There is a new prophet for the New Age— and she's no Tammy Faye Bakker. Marianne Williamson is a liberal, Jewish ex-lounge singer from Texas who preaches about Jesus, Jung, and the S&L crisis, and whose supporters—including Bette Midler, David Geffen, Cher, and Shirley MacLaine—raise big bucks for her good works. But, as LESLIE BENNETTS reports, some wonder if Williamson s real mission is to shine brighter than the stars who follow her

Wherever you looked there were stars, from Madonna and Michael to Liz and Warren. If the guests weren't stars, they were studio heads and moguls, agents and directors—"Everyone who runs the town was there," says one. They had gathered at Sandy Gallin's house on this particular night in late February to celebrate the birthday of David Geffen, who had recently been anointed the richest man in a town full of rich men. Suddenly the buzz in the room quieted down and a striking auburn-haired woman in a strapless black sequined gown stepped forward. As host, Gallin—the manager of Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton, as well as one of Geffen's closest friends—had asked Marianne Williamson to lead a prayer for the birthday boy and to give a blessing before the meal. "She made everyone hold hands," one guest recalls. "All these shoguns bowing their heads—it seemed so weird." Mike Ovitz and Frank Mancuso, Peter Guber and Jon Peters, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, Penny Marshall and Jim Brooks, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, Barry Diller and Sid Sheinberg—they did as they were told, and then Williamson began to speak: about remembering Geffen's late mother on the day of his birth, about his extraordinary material bounty, about wishing for David that his worldly success would be accompanied by an equal degree of happiness and inner peace. "Who is that woman?" one nonplussed guest from out of town whispered to Maria Shriver.



It was a question no insider would have asked; Marianne Williamson is not only the guru of the moment in Hollywood and a growing sensation in New York, but also a leading spokeswoman for a quasi-religious phenomenon that is making waves around the country. The doctrine she preaches is culled from a book called A Course in Miracles, which she describes as "a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy." Written over a seven-year period starting in the mid-1960s, A Course in Miracles has since sold 700,000 copies and spawned more than a thousand unofficial "study groups" nationwide. While Williamson didn't write the book, in the last few years she has emerged as its most visible public voice as she lectures on a system of "mind-training" that seems as full of contradictions as Williamson herself is. A left-wing Jew from Texas who makes it clear that her familiarity with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll was achieved through her own long walk on the wild side, the thirty-eight-year-old Williamson is nonetheless a charismatic preacher who draws enormous crowds to hear her lecture on everything from intimacy and relationships to money and careers. Her tapes are traded like baseball cards among aficionados ("I'll give you Fear of Abandonment and Forgiving Your Parents for Death Does Not Exist and Saving the World"), but whatever Williamson's topic, her talks are littered with references to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If that sounds like Christianity, however, the most cursory investigation reveals that many of the tenets of A Course in Miracles directly contradict Christian teachings. Indeed, in some ways the Course has more in common with Eastern religions than with Western ones. Furthermore, a good portion of Williamson's audience seems to be made up of people who consider themselves Jews or atheists or both, just like Helen Schucman, the psychologist who wrote A Course in Miracles (but more on that later, since that part of the story involves not only channeling but direct "dictation" from Jesus).

From the outset, controversy has surrounded A Course in Miracles, which doesn't exactly suffer from false modesty; its adherents bill it as a correction to Christianity, a remedy for centuries of errors in which the original message of Jesus was misinterpreted by organized religions. But although its proponents insist that the Course is not itself a religion, this assurance offers little solace to the fundamentalist Christians who warn that while the Course is dangerously seductive it may well be the work of the Devil. A lot of Jews aren't too thrilled about it either. "What is this, Jews for Jesus?" says one.

Nevertheless, even the most hostile critics of what Williamson preaches are hard-pressed to find fault with the free services she has provided thousands of AIDS patients through the Los Angeles Center for Living and the Manhattan Center for Living, the nonprofit organizations she founded to offer meals, housecleaning, counseling, and even massage to people dealing with what both centers call "life-challenging" illnesses. Williamson has marshaled a dazzling roster of support for her organizations; it is not every fledgling charity that gets Bette Midler to make public-service announcements directed by John Schlesinger or that boasts Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg, Kim Basinger and David Hockney on its honorary board of advisers.

In accomplishing all this, however, Williamson has also attracted a lot of scrutiny from cynics who wonder what she's really up to. The rumor mill revved up another notch last year when she began making wry references to herself as "a pregnant unwed mother" and then gave birth to a baby girl whose paternity remained unknown even to close associates. Her fans make no claim that she's Mother Teresa ("She's Mary Magdalene," one friend says with a grin), but as the checks roll in and Williamson's lecture tapes multiply up and down the Los Angeles freeways, a growing number of skeptics furrow their brows with suspicion. Who is this woman, indeed?

On a mild night in early March, Sotheby's was buzzing with the second annual Fantasy Auction, a benefit for the Manhattan Center for Living. Mike Nichols got things off to a brisk start by bidding $12,000 for "a portrait of your pet by William Wegman." The offerings were all cleverly geared to the well-heeled Manhattan audience—a portrait of your children by Richard Avedon, a gig as an extra in a Woody Allen movie, dinner with Harrison Ford, and other goodies involving such companions as Lauren Bacall, Steve Martin, Liza Minnelli, and Robin Williams. Robert Woolley, Sotheby's effervescent auctioneer, kept the bidding moving at a spirited pace, but through it all Marianne Williamson seemed curiously absent from the spotlight. She was dressed flamboyantly enough, in a chartreuse silk tunic over tight black pants and gold boots, but she spent the entire auction standing by the wall toward the back of the room, watching quietly. The only time she addressed the crowd it was to welcome them, and she was at the lectern for less than two minutes. Some of those in the room held their breath the entire time.

"The big question is, Will she stand up and pray?" one insider reported several days beforehand. "L.A. likes it, New York hates it, and some of the staff and board members here are afraid the checkbooks will snap shut the minute Marianne gets up and starts going on about God." Stung by the rebuke, Williamson indulged in a couple of passionate but private diatribes to friends, but when the time came she obediently limited herself to talking about "vibrations of love and understanding" and mentioned Himself only once. "We bless all of you and ask that you all join with us in blessing God," she said, so fast that if you coughed you missed it.

The limousine liberals were relieved, but the incident was an ominous symptom of growing tensions between Williamson and many of those in her New York organization—tensions that would explode into open warfare little more than a month later. Afterward, back home in Los Angeles, Williamson found it difficult to conceal her exasperation. "God is definitely out of the closet. I refuse to pretend we don't pray here," she said impatiently, clearly fed up with the hip New York attitude that people who talk about God are either charlatans or fools. "One of the reasons the political right wing in this country has had such an upsurge in popularity is because they have at least acknowledged the idea of God, and the so-called liberals have lost by default. The left wing is too cool to even mention God, so Middle America thinks, Well, I guess God's in the Republican Party."

Her admirers are even more vehement about the supercilious attitude Williamson often elicits. "It's easy to make fun of people who are coming from a spiritual place," says Geffen. "It's very New Age, and that's reason enough for a lot of people to snicker. I think people are generally suspicious of anyone who is involved in spiritual causes, but there's no question Marianne is genuine, and she does a lot of good work. She's not some new version of Aimee Semple McPherson. She doesn't hold herself out to be a perfect person, but she takes care of people who are in trouble and who are dying. She's also able to articulate things that are valuable for people to hear. People are alienated from their families, from religion, and she's found a way to bring them together. She's not a saint, but she does aspire to do good work and to inspire other people to do good work. This is her calling; she decided to do this. I'm pretty cynical, but I'm incredibly moved by what she does."

It is 7:25 on a Wednesday night at the Manhattan Center for Living, a loft space on lower Broadway, and the room is so full that people are standing along the walls. Most of them look quite healthy, although some have begun to betray the emaciated pallor of advancing illness. The monthly HIV-positive support group Williamson leads is about to begin, and tonight people are particularly disturbed by the recent death of Edward Stierle, a Joffrey Ballet star who had made a deep impression with his constructive attitude while dealing with AIDS.

Williamson's answer to this problem, like her answer to virtually any other, is to be found in the underlying principles of A Course in Miracles. To be sure, she interprets them in her own inimitable way.

The left wing is too cool to even mention God, so Middle America thinks, Well I guess God's in the Republican Party.

''Eddie did not die," Williamson says firmly. "He is no longer on Channel 4, and our sets are tuned to Channel 4; he's on Channel 7, but he's still broadcasting. Physical incarnation is highly overrated; it is one corner of universal possibility. The life-force cannot be destroyed—Eddie Stierle is here with us now. Besides, we will all die. Some of us will take the 9:30 and some of us will take the 10:07, but we are all leaving." And on she goes for two hours straight, listening to people spill out their most agonizing personal problems, dispensing advice like some hip New Age Ann Landers, making them laugh, bringing them to tears, leading them in prayer, and finally sending everyone out into the night comforted, as much by her passionate certitude as by the fellowship of a group of kindred souls. One woman with AIDS wants to know how to prepare her fourteen-year-old daughter for her death. A young man devastated by the intolerance of his Southern Baptist grandmother, who won't forgive him for being gay, needs help in dealing with his rage and pain. Williamson is compassionate but tough, refusing to coddle people if she thinks they're being self-indulgent or dishonest, while at the same time offering constructive suggestions for practical problems, all with the spiritual underpinnings of A Course in Miracles.

Although gay men threatened by AIDS make up a large portion of Williamson's most ardent following, she is also drawing a more diverse crowd to her monthly lectures at Town Hall. The first time I went, the ticket line—the suggested admission fee is ten dollars—stretched down the block, Roy Scheider was waiting in front of me, and by the time Williamson strode onstage, every seat in the house was taken. The crowd, which included men and women of all ages, many of them in couples, was affluent and professional; these were clearly not marginal people. "The subject for tonight is intimacy," Williamson announced. "I bet you think it's everybody else's problem." Everyone laughed, and for the next three hours, 1,500 people sat spellbound as Williamson delivered a fervent sermon about a Course in Miracles perspective on relationships, which emphasizes being a loving person in general rather than focusing on finding the "right" person to love. "If Mother Teresa were in this country, people would be saying, 'Is that woman an enabler or what!' We'll accept it in Mother Teresa because she's old and in India, but here we talk about co-dependency all the time," she said, shaking her head. "It's our excuse for being cold and selfish. Nurturing one another is what it's all about, and this generation has a long way to go before we love too much."

Although Williamson makes it clear she disagrees with many of the self-help gurus who make fortunes on the lovelorn, some of her material is familiar to anyone who's ever read a pop-psych book on intimacy. "People are always saying to me, 'I keep attracting unavailable people,' " Williamson said. "I used to say that all the time. But you know what I found out? The unavailable person was me. The flip side of being attracted to unavailable people is how bored you are by available people. Available people are terrifying, because they want to hang around long enough to know you, to like you, to accept you. The problem is not that you attract unavailable people—the problem is that you give them your number."

In talking about contemporary problems, Williamson unquestionably plays to the experience of her generation. But even when the topic is sex, the religious dimension in her talks is inescapable; references to Jesus and the Holy Spirit abound, although Williamson carefully explains that A Course in Miracles uses His name as a metaphor. "All that Christ is is the unconditionally loving essence of every person," she says. Not that she stops there; her talks are laced with a dizzying variety of other references, and if her knowledge of some subjects is little more than skin-deep, her scope is nonetheless awesome. Williamson's March lecture at Town Hall, delivered the night before Passover and Good Friday, was a wide-ranging analysis of Christian symbolism, but her allusions encompassed Jewish history and legend, Buddhist and other Eastern traditions, the hole in the ozone layer and air pollution, hunger and homelessness, nuclear Armageddon, the war in the Gulf, Greek tragedy, the politics of the television industry, white-collar crime and the S&L crisis, the theory of evolution, brain research, Jung's theory of synchronicity, Buckminster Fuller, Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, and assorted manifestations of pop culture that ran from Dances with Wolves and The Mission to a recent Barbara Walters interview with Julia Roberts. Williamson's words tumble out so fast it seems she is hardly able to keep up with her racing mind; her synthesis is seamless, her syntax impeccable, her delivery often hilarious, and she never falters for a moment.

The effect on her listeners can be dramatic. "The first time I went to see her it was like the Liberty Bell fell on my head," says Howard Rosenman, a Los Angeles-based film producer. "Here was this gorgeous Jewish chick who obviously came from a sophisticated, neurotic Texas Jewish background, talking in the argot of my generation, bringing together strands of sociology, politics, anthropology, history, science, and the Bible. The community she's addressing is a group that partied and drugged and sexualized through the sixties and seventies, and here comes this woman who looks like one of us, who you know could have been at Studio 54 or dancing at Fire Island Pines with a tambourine on her hip—and yet she's talking like Jesus Christ. She's talking about the most fundamental precepts. She's talking about the Golden Rule."

For those who knew her in her earlier days, Williamson's metamorphosis into a guru comes as something of a shock. Twenty-odd years ago, movie producer Lynda Obst was Williamson's roommate at Pomona College in California, where Williamson, who wanted to be an actress, was studying drama. "Marianne was a lounge singer the last time I checked in with her," says Obst, who lost track of Marianne for a number of years—until the night Rosenman took Obst to a Course in Miracles lecture. "The place was filled to capacity with the most attractive people I've ever seen in L.A.," Obst reports. "You couldn't get a seat, but Howard announced, 'This is her roommate,' and it went through the whole room—'her roommate, her roommate, her roommate!'—and they parted the waters for me. Marianne was late, and she swept in like Indira Gandhi. I'm thinking, This is complete and total madness—and then she starts speaking. She starts with A Course in Miracles, and all of a sudden she's doing Hegel and Kierkegaard and by halftime I was completely knocked out. I thought, I guess I didn't do too bad after all— my roommate's God! When she calls me now, my secretary says, 'God's on 3.' "

And how did Marianne get from there to here? Obst ponders this for a moment. "I think she sort of invented herself," she says.

Looking pale and wan, Williamson is curled up in an armchair in the living room of her apartment, a modest two-bedroom in an undistinguished modem building just off Sunset Boulevard. She is so authoritative and commanding onstage that it is startling to discover how small she is, how fragile-looking. Today, clad in a baggy brown sweater and khaki pants, she is wearing no makeup, and she looks like a tired schoolgirl. Her normal schedule is enough to exhaust anyone; she speaks half a dozen times a week, not counting all the weddings, funerals, and baptisms where she makes an appearance. "She works seven full days a week," says Williamson's mother. Going to the gym seems to be her only recreational activity. However, since the birth of her daughter, India Emmaline, a year ago, Williamson tries to hold meetings and conduct as much of her business as possible at home. Not that she's exactly the model of domesticity. "I told my mother I was redoing my kitchen," Williamson reports. "She said, 'Darling, wouldn't it be more in keeping with your life-style if you walled it off?' "

Williamson is enthralled with being a mother, although she is forthright about the fact that she would prefer to get married so her child would have a father in residence. Williamson's boyfriends have been many and various, but the one constant seems to be that they don't last; at the moment, yet another romance appears to be fizzling. If marriage remains one of Williamson's goals, however, she makes no apologies for her choice to become a single mother. "I didn't consider for a moment not having the baby," she says. "To me there's nothing sinful about having a child out of wedlock. For me, to have had a child and not be married is many things, but it's not hypocritical." Still, motherhood does throw a few kinks into your schedule. "My daughter's going to be in a therapist's office thirty years from now going, 'And then she left me to go to all these fucking meetings!' " she says with a sigh.

Williamson openly admits that her own earlier years were difficult ones, and that for a long time her search for a meaningful spiritual path seemed hopeless. But she takes full responsibility for her difficulties—she makes it clear in her lectures that enlightenment does not entail blaming your parents for your problems, and she has only loving things to say about her own. She grew up in comfortable circumstances in Houston, where her father was a lawyer. His father, a socialist Russian Jew named Vishnevetsky, had immigrated to the United States via England, where he took his new name from the side of a locomotive marked ALAN WILLIAMSON LTD. Marianne's father retained a progressive approach toward politics. "He was an armchair revolutionary," Marianne says with affection. When she was thirteen, she came home one day and announced that her teacher had said that if we didn't fight in Vietnam we'd be fighting on the shores of Hawaii. Her father's response was to take the whole family to Vietnam "to make sure the military-industrial complex didn't eat my brain and convince me that war was O.K.," as Williamson puts it.

In retrospect, Williamson seems to view the fact that she spent her twenties in a growing state of existential despair as unrelated to her childhood. "I grew up with great parents, and I turned out messed-up," she says with a shrug. Some of her friends are skeptical, "from what I've gathered, Marianne has spent her life trying to get her family's approval," observes one. "She had a remote father and a disapproving mother—it's a double whammy." Not that Williamson was an easy child to raise. "Whatever sounded outrageous, I wanted to do it," she writes in her book in progress, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. "Every door marked 'no' by conventional standards seemed to hold the key to some lascivious pleasure I just had to have."

She didn't miss many. These days she has a humorous attitude toward her past— when I ask her what she did during her twenties, she says ruefully, "Drugs and men"—but at the time it wasn't so funny. "I had no idea what to do with my life," she writes. "I went from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, looking for anything that would give me some sense of identity or purpose. . . . There was some huge rock of self-loathing sitting like a pit in the middle of my stomach during those years, and it got worse with every failure. My pain deepened, and so did my interest in philosophy. ... I always sensed there was some mysterious cosmic order to things, but I could never figure out how it applied to my own life. ... By my mid-twenties, I was a total mess." In her lectures these days, Williamson often refers to what she calls "one big personal conflagration." Sometimes she even makes cracks about falling apart: "A nervous breakdown is a highly underrated vehicle for spiritual transformation," she says with a grin. But if she refuses to take herself too seriously, she makes it clear that the pain was very real. "I've had the experience of being on the floor, the kind where you're already seeing a psychiatrist five times a week but you still need an extra push if you're ever going to get up, " she says. ' 'That period of darkness completely informs what I do now."

Williamson resists getting specific about the immediate cause of her pain, although the demise of a brief early marriage was part of it. ''Like a lot of people in our generation, I went too far and I crashed," she says. ''It's not drugs, it's not alcohol; for me it had more to do with men—and my own hysterical personality. My wildness and my craziness ended up having consequences, and I came out of that period wanting, from the depth of my being, to be a good woman. We do not have, in this generation, a base of consciousness about service and devotion and reverence. The world is dominated by a thought system of selfishness. But I really wanted to devote the rest of my life to helping people. Suffering gives you X-ray vision into other people's suffering."

The opportunity arrived in the late seventies with A Course in Miracles. At first Williamson was put off by the heavy dose of Christ and the Holy Spirit, but eventually she got hooked. The book is heavy metaphysical sledding, but in time she made herself into something of an authority. She also managed to reconcile it with her sense of her own Jewishness. "A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity," she says. ''It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart. The Messiah is not a person but a point of view."

This is not a position that would gladden the hearts of most rabbis, but at least her parents seem to have accepted the work Williamson has chosen. "She associates it with the Golden Rule," her mother says. "I used to kid her about being like Aimee Semple McPherson, but Marianne says, 'Jesus and the Holy Spirit— Mother, they're just words for goodness. I am not spouting Christianity.' If I'd been asked what I would have preferred for her to have done, I would have said, Be a lawyer. I think she would have been a terrific lawyer. But this brings her happiness."

It has also brought her increasing renown. When Williamson moved to Los Angeles in 1983, she says, "I had $1,000, I knew one person, and I didn't have a job." She started working at the Philosophical Research Society, which offered a lecture series, and before long she had begun to speak on A Course in Miracles. At first fifteen people would turn out, then forty; soon it was a hundred. She began renting space in churches, and her audiences grew. Four years ago she started speaking in New York once a month as well. Then one day Williamson had lunch with a close friend who had been battling breast cancer. "She said that for years she had been looking for someone to help her heal and now she needed someone to help her die." Thus was born the idea for the Center for Living.

On a radiant spring day in Los Angeles, Williamson has stopped by the church where volunteers prepare the meals for Project Angel Food to help out with the lunchtime food deliveries. The kitchen is bustling: two middle-aged women and a young black man peel garlic cloves, a blonde woman in tights minces parsley, another woman separates eggs. "I started out as a client and when I got better I became a volunteer," says a former art-gallery owner named Mark. "Everyone I knew was dying, and the people here were so nice and attractive. Every once in a while there's even a movie star cooking."

Project Angel Food volunteers deliver some two hundred meals daily to homebound clients throughout the Los Angeles area. Sometimes local florists donate flowers, and today there are buckets full of irises and daffodils and freesias to be distributed. "When they get flowers they call up weeping," says Freddie Weber, the director of operations.

The project is an outreach program of the Los Angeles Center for Living, which was born in 1987 after Williamson mentioned the idea at her lecture and David Geffen contributed $50,000. Two years later, the Manhattan Center for Living was founded with the aid of another $50,000 from Geffen. While neither center is officially associated with A Course in Miracles, its emphasis on service to others has been a powerful impetus behind their growth, and a lot of the volunteers were originally inspired by Williamson's lectures.

Many people see the anxieties of the age of AIDS as a primary explanation for the growing popularity of A Course in Miracles, which asserts that all human beings are innocent and carries none of the judgmental sting of Christianity. Also, the Course isn't a church; there's nothing to join, no dues to pay, only the book to read for those who so choose. This alone is problematic, however; one of the first obstacles confronting anyone who explores A Course in Miracles is the question of the book's origin. In 1965, Bill Thetford was the director of the psychology department of the Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Helen Schucman was a married Jewish psychologist who worked with him. Friends say privately that although Schucman loved her husband she was in love with Thetford, who was gay. The official story simply states that theirs was a stressful professional environment, and one day, fed up with the tension and hostilities that surrounded him, Thetford burst out, "There must be a better way, and I'm determined to find it!" Surely a more cooperative attitude and a strategy of emphasizing the good rather than the negative could improve their work lives, he reasoned. Shortly thereafter, Schucman underwent an unsettling period of psychic experiences in which she seemed to "know" things she couldn't have known through normal means, and during this time she became familiar with an inner voice that would speak to her. Then one night Schucman telephoned Thetford in a panic and told him that the inner voice would not leave her alone. "It keeps saying, 'This is a course in miracles. Please take notes,' " she reported in a great state of agitation. Schucman feared for her very sanity; Thetford tried to reassure her, and suggested she do what the voice told her.

Schucman sat down to record what would become, over the next seven years, a 1,188-page, three-volume work, all of it "dictated" by a source she became convinced was Jesus. Every morning the latest installment was typed up for her by Thetford, who provided the moral support Schucman needed to continue. Schucman, who considered herself an atheist, was deeply threatened by the spiritual content of the material and resentful of the time taken up by the "dictation," but she also felt compelled to finish it.

Thetford and Schucman were quite secretive about the manuscript, fearing that if they revealed the story of its origins their reputations would be harmed, but eventually they began showing it to a select few people. Its impact on those they chose was extraordinary. Kenneth Wapnick, who had been raised as a Jew and earned his Ph.D. in psychology, has since devoted his life to the Course and currently runs the Foundation for A Course in Miracles in upstate New York. Judith Skutch, whose background was also Jewish, was teaching experimental parapsychology at New York University when she met Schucman and Thetford, and she ended up supervising the first publication of the Course in 1975. Skutch remains the president of the Foundation for Inner Peace, a nonprofit organization in California that is dedicated to publishing the book.

Both Schucman and Thetford have died, and to the end of her life Schucman remained ambivalent about what she had wrought. "It was an embarrassment to her, and she wanted nothing to do with it," says Roger Walsh, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of California at Irvine who met Schucman before her death in 1981. To those who knew her, Schucman always seemed a troubled person; Willis Harman, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, once asked Schucman why she herself did not seem to have benefited from the unusual document that had brought peace to so many others. "I know the Course is true, Bill," Schucman said, "but I don't believe it."

Thousands of others do. For an obscure discipline that doesn't go in for self-promotion and that has received almost no attention from the mainstream media, A Course in Miracles has spread with remarkable efficacy and prompted some grandiose predictions. "I believe that over the centuries the Course will probably come to play as important a role in the world as the Bible has, but I think it will take time, because the world isn't ready for it," says Wapnick. "It's a deceptive book, because it's not simple; it talks about love and peace, but it's not just a self-help book—it's a profound thought system, and it's quite radical in what it teaches."

The ranks of literal believers are augmented by others who take a more tempered view. Dr. Walsh, a specialist in comparative religion, doesn't believe that the Course was actually dictated by Jesus, but he acknowledges that other explanations are problematic. "I don't believe Schucman could have dictated this from her conscious mind," he says. "I don't think she had the background knowledge, the depth of wisdom, and the profound insight into the workings of the mind that this thing shows. There's no really satisfactory explanation of the whole so-called inner-dictation process, but this type of thing has been going on throughout recorded history and has had a major impact on all kinds of religions, from parts of the Koran and many Tibetan texts to mystical Judaism to the allusions to it in the Bible. My own guess is that people who do this are basically tapping into deeper levels of the psyche, and that in some circumstances people can produce writings that seem to go beyond their own levels of experience and knowledge. The Course is a very psychologically sophisticated piece of work in its discussion of subjects like identity, ego, defense mechanisms, perception, and projection, and some of these insights are on a par with some of the best writings I've seen in either Western or Eastern traditions. There's an enormous emphasis in the Course on the cultivation of love, and there's a much more extensive and sophisticated treatment of forgiveness than I've seen in any other religious tradition, including Christianity." Such encomiums fail to impress those who peruse A Course in Miracles and find banal popspeak instead of eternal verities. "It's complete gibberish," says one critic. "It's typical Southern California New Age bullshit. All these people, in a month or a year or a decade, will turn to yet another Southern California New Age bunch of bullshit, and the leader of that one will also say that his text will be as important as the Bible."

The staying power of many contemporary evangelists and cult leaders does seem to be rather fleeting of late. Werner Erhard was portrayed on 60 Minutes as a sadist who raped his daughter; according to the Los Angeles Times, John-Roger, the last darling of the Southern California smart set, was a sexual predator who allegedly seduced his male followers and misused funds. (He denied all.) Jim Bakker went to jail, and Jimmy Swaggart's reputation crashed and burned at the hands of a New Orleans hooker. None of that makes any difference to the growing crowds who gather in ever larger auditoriums to hear Marianne Williamson.

Although her listeners unquestionably turn out in part because her personality is so compelling, she frequently cautions that she is ultimately beside the point. "I didn't write A Course in Miracles. I'm just giving a book report," she says. "Nobody comes to A Course in Miracles thinking that I personally have the answer. The Course attracts a very sophisticated breed of thinker; it's not a path for people who are looking for someone else to do it for them. It's a lifelong study, and there is no graduation day." Nor does she seem particularly concerned with spreading the word, as opposed to merely offering it. "Your purity lies in putting out your truth to the best of your ability, and as soon as you get involved in trying to proselytize, your purity is compromised," she says.

As she tells it, what she wants personally is simple: "Peace in my own life. I go through the same growth processes everyone else goes through. My goal is the deepening of my own ability to practice the principles myself. ' ' As for her worldly ambitions, in some ways she remains her father's daughter. "Social revolution is at the center of my being," she says with a smile, "but ultimately I had to realize that love is a more revolutionary position than hatred as a motivator; it's less sensational but more effective. My interest is in the creation of an enlightened society."

Williamson is very explicit about the fact that the spiritual discipline she teaches is not merely an individual path. "Spiritual seeking without service is self-indulgent," she says firmly. "People who are into crystals and rainbows and who use spiritual principles as a how-to to help you get what you want—that's not what A Course in Miracles is about. A Course in Miracles is about serious devotion to the idea that you are healed to the extent that you allow your life to be used. Service is a direct beam to God. Cynicism is easy; anyone can sneer and jeer. Hope is born of participating in hopeful solutions. As we said in the sixties, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

A Course in Miracles has no monopoly on altruism, of course; social activism is a basic tenet of both Judaism and Christianity, among other religions. However, it is undeniably true that Williamson is motivating segments of the population who have no interest in organized religion and who had previously seemed immune to the idea of unselfish giving. And up until now, despite the obvious materialism of many of the yuppies who flock to hear her, she herself has maintained a certain aura of purity, showing little interest or aptitude for cashing in on her popularity. Her audiences are supposed to pay a modest admission fee to her lectures, but Williamson's policy has always been that people pay what they can or want and that no one is turned away. And most of Williamson's services are free, such as the HIV-positive support groups, the prayer groups, and the individual counseling she does when someone seems to need it. She drives a battered black Peugeot, buys designer clothes on sale at discount stores or not at all, and takes no money from the Centers for Living. However, her appeal is such that exploitation by more commercial sectors seems inevitable. "People at CAA keep telling me, 'She's a gold mine!' " says Steve Sager, a real-estate developer who is helping to promote Williamson. "I think they mean she needs to be marketed—big. Tapes, direct mail, video, radio shows, television shows... " Such developments wouldn't surprise some of Williamson's more cynical observers, who point to her rapid rise as de facto evidence of her ambitions. In recent weeks, opinions on Williamson have grown more polarized as longstanding tensions with some of her associates at the Manhattan Center for Living flared into open hostilities. First the executive director of the center, Regina Hoover, wrote a poisonous memo to the program director, Cynthia O'Neal, ordering her to stop "undermining and discrediting others" at the center and to stop "maligning Marianne Williamson" in particular. O'Neal, who had first met Williamson at one of her lectures, had started out as a great admirer, but their relations had grown strained even before O'Neal instigated the campaign to dissuade Williamson from offering a prayer at the Sotheby's benefit in March. After receiving Hoover's memo, O'Neal promptly resigned, setting off a furor among board members, staffers, and even clients at the center. Some called for Hoover to be fired and O'Neal reinstated; others felt O'Neal was an ongoing source of discord and should be permitted to bow out despite the protests of many clients who had grown attached to her. Further complicating the situation was the fact that O'Neal, a former actress, was responsible for much of the fund-raising and many of the heavy hitters who have supported the center through her longtime friendships with people such as Mike Nichols and Stephen Sondheim. As for Williamson, she denied putting Hoover up to writing the memo, but some insiders were not convinced. "This is not really about Regina and Cynthia, it's about Marianne and Cynthia," said one exasperated board member. Others threatened to resign, further eroding the center's infrastructure.

Through it all, however, Williamson maintained an outward calm, telling everyone that the most important thing was to remember the clients and not to let individual egos get in the way of the services they were trying to provide those in need. Such admonitions did little to smooth ruffled feathers. "I can't even go to her lectures anymore, she's such a hypocrite," said one board member. "She pretends it's all about doing good, and it's really all about power." Another added, "Marianne wants it to be all Marianne's. For whatever reason, she is comfortable only when she controls everything. In Los Angeles the board is made up of Course in Miracles people who are passionate in their devotion to her, and I don't think she's ever been comfortable with the independence of the board in New York. She's always been jealous of Cynthia, and she's willing to sacrifice the emotional center for the clients, which is Cynthia, for the sake of having a board and an executive director who will do what she wants them to do."

Williamson's defenders argued that since Marianne had founded the organization and was the president of the board, she had every right to want a cooperative staff, and that it was unfair to charge her with a mania for control simply because she didn't want her creation usurped by hostile rivals.

In one sense, what it all came down to was, like Helen Schucman's opus, a question of faith: is Marianne Williamson the selfless missionary she presents herself as being, or is she a calculating operator who, given five years and a deluge of money and publicity, will have turned into a monster? Her more charitable friends maintain that a taste for the limelight in no way invalidates Williamson's good works. "She's playing a win-win game for herself," says Howard Rosenman. "Here she's preaching the gospel of giving and love and goodness, and what she's getting out of it is fame. She wanted to be a nightclub singer; she wanted to be needed, to be powerful, to be recognized, to be fawned over. She's getting what she wanted: she's a star. She's not venal like Werner Erhard, and yet she's not Mother Teresa either. Somewhere in the scale of good works, let's say Marianne gets an eight or a nine out of ten. So she takes two for herself and has a nice Armani dress— she doesn't have yachts and four hundred servants, and she's giving back to the community."

Williamson dismisses talk of stardom. "A Course in Miracles says that no person's any more special than another, in terms of their potential," she says. "Charisma was originally a religious term; it means 'of the spirit.' I exist to empower other people. I'm a teacher; teachers love to teach. This is a privilege and an honor and a blessing, and it's my high."

It's also great entertainment, and some of her savviest friends think that a big future is virtually guaranteed. "I think she can become a household word," says Sandy Gallin.

"She'll write books, she'll become a televangelist, and I think she'll be on the cover of Time magazine within five years," predicts Rosenman. "She's a modern-day shaman, a witch doctor. And the great thing about Marianne is that she is able to look at the irony of her own persona and laugh and get off on it. She's not self-righteous. But she has her eye on the ball all the time."