she immediately agrees.
“This is definitely one of the least locked-out districts.” That being said, “We are more than economic creatures. We have a soul.” She continues, benevolently, “I am not speaking to the rich in you, or the poor in you. I am speaking to the American in you.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she says with a smile, “capitalism has been good to me. But what is happening today is that too many people can’t get in the club, there has to be enough access. There has to be enough access to opportunity for America to be a stable democracy.
I agree with him, but I’m wondering what he thinks Congress is? They’re not politicians?
”All in all, she exudes an aura of moderation, and her frequent references to America’s most popular political icons only add to it. “The Constitution doesn’t mention political parties; Washington warned us against them,” she declares. “JFK said, ‘Let us not seek a Republican answer or a Democratic answer. Let us seek an American answer.’”
What, then, is the American answer that Marianne Williamson seeks? Well, despite the promise of her campaign’s slogan to “Create Anew,” it is pretty much warmed-over, social-justice, progressive, liberal blah, blah, blah, with a little California crunchy-wackadooism thrown in.
Prison reform, climate change, shutting down nuclear power plants, and ending the “corruption of the food supply” are high on her list of priorities.
Above all else, she is intent on getting the money out of politics and views Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision easing restrictions on campaign contributions, as perhaps the greatest threat to democracy that America has ever faced.
But even while condemning both political parties and the state of our democratic system in general, while complaining about incarceration rates and Monsanto and “moneyed interests,” she somehow still sounds quite reasonable, lacking the stridency of MSNBC and the outright incoherence of the now-defunct Occupy movement (RIP).
After just a few minutes, I can’t deny that Williamson is a knockout of a candidate: smart, eloquent, passionate, and considerably more telegenic than her, um, rodentine predecessor.
As our conversation winds down, she suggests I check out her weekly spiritual lecture, you know, “so you can see me in front of an audience.”
I am happy to oblige, and when I show up at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills on a Monday night, taking my seat in the back among a crowd of several hundred spiritual seekers, I am not disappointed.
Williamson writes in A Return to Love that “the spiritualization process. . . is the cultivation of personal magnetism,” and if she were any more magnetic, people’s fillings would be flying out of their teeth.
If Williamson can be the “Bitch from God” then can’t Oprah be the “Bitch from Hell”?
As spirit guide, she is softer than in her candidate persona, but she talks just as quickly and fluidly and with as much conviction.
“May we be lifted above and beyond to the endless love and peace that is beyond,” she prays from the stage, concluding, after a dramatic moment of silence, “And so it is.”
She talks for about an hour to the rapt crowd about a passage from The Course dealing with the idea that “I am as God created me.” Her talk is quite soothing, and she implores us to “discover within your mind the self that is the son of God.”
She reminds us that we “are perfect and changeless, and so is everyone else,” that “the universe is invested in your self-actualization,” and that our “function is to be the light of the world.”
Jesus said we are the salt of the world; He is the light of the world.
“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matt 5:13).
The meaning of Jesus’ words are debated, here are a few suggestions:
* Whiteness represents the purity of the justified believer.
She was a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York from 1958 until her retirement in 1976.
Schucman is best known for having “scribed” with the help of colleague William Thetford the book A Course in Miracles (1st edition, 1975), the contents of which she claimed to have been given to her by an inner voice she identified as Jesus. However, as per her request, her role as its “writer” was not revealed to the general public until after her death.
* Salt’s flavoring properties imply that Christians are to add divine flavor to the world.
* Christians are to sting the world with rebuke and judgment the way salt stings an open wound.
* As salt, Christians are to create a thirst for Christ.
* Salt has another vital purpose which is probably what the Lord had in mind-it stops decay. When Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth”, He meant that all of His disciples were to serve as preservatives, stopping the moral decay in our sin infected world.
I agree with the last suggestion because salt adds flavor to the meal. Therefore, Christians are to stand up and show the world their faith in Jesus Christ, not hide it.
In Matt 5:14, Jesus said,
“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”
That more or less clarifies what I think Jesus meant in regard to us being the salt of the world. But we are not “THE” true light of the world, Jesus is:
“Then spake Jesus again unto them saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (Jn 8:12).
The overall effect is pleasantly soporific, and by the end of the lecture I get why everyone here loves her so much. I mean, I feel fantastic; I had completely forgotten how perfect I was.
After the closing prayer, after we “gently pour ourselves back into the awareness of the human body,” she gives us another “And so it is.” This time the audience calls back in unison, “And so it is. Amen,” which, I’m not going to lie, is pretty odd.
In fact, it’s almost as odd as some of her supporters. At the campaign’s weekly volunteer meeting, held at The Source Spiritual Center in Venice every Thursday, the first person I encounter, among the crowd of about 50 volunteers, is Steve.
A self-described fiscal conservative and social liberal, Steve is the founder of GRIP—Get Rid of Incumbent Politicians—an organization with the modest goal of removing every single incumbent in America from office.
GRIP is a simple means to effect change. This idea is not aligned with the right wing or the left wing, with Democrats or Republicans.
For years the two party system has been bankrupt. They are two sides of the same coin.
There are plenty of ideas on how to fix things but GRIP is not about ideas that will be shot down due to differences of opinion.
The best idea is to think, vote and Get Rid of Incumbent Politicians.
Steve starts to tell me how he got involved with the Williamson campaign (“Have you heard of Dirty Wars?”), but our conversation is interrupted when an airy woman with flowing blonde hair grabs a microphone on stage and starts welcoming us to The Source.
“Let’s just take a moment of silence and sit in gratitude for a moment and take a couple of breaths together just to get present in this moment. This is all we’re ever in, this is all we have, and that’s where all power lies.”
She closes her eyes, inhales deeply, exhales, inhales deeply again, and exhales before inviting us to check out “the amazing soundbath The Source has on Saturdays,” with a promise that afterwards we can go to the “café and elixir lounge” downstairs, if we like.
She hands the mike over to Rob Nelson, Williamson’s campaign coordinator. Wild-eyed and meticulously unkempt, Nelson paces the stage back and forth like an uncomfortable comedian, the front of his sweater inexplicably tucked into his boxer shorts, which stick out of the top of his designer jeans.
He and the campaign’s political coordinator, a nebbishy young fellow named Ben Eisenberg, go through a simple training session on how to register people to vote, and they dutifully deal with the volunteers’ innocence about the process.
One supporter, for example, is horrified to discover that some of the people they register might vote for Waxman (he was still in the race at the time).
Another asks if she has to stay in her own neighborhood, or if she can register voters in other parts of the district, to which Eisenberg responds, somewhat wearily, “If you live in Santa Monica, but you want to register voters at a farmer’s market in Malibu, that’s totally okay.”
There’s a brief pause in the action before everyone breaks into smaller groups to discuss canvassing specific locations, and I flinch when a pair of large hands suddenly begins massaging my shoulders from behind and a face pops into my peripheral vision.
“Oh! I didn’t mean to startle you!” my new friend, an African-American man wearing a UCLA cap, says with a smile. “How’s the universe treating you?” I let him know it’s treating me just fine and ask how it’s treating him. “Oh, just living in the attitude of gratitude! So are you ready to create anew and achieve the dream?”
This is Tony. He’s been a follower of Marianne for a while, and when he heard she was running for Congress he signed right up to help. In fact, he even wrote a “musical poem” for her campaign.
Based on the ’90s hip-hop song “I Got 5 on It,” the poem combines the Williamson campaign slogan “Create Anew” with the generally great life slogan “Achieve the Dream.” According to Tony, he got the idea from Gandhi’s grandson, whom he recently met on a trip to India.
When I tell him I’m a reporter writing a story on Marianne, he asks excitedly if I think “America is ready for amazing grace on seis tres,” referring in Spanish (for obvious poetic reasons) to June 3, the date of California’s open primary, when the voters will decide which two candidates get to face off in the general election.
When I tell Tony I’m not sure, he shakes my hand with a smile, tells me it was great to meet me, and vanishes almost as abruptly as he appeared.
A few days later I find myself in another bustling crowd, this time at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club, where we are assembled for the Williamson campaign’s first monthly issues forum.
Tonight’s topic is the all-important “Getting Money Out of Politics,” and Marianne has brought in special guest Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor, to give a talk.
As I enter the hall, I run into Whitney and Caroline, a pair of sixty-something students of The Course. Even though they live just outside the 33rd District, they’re big supporters and plan on urging all their friends in the district to vote for Marianne.
“She is a self-actualized person,” Whitney tells me, “Which is a good thing to bring to a body of people like Congress.” Caroline, the more talkative of the two, is more forceful in her endorsement.
“It’s like Marianne says, it’s either love or fear. Do you remember what Eisenhower said?” I assure her I don’t. “Beware the military-industrial complex,” she says with a stern face, before adding, casually, “I believe in the Illuminati and all that.”
I believe in the Illuminati too, I believe they exist, but I certainly would not promote them, it’s one of the devil’s groups.
The room is packed by the time our guest speaker is introduced. Winkler, for his part, gives about as interesting and humorous a talk on the legal history of campaign finance reform as one could expect.
Then Marianne joins him on stage, and the floor is opened for questions. “Waxman, while he has been good, has shown a penchant for the military-industrial complex,” the first questioner begins.
“Why is impeachment of the Supreme Court not viable?” asks another. “How can we stop Grover Norquist?” “Is there a shadow government?” “Would you support efforts to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth?”
Williamson handles these questions with aplomb, working the crowd, delivering lines that frequently elicit applause. Perhaps not surprisingly, she is less conciliatory here than in her sit-down with me.
These are her people, and she is serving them red meat. Or whatever the vegan equivalent of red meat is. “Waxman says fracking is bad, but he won’t do anything about it. How many more studies do we need to realize we are raping our planet?” she asks too much applause.
She announces, to more applause still, that she supports a bill creating a Department of Peace and making its secretary a cabinet-level position.
“The phrase ‘shadow government’ doesn’t feel helpful to me,” she says at one point. “It sounds like something over there that we can’t do anything about. They’re doing it in the light of day!” The crowd erupts. “We repudiated aristocracy in 1776. It is time for us to repudiate it again!” she shouts, to the loudest cheers of the night.
Throughout all this, she still manages to talk about America’s founding principles and the greatness of the American experiment, about the urgency of reengaging with the democratic process, at one point even referring to Tocqueville, all while making the case for her candidacy.
“The House of Representatives is the people’s house—the artist, the philosopher, the shoemaker should all serve terms,” she says. “I think my election to Congress would be the best thing to happen to the Democratic party—it would make them get their soul back.”
And it is the soul after all—be it the Democratic party’s, America’s, yours, or even mine—that Williamson is most concerned with. After a question on the compatibility of spirituality and politics, posed toward the end of the forum, Williamson grows a little quieter, a little softer, assuming her spirit-guide mantle yet again.
“Spirituality is the path of the heart; it should influence everything we do.” She concludes, simply, “We need a politics of conscience, we need a politics of heart, we need a politics of love.”
As we file out of the Woman’s Club—our political apathy most heartily rebuffed, a nascent sense of brotherhood among us, the energy of a newfound love for our fellow man propelling us merrily toward the parking garage next door—a bearded, burnt-out-looking man sporting a grungy flannel under his “Marianne for Congress” T-shirt asks if anyone can give him a ride to a place called Café Gratitude in Venice.
An awkward silence ensues. Nobody in the crowd responds, or even makes eye contact with him, doing their best to ignore his existence.
And so it is.
…the Judgment Seat.