A WOMAN'S WORTH

``In writing this book I have no purpose other than a creative spill of my own guts,'' proclaims Williamson at the start of these seven inspirational essays aimed at resurrecting the sacred feminine in today's women. Readers of the author's mega-selling A Return to Love (1992) know that her guts spill rather messily, the point of the effluence being not so much to inform through logic and hard data as to transport to new spiritual heights on a torrent of upbeat chit-chat. So, here, readers will find themselves responding—perhaps off the page but most certainly on (`` `What?' you say. `Me, a priestess?' '')—to Williamson's exhortations that they put aside the deadening constrictions of patriarchy and ``embark on a quest for our own enchantment.'' Williamson covers issues such as image, sex, gender-biased language, abortion, emotional masochism (``Yuk. How sick. Yet how familiar''), etc., all the while urging her ``girls'' to release their passions and to realize the ``power of our womanly knowingness'' as they meditate and pray to both ``God'' and ``the Goddess.'' (Williamson is, of course, a fervent student of the ``channeled'' mystical-religious teachings known as A Course in Miracles). It's a familiar yet enduringly potent message, delivered in frank, elbows-on-the-table style that's likely to see an extraordinary number of readers sharing the author's thoughts and then chanting, as she does, ``We are about to break free. We are about to be born. We have seen the shining. We have seen. We have seen.''