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"It's important to point out the moral imbecility of what the New Age people are trying to do," says United Methodist Clergyman J. Gordon Melton, ^ director of Santa Barbara's Institute for the Study of American Religion. "But at the same time I wouldn't see it as a threat." Even that, though, is perhaps too harsh a condemnation to serve as the final word on an essentially harmless anthology of illusions.
But Shirley MacLaine is accustomed to slings and arrows. "I think the thrust of this article, aside from bemused sarcasm, is going to be that a lot of people are getting rich on all this," she says, in a fairly successful venture into prophecy. "That seems to be a concern of many journalists. But I would say we all have to decide what we're worth . . . I think journalists who are investigating belief in the unseen have to adjust the way they are judging the issue of materialism in relation to spirituality. Anything you want to learn costs money in this world."
MacLaine is working hard these days. Aside from all her New Age activities, she is in London to shoot a new John Schlesinger film about a domineering piano teacher. "This character makes Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment look like a day at the beach," she says. "I'm on the set by 8, and we work till 8, and then I have lines to learn." She has also written a new book, tentatively titled Going Within. "It's techniques of meditation, visualization, color therapy, sound therapy, how to work with crystals, how to work with colored jewelry, acupuncture, acupressure, things that have been helpful to me. I can only write about what's happened to me."
In many ways, her life remains much the same as ever. "I live a kind of nomad existence. I like to travel light. I don't wear a lot of jewelry. I travel with one suitcase because I always end up carrying it." In other ways, though, her life is quite different from what it was in her early days of singing and dancing on Broadway, which seem, if one may say so, several lifetimes ago. "It's me that makes things happen to me," she says. "I'm not the leader of this movement. I'm not a high priestess of New Age concepts. I'm just a human being trying to find some answers about what we're doing here, where we came from and where we're going. That search is equal to finding a good script, and maybe it even helps."
So let the final word on the New Age be: om.