years ago, that Williamson seems to find
the most spiritual resonance. She has
written about the "magical overtones of
an eccentric father" and tells how he
took her to Saigon as a teen to "show
me what war was."
She has told audiences that while her
father called himself a Jewish atheist, she
has labeled him "one of the deepest
Christians I know.
"I believe that my father used to say ,
that he was a Jewish atheist with a twin-
kle in his eye," she said.
At the same time, one gets the sense
that her father did not completely
approve of his daughter's spiritual path.
She describes a conversation with him,
in which she struggled to assure him
that she was still, in essence, a Jew.
"My father, early in my career, took
me aside and said quite sternly, 'It's the
same God, isn't it?"' she recalled in a
stubborn girlish voice. "I said, 'Oh yes,
Daddy, it's the same God.' And he said,
`Well, don't let me hear that it's not.'"
While Williamson has several kind
memories of her hometown rabbi, she
questions whether the lackluster Jewish
education she received as a child at a
Conservative shul in Houston can be
blamed for her turning elsewhere for
spiritual succor — a premise she ulti-
mately rejects.
"One rabbi, from Israel, when I com-
plained to him in a pretty self-justifying
tone that the rabbis in my childhood
should have taught me the mystical fruit
of my own religion, I was told some-
thing that has stayed with me. He told
me something that I desperately needed
to hear.
"He said, 'You talk as though there
was some conspiracy. You talk as though
their goal was to assimilate this way.
This is not what occurred. The great
rabbis of Eastern Europe did not come
here. Before the war when the great
waves of immigration were occurring
into the United States, the great rabbini-
cal teachers actually had a line in Yid-
dish that meant, God's not in America.'
"He said the chain got broken. He
said, 'In way too many cases we lost our
great teachers. They died in a Holocaust.
It's not like there was an intention to be
shallow,"' Williamson continued.
"It's my responsibility to learn
Uudaism)," she said, but, "By the time I
was even at an age to know where to go
to learn it, or even had any stirring in
my heart ... I had already been claimed."
At the same time, Williamson is
firmly committed to providing a Jewish
education for Emma, for whom she
wrote the children's book, Emma and
Mommy Talk to God.
Emma, who currently attends a local

10/2
1998

76 Detroit Jewish News

Montessori school, is enrolled in a
Reform movement Hebrew Sunday
school program.
"Clearly, [Emma] hears from me
things that are outside the theological
dimensions of traditional Judaism. That
is true. But I go to these things as a Jew,
and that is my grounding. And I am
very committed to that being hers as
well.
"That's what's ironic here — it's more
than heritage for me. It's tribal, it's theo-
logical," Williamson said with a laugh.
"It's way beyond culture, it's beyond eth-
nicity — it's about our relationship with
God."
Williamson said she has also met
with rabbis in Los Angeles and in
Michigan, including Rabbi Daniel Syme
of Temple Beth El. Syme, who calls
himself an "admirer of her writings,"
said he respects Williamson's search for
her spiritual self But he challenges her
inability to find spiritual sustenance in
Judaism.

identity or purpose, some feeling that
my life had finally kicked in ... I sank
deeper and deeper into my own neu-
rotic patterns, seeking relief in food,
drugs, people, or whatever else I could
find."
She happened upon A Course in Mir-
acles at a friend's apartment, but was put
off by its Christian orientation. She
avoided the books for a year, but picked
them up again and discovered that they
spoke to her.
"I felt," she wrote, "that I had come
home."
At that point, Williamson's life
changed. She began "sharing" her under-
standing of the Course with people in
Los Angeles and her career took of
After more than a decade in Los
Angeles, however, Williamson was ready
for a change. She said she "missed the
life" she had in the early '80s, when she
worked with people who had AIDS and
HIV, and lived a life closer to the com-
munity.

Carole Kabrin doesn't find
Unity contrary to Judaism.

"While there are congregations that
don't promote spirituality, Judaism itself
is one of the richest sources of spirituali-
ty of all the world's faiths. That's why
we've been around for 4,000 years. If
Judaism itself was not meeting people's
spiritual needs, it would have disap-
peared a long time ago," Syme said.
Williamson's own spiritual journey
began more than two decades ago when,
by her own admission, she was a "total
mess."
"I didn't know what to do with my
life," Williamson wrote with charac-
teristic frankness in A Return to Love.
"I remember my parents kept begging
me to do something. I went from rela-
tionship to relationship, job to job,
city to city, looking for some sense of

Although she is now based in the
Midwest, Williamson does not hide the
fact that she is a somebody even if she's
not maintaining the heady lifestyle of
the late 1980s, when her name was
splashed across celebrity gossip columns
everywhere. Williamson made headlines
as she cozied up to Oprah on the
"Oprah Winfrey Show," performed a
marriage ceremony for Elizabeth Taylor,
and lunched with Hillary Clinton.
Regardless of what "really was" back
in those.days, she earned her stripes as a
gifted orator and founder of several
charities, including the now-defunct
New York and Los Angeles Centers for
Living, which provided free non-medical
support services for people with AIDS
and cancer.

Another charity, Project Angel Food,
a meal delivery program for some 1,000
people who are homebound or disabled
by HIV/AIDS, is still in existence in Los
Angeles.
Williamson is still an in-demand
speaker, with engagements booked
through the next year. She leads spiritual
tours through a company called Spiritu-
al Pilgrimages to Egypt, Stonehenge,
Crete and Greece and established the
American Renaissance Alliance in Wash-
ington, D.C., a group she hopes will
bring spiritual values into the political
arena.
The Alliance is one instrument for
Williamson to achieve her striking polit-
ical agenda. Another is her newest book,
The Healing of America, a social com-
mentary with instruction to help Ameri-
ca attain true equality and justice. In
both, racial reconciliation is an impor-
tant theme.
Williamson is moving away from a
purely internal message and asking her
audience to turn outward, to work to
improve the country and the world. She
said she hopes to prick America's social
conscience and make Americans realize
that economics are not more important
than humanitarianism.
Her views will feel familiar to many
Jews, as they are those of a "stereotypical
Jewish liberal," Williamson noted.
"A nation has a spiritual life that
must be attended to, every bit as much
as an individual has a spiritual life that
must be attended to," she said.
"The heart of that, to me, is living in
compassion, non-judgment, and service.
I believe that God would have us attend
to human suffering and to alleviate it in
any way that we can. I don't see how
any of us can take our religious lives seri-
ously and tolerate with equanimity the
needless suffering in this country and
around the world."
In this light, leaving California for
Warren could be Williamson's way of
tending to her own soul. The move
can also be seen as a bid to enhance
her credibility before she moves to
conquer bigger audiences, and perhaps
parlay her popularity into a political
careen
During a recent Internet chat,
Williamson wrote, "I have something up
my sleeve ... It's nothing I can talk about
yet, because it is in a seminal phase, but
it would involve a more action-oriented
approach regarding these (political)
issues."
But in person, Williamson is evasive,
saying only, "I feel like I'm where I want
to be right now The present is so full
that I assume the future will take care of
itself." El

