c. 2000 Religion News Service
COLUMBUS, Ohio _ She was a channeler to Shirley MacLaine’s channeler, an honor in the New Age movement akin to being the pope’s confessor.
When she was not conjuring spirits from the next world, she got down in the soap opera mud as the misunderstood other woman cavorting with a pair of brothers-in-law and as the uptight, bigoted wife whose husband was having an affair with her best friend in shows from “General Hospital” to “Generations.”
And now, safe in the religious bosom of the Midwest, Gail Ramsey is taking on the hardest role of her career _ Hollywood evangelist. On Saturday (Aug. 12), she will go onto Sound Stage 20 on the CBS studio lot and lead a group of producers, actors, technicians and entertainment industry workers in prayer in the same town where she played a harlot each day for five years.
The slightly built Ohio minister _ still recognized as Alan Quartermaine’s mistress on “General Hospital” _ is at the vanguard of several new ministries designed to take God into the area that many evangelicals consider the belly of the beast.
Like the nation of Israel, which some evangelicals speculate will be both the setting of the Lord’s return and of apocalyptic warfare, Hollywood is viewed with special fascination by those contemplating the end times. The celluloid sin city is symbolic of the biblical requirements of great evil occurring before the Second Coming, while the new ministries are signs of God at work even in the darkest times.
Who could ask for a better script: saving the lost in the heart of moral darkness?
“It was amazing to be standing in the middle of a sound stage in the middle of Hollywood talking about the Lord,” Ramsey said of her 3-month-old Seeking Truth ministry. “I can’t even describe it. It was just like, `God, you’re awesome.”’
The religious odyssey of Ramsey is a true Hollywood story that begins with an innocent young woman raised in Roman Catholic schools in the Midwest heading west to pursue her dreams, and falling in with a lifestyle of power, fame and New Age spirituality that would hit bottom only with a dramatic scene of demonic possession.
It was at that moment Ramsey would begin her new life.
On a recent sunny day, she let her mind wander to the day of her conversion, flashing back to a condominium in Tarzana, Calif., on the last day of 1990.
Through her storyteller’s art, the cultured 52-year-old woman becomes an actress without a date on New Year’s Eve, sitting on a couch in a friend’s house. They were talking about supernatural powers when her friend detected the presence of evil in the room, said Ramsey, her eyes becoming distant in recollection as she rises out of her seat to re-enact a scene of demonic possession.
She stretches her hands over her head and spreads her fingers over the table in a vulturelike position, her face contorting to portray an enraged, disembodied spirit. She describes the feeling of a force taking over her body and propelling her forward to strangle her friend.
“I rose up on the couch,” she said in a menacing tone. “What I felt inside of me was like the power of the atom bomb.”
A few terrifying seconds later, the force left her and it was over.
As she finishes the story, Ramsey sits back in her chair and contemplates those moments that changed her life.
It was the devil’s last, best shot, she said now. The spirit that had guided her as a New Age psychic and channeler had been exposed for what it was all along: a force of Satan, she said.
Her friend, another actress who recently had become an evangelical Christian, immediately began to pray for her and called up other friends to start a prayer network for Ramsey.
Ramsey’s first reaction, however, was one of anger _ at God.
For two days, she cried out to the heavens, “How could you let me be deceived for so long?”
The answer came back: “God told me, `First, I am going to take you out. But one day I will take you back and they will listen to you because you have been there.”’
And “there” was not only the top of the soap-opera world but the height of the New Age movement, at a California resort filled with famous actresses and other big names from Hollywood. Kevin Ryerson, a spiritual guru for Shirley MacLaine who has become a sought-after speaker and $350-a-session channeler on the New Age circuit, was giving a seminar and chose Ramsey to come to his cabin and be his personal guide into the spirit world.
Ramsey does not remember what was said, but still recalls allowing “a spirit guide” to speak to Ryerson through her body.
“It was kind of a scary place to go,” she said.
And a long spiritual journey for a woman who was raised in Catholic schools in Wausau, Wis.
Leaving the University of Wisconsin in her senior year, she went west to pursue her love of acting.
“At first I was offended by everything I saw,” she said. “The longer I remained in that environment, slowly but surely I was affected by the darkness, the lack of morality.”
On screen, she was hopping in and out of marital beds as “sexy Susan Moore” from 1979 to 1983 in “General Hospital.” Her character started sleeping with Mitch Williams, and later graduated to breaking up the home of Dr. Alan Quartermaine, his brother-in-law. Susan Moore and Quartermaine had a son, Jason, who eventually became the most popular character on the show. When Quartermaine decided to return to his wife, Moore filed a $1 million lawsuit and won.
In her personal life, Ramsey had star power and lots of money, but could find no more fulfillment than her screen characters. She tried Transcendental Meditation, psychics, anything she could find.
“What was the truth? What was the truth? What was the truth? I was searching everywhere,” she said.
One day, she went to a psychic, having to bite her tongue to keep from laughing as the woman told her, “People are going to give you many, many gifts.” Two months later, she won the title of Winter School Queen in Aspen, Colo., and a package of prizes including a snowmobile.
That was the hook, Ramsey said, and the desire to learn the future became “almost like a drug. You want another reading, another reading, to see what happens.”
She would go on to prominent television roles in “Mike Hammer” with Stacy Keach, the soap opera “Generations” and the sitcom “California Dreams.” She would make her way up the psychic world to become a channeler to others.
And then came the New Year’s Eve of her dramatic conversion.
She left Hollywood in 1993, deciding to move to Columbus after being invited for a visit by a friend here and desiring a healthier environment for her son, now a sophomore at Ohio State University.
“It’s difficult to be a good Christian, a strong Christian, around that much darkness all the time,” she said.
She attended the World Harvest Bible School in Columbus and was ordained as a nondenominational minister in 1995. In addition to giving acting lessons, she travels throughout the country as an evangelist and writes a “Dear God” advice column that appears in the evangelical Connection magazine.
“I used to think Christians were a bunch of weak, weepy weirdos and I wanted nothing to do with them,” she said. “Shirley MacLaine was the answer to the world. That’s how deceived I was.”
Yet life without the limousines and star power has never been better, she said.
“I have total peace inside me, that’s all I can say,” she said.
Her first prayer gathering in June at CBS drew 20 people to Stage 18. The next month, on Stage 20, some 40 people _ from actors to producers to technicians _ attended.
The day before her prayer meeting this month, another ministerial team, the Revs. Trish and Jim Steele of True Life International, will hold a Women Crowned in Glory meeting on the studio lot. On Sunday, a group called United Prayer for Hollywood will hold a prayer walk through the CBS studio.
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Overall, there are now more than a dozen ministries helping Sin City meet its maker.
In an evangelical world that takes biblical prophecies of the Second Coming seriously, Hollywood offers a special attraction. Look no farther than Hollywood to see scriptural clues of the coming apocalypse in a place where people will be lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God and that offers the moral destruction akin to the physical destruction of wars, floods and earthquakes that will signal the last days, according to some evangelical interpreters.
“It’s going to get worse and worse, and that’s what’s going to bring the Lord back,” said the Rev. Darlene Bishop, co-pastor of Solid Rock Church in Cincinnati, a financial supporter of Ramsey’s ministry.
Where there is darkness, however, Christians are called to spread the light, and nowhere will the light shine brighter in contrast than Hollywood, leaders of these new ministries say.
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What makes Ramsey’s effort special is that she has been there.
Having seen it all the first time, Ramsey realizes other evangelists have come to Hollywood and been seduced by the power and influence of it all.
“I think people on the whole are really intimidated by Hollywood power, and I’m not,” Ramsey said. “I say God is still the devil’s boss.”
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