Marianne Williamson: A Politico or Apolitical?

The outsider from the 2020 presidential race ponders what’s next.

Marianne Williamson was invoking Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy and Thoreau, barefoot in a brownstone in Brooklyn. “If everything you’re doing is making everybody happy, you’re not doing the right stuff yet,” she said to a room of about 30 people.

That September day, Ms. Williamson, the author, spiritual teacher and erstwhile presidential candidate, was wearing dramatic draping sleeves like a wizard’s. The attendees were mostly writers, including the playwright Leah Nanako Winkler and Derek Simonds, the showrunner of “The Sinner,” and were there by private invitation.

What drew this crowd was the same thing that has pulled audiences toward Ms. Williamson for almost 40 years. It was the first time she had spoken at an in-person event since the pandemic began, a radical change for a person whose career is tied to public speaking. What Ms. Williamson ultimately advised, knowing her audience, was this: that each of us should sit down and pray, “Dear God, let me write one true sentence.”