“All things are delivered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him.” (Matt. 11:27)
In 1992, self-appointed spiritual guru of the New Age, Marianne Williamson, burst into the national consciousness with her first popular appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey, who made it a personal crusade to find the next big spiritual thinker, who was herself always on a restless quest for divine fulfillment, hitched her wagon to a series of enlightened ones, including Deepak Chopra, Maya Angelou, and Williamson. During that 92 episode, which I watched, Williamson took much of her talking points from the New Age Bible “The Course in Miracles” (ACIM). ACIM is a book written and edited by Helen Schucman (a New York City psychologist), and first published in 1976, that, according to the author, was guided by an “inner voice” she identified with Jesus Christ. Williamson was the new appointed interpreter of that great gnostic text for the ages. To the lost, like me, what she said made so much sense at the time, for, there were “many paths” to God. In ACIM it states: “Is he [Jesus] God’s only Helper? No, indeed. For Christ takes many forms with different names until their oneness can be recognized.” Wow, I thought, because then, I was keenly exploring every religious philosophy and belief system that I could find: from Hinduism to the Tarot Cards. So, to what she was talking about - I related to – that all these things could be combined into one; and, then, I would understand who and what I was. But, what about my homosexuality? Williamson and ACIM also had the answer: “God does not forgive because He has never condemned.” Williamson wrote: “Meaning lies in us.” Therefore, I was my own arbiter of right and wrong. Williamson’s mantra of self-forgiveness and human potentiality rang true with many men in the gay community: “To remember that we are part of God, that we are loved and loveable, is not arrogant. It’s humble. To think we are anything else is arrogant, because it implies that we’re something other than a creation of God. Nothing we have ever done or will do can mar our perfection in the eyes of God. We are deserving in God’s eyes because of what we are, not because of what we do.” Nothing we could do would separate us from God – and, certainly not our homosexuality.
Author’s note: Because of Oprah’s popularity in the gay community and because of Williamson’s feel-goodism, ACIM sessions and Williamson inspired group-thinks popped up all over the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. I attended a few classes, with another former Catholic boy turned gay man, as did a few more LGBT friends in LA. For a moment, we thought we had a relationship with Christ; He didn’t care what we were doing, and we didn’t have to much worry about Him. All we had to do was love; as Williamson wrote: “Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. I was loving without fear men in bed; Only, Williamson never really explained what love was. Catholic priest Benedict Groeschel criticized ACIM and their related organizations. Finding some elements of ACIM to be what he called “severe and potentially dangerous distortions of Christian theology,” he wrote that it is “a good example of a false revelation” and that it has “become a spiritual menace to many.” Not long ago, Williamson said: “Gay men in a very real way created my career.”