The Age of Miracles by Marianne Williamson: book review

Williamson, M. (2008). The age of miracles: embracing the new midlife. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

This book easy to read but less than filling, like potato chips. Willliamson uses the Course in Miracles, a putative channeling of the Christ voice, as the basis for her spiritual teaching. She is an effective story-teller who laces the work with tales of both the rich and famous and ordinary folk. Yet, in the end, the lessons can be reduced to simple homilies:

• Never give up, never give up,never give up (Winston Churchill)
• Seek and practice only love
• Be forgiving
• Find new interests
• Be grateful
• Pray, meditate
• Take care of your body and mind

Williamson, like many teachers of spiritual wisdom, believes that a quantum shift in human consciousness is possible when enough people practice love and forgiveness. A tipping point will be reached such that people who are out-of-alignment with principles of peace, love, and harmony will now adopt and adapt to these practices. Human consciousness will evolve into a new reality that provides peace on earth -- a kind of return to the Garden of Eden.

Williamson does not present any ideas that she has not thoroughly gone over in previous books such as A Return to Love. In the early pages, I was attracted to her claim that midlife and old age can be a time when we again experience the sense of magic that many of us enjoy in childhood and youth, before the cares of everyday life overwhelms our innocence.

She argues that by practicing gratitude for our extended life spans, by implementing wisdom learned from our life journey, and by spiritually connecting with love and joy, we can return to that sense of the miraculous. It is a seductive message but one which, by the last pages of the book, contends with the realities of old age -- reduced income and physical limitations that can reduce the possibilities we have.

In sum, this book will be more attractive to someone who has felt enriched by reading Williamson's past works. A slight volume larded with prayers and anecdotes, it is upbeat in tone and a light confection of positive reflections with which to greet aging.

For more information about the book and Marianne Williamson, please visit her website.

Godddesses for Our Times: Jean Shindo Bolen Tells Archetypal Stories to Inspire Aging Women

Bolen, Jean Shinoda. (2001). Goddesses in older women: archetypes in women over 50: becoming a juice crone. New York: HarperCollins.

Bolen casts a cross-cultural net to find goddess stories to inspire and provide templates for aging women in the United States and other Western cultures. She also provides a mature perspective on the stories of Greek goddesses covered in her earlier book, Goddesses in Every Woman.

The parts of the book are about goddesses or icons of wisdom; goddeses of anger, laughter and compassion; the update on familiar Greek goddesses Artemis, Athena, Hestia (who also appears in the wisdom section), Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite; and a final section of forming circles of wisewomen. Bolen argues for a cultural renovations of the word crone. The word has long been associated with the Halloween witch with a wart on her nose, a pointed chin, and yellowed baggy skin, like the hags in Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

As a communication scholar, I do not see this term rising like Lazarus from the grave to connote juiciness. Combatting ageism in our youth-worshipping culture is a challenging enough without saddling these efforts with a timeworn word of such negative connotations.

Bolen is an effective story-teller who relates the stories of each archetype through the lens of psychology. She creates mental pictures into which each woman can project images of herself in the broadly-defined roles and qualities of each goddess icon. I found it especially interesting to read her interpretations of the biblical Sophia as a goddess of mystical and spiritual women; of Hindu Kali as a goddess of angry destruction and regeneration (the cycle of life and creation); Baudo as a goddess of bawdy mirth; and Chinese Kuan Yin and the Roman Catholic Virgin Mary as goddesses of compassion. Today’s aging woman needs stories about admirable women whose qualities offer templates for maturity that do not depend on cosmetic surgery and desperate efforts to avoid aging.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to any woman who is looking for models for aging with grace and maturity. These iconic stories tap into timeless energy patterns that Carl Jung called archetypes. Through these mysterious psychological resonances, we may discover blueprints for our future.

Two Books About Aging

Millner, Nancy Bost. (1997). Creative aging: Discovering the unexpected joys of later life through personality type. Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black Publishing.

Raines, Robert. (1997). A time to live: Seven steps of creative aging. New York: Plume (Penguin).

What I would like to find in a book about aging is a game plan for transcendence. These books repeat platitudes about aging being a time when we can come to self-acceptance, wisdom, and creativity. These things are true enough, but they do not provide me with the sense of magic and wonder of my youthful illusions that the future stretched out with endless possibility and promise. I miss that.

The first 60 pages of Millner’s book orient the reader to a Jungian perspectivpere on the elder years. Millner is a fluent writer who performs this task effectively. If you are not familiar with the 16 personality types, as categorized using the Myers-Briggs personality index, there are many good websites where you can gain fundamental understanding before buying the book. A pretty good free version of the MBTI may be found at the Humanmetrics website. The scoring isn’t particularly detailed and, therefore, it wasn’t spot-on for my type. If you are interested, you may want to find someone who is certified to administer and explain the type fully for you.

Chapters four through eight characterize five components of the elder experience as: vitality and contentment, generosity and spaciousness, connectedness and relatedness, joy and devotion, and reflecting on the great art of living.

Millner then suggests how some of the 16 personality types might inhabit that dimension of aging, using extended case-study examples. I am out of patience with popular psychology books that over-generalize on the basis of limited studies. It’s a shame that my training has been as a quantitative researcher, because it is getting harder as I age to persuade me that limited studies do as much as even I have claimed in my own work to promote the understanding that is a goal of qualitative research. Perhaps this is merely a testament to the wisdom of my own years.

I think this book would be more appealing to someone who is relatively new to personality type studies. The engaging writing, clear descriptions of type, and concise case examples will appeal to many readers.

Raines, on the other hand, writes with the deliberation of the memoirist, which in fact he is. I had been expecting a illumination of Jung’s seven tasks of aging, and this is not.

Jung’s 7 tasks of aging	Raines 7 steps of creative aging
1. Facing the reality of aging and dying	1. Waking up
2. Life review	2. Embracing sorrow
3. Defining life realistically	3. Savoring blessedness
4. Letting go of the ego	4. Re-imagining work
5. Finding new rooting in the Self	5. Nurturing intimacy
6. Determining the meaning of one’s life	6. Seeking forgiveness
7. Rebirth – dying with life	7. Taking on the mystery

A retired minister, Raines brings numerous personal experiences to his exploration of the blessings of aging, as well as examples from other people’s lives. The book is liberally sprinkled with quotations from great writers and thinkers. Raines is reflective and deeply human as he describes his illuminations. In the final analysis, however, his illuminations are his, and I must have my own.

In sum, I respect all writers on the basis that they have accomplished something I have not – the publication of a book. Each book has its particular strengths and will appeal to its own audience of readers. Neither, however, has lifted me from the doldrums of vague disappointment with the experience of aging, for I am neither as wise as I would like to be nor as accepting of this life stage as its inevitability requires.