I read this book over many months, but it came at just the right moment for me. This change begins with choosing love over hate. As individuals, we have incredible power to change this world.

We are living in trying times for sure, but healing starts with each of us. Along with the power of love is the power of the individual. Marianne Williamson feels strongly about love and the power of love. Rather it is a call for us, as a people and as a nation to return to prayer….to return ultimately to love. This book is not meant to replace your own prayers at all. The prayers given here can act as a guide for you. We may have someone in our life going through something we know nothing about and are not sure how to pray.

Other times, the pain is too overwhelming for the words to come. Though I believe God knows our hearts, at times, it is hard to find the words to pray. At its simplest, it is a book of prayers for all of us to use as the need arises. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world.Illuminata, A Return to Prayer by Marianne Williamson is a beautiful book. 'No conventional therapy,' she says, 'can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. 'By all means, create your own.' Illuminata is a way to bring prayer into practical use, creating a sweeter, more abundant life for yourself and the people you care for. 'Read my prayers or someone else's,' Williamson says. There is also a ceremony of the elder, for moving into midlife, and a ceremony of divorce, in which a gentle transition is provided for both the couple and their children. How, Williamson asks, can we expect anyone to forgive when we have made no formal apology? Another section includes rites of passage, ceremonies of light for the signal events in our lives: blessing of the newborn, coming of age, marriage, and death. Williamson also gives us prayers for the healing of America, including two prayers that have had powerful effects on audiences at her lectures: a prayer of amends on behalf of European Americans to African-Americans and one to Native Americans. There are prayers to heal the soul, prayers to heal the body, and prayers for work and creativity. There are prayers for couples, for parents, and for children prayers to mend broken relationships and prayers to overcome obsessive and compulsive love. 'To look to God is to look to the realm of consciousness that can deliver us from the pain of living.' Illuminata brings prayer into our daily lives, with prayers on topics from releasing anger to finding forgiveness, from finding great love to achieving intimacy. Prayer is practical, Williamson tells us. Marianne Williamson's bestselling A Return to Love ended with a prayer in which she asked God to help us 'find our way home, from the pain to peace, from fear to love, from hell to Heaven.' Now, in this stunning new collection of thoughts, prayers, and rites of passage, Marianne Williamson returns to prayer.

Illuminata a return to prayer