COMMENTARY: Earth to Eleanor: Help Hillary

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today magazine.) (RNS)-Whenever I try to have a chat with Eleanor Roosevelt, I end up getting the Shopping Channel instead. Guess it’s my fault. I’m just […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today magazine.)

(RNS)-Whenever I try to have a chat with Eleanor Roosevelt, I end up getting the Shopping Channel instead. Guess it’s my fault. I’m just not as high-minded as our first lady.


In fairness to her, it doesn’t appear that Hillary Clinton had any expectation that she was actually talking with Roosevelt. Bob Woodward’s new book,”The Choice,”describes Hillary in a session with”researcher in psychic experiences and altered consciousness”Jean Houston. In a sunny room at the top of the White House, Woodward writes, Houston encouraged Hillary to close her eyes, imagine Roosevelt in vivid detail, then converse with her.

For Hillary, this appears to have been merely a creative mental exercise, not an attempt to commune with the dead. The session sounds a little touchy-feely, but in its raw form it’s not all that unusual.

When faced with important decision-making, most of us run through imaginary conversations, rehearsing the likely outcome of asking the boss for a raise or pondering how a beloved grandparent would have handled a situation. Acting it out in this way _ actually playing both parts in an imaginary conversation _ is a little goofy, but not out of the realm of reasonable.

Nor is it out of the realm of the natural. Hillary was willing to playact dialogue with Roosevelt and Mohandas K. Gandhi, but she drew the line when Houston suggested she put words in the mouth of Jesus. It’s one thing to daydream, and another to make genuine contact with someone who truly lives”beyond the grave.”Hillary, a Methodist, wasn’t willing to rope Him into this therapeutic exercise.

But for Houston you have to wonder if this exercise strides the border of the supernatural.”Houston and her work were controversial because she believed in spirits and other worlds, put people into trances and used hypnosis, and because in the 1960s she had conducted experiments with LSD,”Woodward writes.

Now, there’s a chance that Bob Woodward is not the nation’s foremost authority on New Age and women’s spirituality. His faintly shocked descriptions of Houston’s background recall my dad’s amazed descriptions, decades ago, of the world of”long-haired hippies”(or”beatniks”_ for him, the terms were interchangeable).

Still, it appears that Houston’s experience of communing with spirits is more literal than Hillary’s playacting. As Woodward describes it, Houston believes that her”personal archetypal predecessor”is Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Houston dialogues with Athena on her computer, an exercise she calls”docking with one’s angel.” When Houston heard Hillary talking about her admiration for Roosevelt, she concluded that Roosevelt was Hillary’s”archetypal, spiritual partner,”just as Athena was for herself.


It’s the grandiosity of all this that begins to wear thin. Not only do these women get attentive other-worldly partners who are figures of nobility and power (is no one spiritual partners with a 19th-century bootblack?), but according to Woodward, Houston said Hillary herself is a person of vast historical significance. She comes at the end of 5,000 years of women’s subservience, at the moment when women are rising to equal partnership with men,”the biggest event in history.”Woodward reports that Houston regarded Hillary as the biggest thing since Joan of Arc. Criticism of Hillary, Houston told Woodward, constitutes”a female crucifixion.” There is plenty to disagree with in that package, including what constitutes the biggest event in history. But there’s no disputing that a self-image built around an image of one’s immense historical importance, compounded with assertions of long-suffering in the face of unjust criticism, is an intoxicating tonic. It results in an overwhelming focus on self, and attention squandered on defining, caressing and presenting that self. It distracts, in fact, from focusing on task.

There are real consequences to contacting the spirits of the dead; it’s not a safe place to play. But Hillary appears to have had no such contact in mind. The danger for her is more mundane: falling into her own mind, trapped in self-admiration and self-pity like a fly in honey. Start out talking to yourself, end up talking about yourself, endlessly, boringly, stifled by self-fascination.

Woodward describes Hillary as”this articulate woman of great intelligence, talent, stamina and genuine caring.”And if those who criticize the first lady’s ethics in the Whitewater affair or in the firings of the White House travel office are to be believed, she’s also someone who appears to have made plenty of mistakes. She might well benefit from some forthright self-appraisal, conceivably leading to repentance.

But Hillary Clinton is not likely to get such guidance from a”psychic researcher”who fawns over her and pampers her self-regard. It’s a formula for failure that has brought down many a person in power. And if Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t tell her that, she’s not doing her job.

MJP END GREEN

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