PUTTING LOVE ON THE BALLOT
I recently
attended a gathering in Greenville, South Carolina, where author, spiritual
teacher, and now candidate for president of the United States, Marianne
Williamson was speaking. I wanted to thank her in person for doing something
extremely radical: Putting love on
the ballot—squarely, unapologetically, powerfully, eloquently. “I am running
for president,” she declared, “in order to harness the political potential of
our love, our decency, and our compassion. That is who we are, and that is what
America should be.” Love is a topic in which Marianne is well-versed.
Her first
book, A Return to Love published in
1992, and the first of seven New York
Times’ bestsellers (all reflections on the principles of A Course in Miracles), proclaimed
simply: “Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here.”
Marianne writes almost as much about fear as love—given fear is a result of
hate, both opposites of love. “Fear unchecked grows exponentially. Love poured
forth has the power to remove it.”
Does the presence of love
really have that much life-changing power? Marianne adds: “...where love is
absent, fear sets in.” Just in case we need a real-life reminder: Fear is what elected
Donald Trump and powered the destructive growth of dog whistle politics, giving
a louder voice to hate-filled rhetoric spewed from the Senate floor to church
pulpits. (No halls so ‘hallowed’ as to escape the maliciousness of it
all.) “It’s not
the first time,” clarified Ken Burns, the creator of those movingly beautiful
American history documentaries. “Human beings are susceptible to politicians
that play to our baser instincts, our worst fears of ‘the other’ instead of, as
Lincoln said, ‘the better angels of our nature’.”
We are
living in a world where it appears that fear is winning. “Without love, our
actions are hysterical. Without love, we have no wisdom.” (Marianne doesn’t
mince her words!) It’s time to get revolutionary about love. It’s time for a
miracle.
“We had a
miracle in this country in 1776,” Marianne announced when exploring a run for
the presidency last fall, “and we need another one!” (Keep in mind she holds a
‘miracle’ as ultimately a “shift in perception.”) She then gave a little
history lesson, since some may have forgotten what that miracle was nearly 250
years ago. Before this county was founded, all of Europe, under “the divine
right of kings,” was “run according to a manorial and aristocratic system.” In
other words, a king and/or queen and their pals (the aristocracy) were entitled
to the land, the wealth, the education—everything!
And the rest of the population, the vast majority, “was little more than serfs
to that small group.” However, Marianne continued, with the founding of this country, “we turned that entire
mindset on its ear.” And when declaring our independence, we declared that “all men are created equal, and that god
gave all men the inalienable rights
to life and to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness—and governments were instituted to secure those rights.”
Consequently, our new nation stumbled right out of the gate, and then stumbled
often, not always living up to those principles. And now we’re stumbling again
with a government, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, functioning only “of a few of the people, by a few of the people, and for a few of the people”—which means, as
Marianne explains, “we have subconsciously reverted to an aristocratic
paradigm.”
But we are a
nation of courageous “problem solvers who have risen up in their time. So yes,
we had slavery, but we also had abolition. We had the oppression of women, and we also had two major waves of
feminism and the women’s suffragette movement. We had institutionalized white
supremacy and segregation, and we
also had the Civil Rights Movement.” With that reminder, Marianne is delivering
a call to action for this country’s spiritual awakening, “Join the Evolution!”—it is now our turn to be the problem solvers! And
that’s where love comes back into it.
Neuroscientist
Richard J. Davidson—professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds—considers the
next frontier for his field is the study of how the practice of love affects the brain and body,
believing there is a quality of love that breaks apart boundaries. Can we take
this as an affirmation that, in Marianne’s words, “love is a potent force”?
Film director Spike Lee, during his passionate Oscar acceptance speech at the
recent Academy Awards ceremony, urging us to vote, urging us to “do the right thing,” put it frankly: “Make the
moral choice between love versus hate.”
In calling
for a course-correction in this country and putting our democracy back on
track; for a resetting of our moral compass and putting the lives and
well-being of our children first, Marianne Williamson calls for a return to
what made the founding of this country so unique; she calls for nothing less
than a return to “an ethical center that is the true exceptionalism of the
American ideal.” She encourages us to be on the side of “our better angels” and
to “stick with love,” as another peacemaker shared. “We have before us,” Martin
Luther King, Jr. remarked—with hate staring him in the face—“the glorious
opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our
civilization.”
It’s time
for, like in Lincoln’s day, “a new birth of freedom.” It’s time for some
old-fashioned love one another like a
day-in, day-out practice. Remembering that love is a show of strength, not
weakness, it’s time for a love revolution!
“Love taken seriously is a radical outlook, a major departure from the
psychological orientation that rules the world,” Marianne wrote in A Return to Love over two decades ago.
“It is threatening not because it is a small idea, but because it is so huge.”
When I shook Marianne’s
hand that afternoon in Greenville—a packed room of mostly women, women of all
stripes—thanking her for putting love on the ballot, she replied, “Yes! It’s
time to get radical with our love.”
Radical, like love as an “essential existential fact.” Radical, like love is
“our purpose on earth.” Radical, like your life depended on it! ~
.................................
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
With the success of her books and appearances on
Oprah Winfrey’s shows through the years, Marianne Williamson has been a
sought-after speaker on the personal transformation circuit. I’ve followed her
work, listened to her various recordings, quoted her in my articles and books,
and admired her beautiful and effectively intimate way with words. With
Marianne, you re-remember that words have power, that love powers all. “Love
requires a different kind of ‘seeing’ than we’re used to—a different kind of
knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts. It’s a
‘world beyond’ that we all secretly long for....”
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