Healing the Soul of America
Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Healing That Reaches Beyond the Self
In this landmark work, Marianne Williamson reminds us that there is a point in everyone's spiritual journey where the search for self-awareness can turn into self-preoccupation. All of us are better off when contemplation of holy principles is at the center of our lives. But it is in applying those principles in our lives that we forge the true marriage between heaven and earth.
In the compassionate but clear-eyed prose that has won her so many avid readers, Williamson shows us that the principles which apply to our personal healing also apply to the healing of the larger world. Calling on Americans to turn the compassion in our hearts into a powerful force for social good, Williamson shows us how to transform spiritual activism into a social activism that will in turn transform America into a nation seriously invested in the hope of every child and in the potential of every adult.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bludgeoning readers with grandiose good intentions, this exuberant exhortation by Williamson (Illuminata) to return to America's founding principles gives the sensation of being assaulted by a college roommate in the throes of a late-night epiphany. Williamson claims that in the "yang" of the Industrial Revolution and our subsequent technological and political expansion, the U.S. lost the "yin" spirit that suffused the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. "We have the yang; we must reclaim the yin. We have the intelligence; we must retrieve our souls." Quoting Martin Luther King Jr. that the means of change "must be as pure as the end," she urges her readers to dare to be conduits of God's love. Williamson's desire to remind her vast readership of the courage and vision of the Founding Fathers and of the connection between social awareness and inner development is commendable, and she has a knack for rendering spiritual concepts in immediate terms ("Anger, like money and white sugar, is a temporary motivator of lower human energies"). Her sweeping generalizations, however, along with her tacit assumption of the banner of leadership, would probably bewilder Thomas Jefferson and company: "We are moving into new territory where we are unable to plug into our own energy sources unless we learn how to convert our thinking. We need adapters--facilitators of the new consciousness...." And though she promotes the noble idea of turning "spiritual conviction into a political force, as Gandhi did in India and King did in the United States," she numbs with bombast rather than awakening us, as Gandhi and King did, through the living examples of their courage and commitment.