HealingHQ.com discusses some of today’s most timely issues with our friend, internationally acclaimed author and lecturer Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson is the best-selling author of nine books, including A Return to Love and Everyday Grace. A regular guest on television programs such as Oprah, Larry King Live and Good Morning America, she is also the founder of The Peace Alliance, a grass roots campaign supporting legislation currently before Congress to establish a U.S. Department of Peace. She currently hosts her own radio show on the XM Radio block “Oprah and Friends” and is working on her latest title, Miracles at Midlife, set for release later this year. In December 2006, Newsweek magazine named Williamson one of the 50 most influential baby boomers.

What is the best thing someone can do to empower him or herself?
The issue isn’t really to empower yourself, so much as to remember the power that already lies within you. God has already empowered you. You experience your own power when you use it on behalf of others. You experience the love within you when you extend that love to others. Love is the only real power.

What do you do outside of your lectures to impact your community in a positive way?
I’m the chairman of an organization called the Peace Alliance, a grass roots campaign supporting legislation to establish a United States Department of Peace. Over the last 20 years, there has been an explosion of peace-building expertise throughout the United States. The campaign has activists in all 50 states and is making tremendous inroads. Over 300 colleges and universities in America give advanced degrees in peace-building. There should be an institutional platform within the functioning of our government so that serious resources are applied to all that talent. We need peace-building options – from nonviolent communication skills to ethnic and interreligious healing modalities – to augment our current problem-solving options.

Tolerance is always a heated subject. What is the best way for people of different faiths to live in harmony?
James Madison said that tolerance is not enough. Tolerance still implies judgment. It’s difficult to live in true harmony with someone if they feel from you an underlying contempt. Ultimately, we will not have true harmony until more people consider the possibility that those who do not agree with them might have a valid point too. And that includes a valid perspective on God.

What about those who use religion as a means to create war?
Hypocrites, all.

At least in Western culture, spirituality and science have often been considered mutually exclusive. Do you see these merging together or as separate entities?
I love Einstein’s comment, “The more I know about physics, the more interested I am in metaphysics.” At their highest, science and spirituality merge. Spirituality is truth. Science is its alphabet.
 
You are very politically active. With the 2008 election race already in full force, the question keeps being asked: Is America ready for a black or female President? Do you think that’s even a relevant question?
I think America is ready for a radical departure from the policies and perspective that have been dominating our government for the last 6-8 years. Whoever articulates the most positive and hopeful direction, regardless of color or gender, will carry the day.

What is your stance on religious leaders participating in politics? Should church and state be completely separate?
The separation of church and state is a very profound and enlightened principle at the center of our Constitution for a very important reason. Our founding fathers were protecting our governmental functioning from undue religious influence and they were also protecting the freedom of religion from governmental interference. Both are extremely important. But our founders were in no way trying to suppress the spiritual or religious impulse in America. To the contrary, they were doing everything they could to protect that influence. A person doesn’t give up their role as citizen when they take on the mantle of spiritual conviction. If you are convicted spiritually, this conviction does not just inform part of your life – it informs all of your life. Our spiritual function is to bring forth the light of love into all corners of our lives. We are here to enlighten our personal lives but we are also here to enlighten politics, economics and society at large.

What about the importance of healing? There’s so much devastation going on, but at the same time, people are getting active and seeing this as a time to regenerate and move forward in our consciousness. Are we on a positive path?
Yes, of course, of course! We are a wounded species living on a wounded planet and healing ourselves and each other is our mission here. Healing is the most important mission and love heals all. We are living at a time of extraordinary split between forces of fear and forces of love. I think that with every breath we take and every thought we think we contribute to one or the other. None of us are perfectly loving all the time, but whatever efforts we make in that direction are helping to heal the world.

For more information, visit: www.marianne.com and www.dpalliance.org


Interview by Mar Yvette