Excerpt 1 from Marianne Williamson's Lecture on "Spirituality and the Oil Spill"

In a fascinating lecture titled "Spirituality and the Oil Spill", Marianne Williamson offers an acute analogy between the recent disastrous oil spill, our country’s addiction to oil, and how we can and should collectively apply the tenets of the recovery movement’s 12-Step program to this addiction. Following is an excerpt from that stirring talk.

Days ago, soon after we last spoke, I was kind of excited. I wanted to give a lecture tonight about relationships. I thought it was particularly cool for those of you who were here last week -- the woman talking to us about her boyfriend and he called while we were talking. That was great. And then another woman, I think the week before, had talked about the special versus the holy relationship. So I thought -- well this will be great. We’ll really delve into relationships and get into all that fun stuff as well. But it started to seem to me, in the last few days, that we would have to postpone that because I think it is only right that we discuss the oil spill. So that’s what we are going to do here tonight.

Some of you are groaning, some of you are clapping, and that’s quite interesting. Alright, in the State of the Union address, January 31, 2006, President George Bush said, and we all remember this, keeping America competitive, he said, requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil.

Now I remember jumping up and down at wisdom. Like wow -- the president just said that America is addicted to oil. So I thought that was pretty cool. He says -- which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology, and then he goes on to tell us what the technology would be spent on. He says clean energy alternatives, he says, and what he describes those as wind and solar technologies, coal fired plants, and clean safe nuclear energy.

So that’s like, if ever that’s an addict talking, because that’s like saying “I’m addicted to heroin, and the way to break this is to start drinking.” So I thought that in order to do our civic duty tonight, given the fact that that proclamation, true as it is, that we are addicted to oil was then not followed by the conversation that you’re sort of supposed to have once you face that you are addicted to something. I thought that in order for us to do our civic duty tonight, we should twelve-step the United States.

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