Dating : on Marianne Williamson

because America needs a miracle.

Though I’ve never read her books, Marianne Williamson has touched my life.

My mother has been doing her Course in Miracles and finding it profoundly transformative. It’s helped her through a painful year-and-a-half divorce from my father, the man she’d been married to for thirty years. They finalized their divorce on June 14th. My mother’s birthday. My birthday too. Donald Trump’s birthday, weirdly. Happy Birthday to us.

Now, though the pain of loss and re-negged vows isn’t gone, she feels strength in herself again. Not the strength to take down the world, the strength to grow it around her. She is able to care for herself and for others with honesty and compassion for both. At sixty-one, she’s starting a new life in Washington state, where she’s always dreamed of moving. After years of adopting my “stray” friends, she plans to build an intentional community for troubled teens. She has whole new perspectives on caring for herself and her daughters.

There was no dogma; she simply opened, and found love, compassion and trust where before there had been only pain. In love, compassion and trust, she found strength. A new kind of strength. An antifragile strength.

Her opening helped me to open, as it always has. She helped me to process my own pain, as she always has. Her openness to love has allowed me to forgive my father for divorcing her, to understand him in his pain and judge him less. I’m still working on it all, but I am working on it.

Do you find Marianne Williamson annoying? Great, me too.

Not for her views, for the simple fact that any time I tell my mom one of my new ideas, she’ll go on about how A Course in Miracles says that too. Yes, mom. I get it. But Marianne Williamson is B) twice my age, but more importantly A) not your kid, so could you maybe be proud of me for figuring it out too? Jeez.

Still, I am grateful she’s entered our lives.