Mother Teresa for the ’90s?

Every Saturday morning at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in West Hollywood, Marianne Williamson steps to the pulpit before a packed house. But she is no ordinary minister: the church has been rented and the message is decidedly New Age nondenominational. Impeccably groomed and clad in designer clothes, the slender brunet launches into a sermon that mixes Christian exhortations, meditative slogans and psychotherapeutic advice: “Align your mind with God and watch miracles happen.” Then she saunters down the nave to “share” with the audience. “Anytime you think someone owes you something, it’s a limit on your happiness,” she counsels a distressed young woman. Bowing her head in prayer, she intones, “God has the power to bring happiness into our lives.”

Those spiritual theatrics have earned Williamson, 39, recognition as “the guru of the moment in Hollywood,” the most highly visible advocate of a mind- awareness text called A Course in Miracles. The 1,200-page spiritual- psychological tome was written in the 1960s by a now deceased Jewish psychologist Helen Schucman; it teaches spiritual self-betterment through exercises to clarify the subject’s perception of reality. The book has spawned an informal network of more than 1,000 study groups based on its introspective meditational program.

None of the course’s other practitioners have the show-biz pizzazz that Williamson brings to the lecture circuit. She has linked herself with Hollywood’s cause-consciousness by founding the Centers for Living, bicoastal organizations dedicated to providing home help for those with life-threatening diseases. Williamson is also the prime fund raiser for Project Angel Food, a program that delivers 200 gourmet meals daily to dying AIDS patients in the Los Angeles area. Among the 800 volunteers who help with Angel Food are recording mogul David Geffen, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Midler, painter David Hockney and 20th Century Fox head Barry Diller. Most of those celebrities are not devotees of Williamson’s think-positive course lectures, but a few are, and the glamour has rubbed off. “There’s so much to worry about,” says Sandy Gallin, Hollywood manager of top stars, who attended Williamson’s lectures and then invited her to bless his star-studded birthday party for Geffen. “Put together the ecological breakdown, disease and the recession: we gotta pray to get out of this one.” Actor Tony Perkins credits the course with quieting his mind: “It slows down your repetitive, competitive and comparative thinking processes.”

The majority of Williamson’s followers, however, are glitzless baby boomers. Many are graduates of 12-step programs — they are the addicted, or the obsessed and compulsive. Others are spiritual seekers turned off by organized religion. Williamson, the daughter of an affluent Houston attorney, considers herself one of them. “The course was my personal path out of hell,” she says. “There was little I hadn’t tried or been through,” including numerous sexual relationships, drugs and even a stab at singing nightclub jazz.

In 1977 she first spotted A Course in Miracles on a friend’s Manhattan coffee table. By 1983 she was lecturing on the text for the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, a metaphysical center, while supporting herself as an office temp. Today she gives three sermons a week, charging $7 a head, to those who can pay. In addition, she travels monthly to New York City, where her lecture brings in 1,000 listeners at a time. She has recorded more than 50 cassettes summarizing the course, lectures regularly on public-access TV and next year will publish her first book, A Return to Love, which summarizes her thoughts on the course.

One of her many admirers calls Williamson “a Mother Teresa for the ’90s,” promoting peace of mind through God. Her detractors, however, see something less enlightening at work. No one has accused Williamson of greed — a single mother, she lives modestly with her daughter India, 14 months, in a two- bedroom apartment in West Hollywood — but her desire for publicity is another matter. “She’s an expression of the entertainment industry — fueled by fame and the desire to be a star,” says an expert on new religious movements in California. “The course is the perfect disconnected religion of the ’90s. It allows driven, self-absorbed, narcissistic people to continue in their ways.”

“There’s a deep need for spiritual values,” Williamson replies. “In the 1980s we had our materialistic orgy. Now we’re experiencing a rebirth of early ’60s thinking, a spiritual shift. We must learn how to be nonaggressive in order to survive.” Rather than being a nonjudgmental license for self- indulgence, the course, she says, encourages service as a way of prayer. “It teaches us to relinquish a thought system based on fear and accept instead a thought system based on love.” And for now, no one can pass that message along quite like she can.