The Long Journey from God to Self-Exaltation

The Long Journey from God to Self-Exaltation

Along the way while Oprah was being made and making herself, her spiritual metamorphosis was taking place. Take note of Oprah’s spiritual journey.

In high school, she wrote in the yearbook of her friend Gary Holt, “You have showed me more by your actions, by the way you live from day to day, that there is truly One Way, Jesus Christ! And that without Him taking control, without Him running the whole show, life is just an endless go-round with no meaning.”¹⁰

During a “look-back” show twenty-two years later, Oprah invited Gary Holt on her show. But it didn’t turn out the way either he or she expected. As he saw her surrounded by her entourage of beauticians, production team, and other assistants he asked why she was doing all this. “Because I want to bring truth to the world,” she said. Gary paused, took the yearbook out of his bag, and showed her what she had written two decades earlier. She added a few pleasantries and wrote further, “God is still King!”¹¹

Changes may come in small increments, but they come indeed. The erudite know how to best talk their way out of their unattractive transformations.

There is another telling passage about her spiritual journey. When she joined an A.M.E. church in 1976, Oprah was described as a “preacher woman” fervently committed to Jesus Christ, having also memorized books of the Bible. She was strong in her faith and in calling people to live consistently with those truths found in the Bible. “I was raised to not question God. It’s a sin… But I started to think for myself… and that’s when I really started, in my mid-twenties, my own journey towards my spirituality, my spiritual self,” Oprah has said.¹²

In picking the moment of change, she references a sermon she heard from her pastor, Rev. John Richard Bryant, on the text that says God is a jealous God (Exodus 20:5):

I was just sitting there thinking for the first time after being raised Baptist… church, church, church, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday… I thought, “Now why would God, who is omnipotent, who has everything, who was able to create me and raise the sun every morning, why would that God be jealous of anything that I have to say? Or be threatened by a question that I would have to ask?”¹³

Really, Oprah! This is what started it all? Do you really want us to believe that all of a sudden, after preaching the truths of the Bible for years and memorizing whole books of the Bible, you didn’t like this God you had been following?

If this renunciation of God is true, either she didn’t understand what the text meant and what she had believed all her life or she was deliberately looking for a way out to choose this reason for rejecting the faith of her childhood and youth. Often when we are struggling with how best to say we no longer believe what we once did, it is easiest to find one idea and either warp it or take it out of context and make ourselves heroes for being willing to renounce the unacceptable. I cannot help but be reminded of my friend in the last chapter. But the journey down the lane of the mystical, bolstered by a heavy dose of self-confidence and spiritual jargon, made Oprah the spirituality queen of the talk shows. The God she grew up believing in may have no longer been there, but there was an awful lot of spiritual talk. Redefining terms is the best way to smuggle in hungers while remaining autonomous. We all know this trick well.

Strange esoteric beliefs were waiting for acceptance. It is a long way from quoting the Bible to her fascination with The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Beyond even that is what she has declared her second-favorite book, after the Bible: Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul. Authors such as Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now), John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), Iyanla Vanzant (Acts of Faith), and Sarah Ban Breathnach (Simple Abundance) caused her to become verbose about their spiritual insights. Dr. Phil was catapulted to fame as a regular feature on her show. These were branded “Change Your Life” shows. She ended that series with an astonishing segment called “Remembering Your Spirit,” which was introduced with New Age music in the background as she said, “I am defined by the world as a talk show host, but I know that I am much more. I am spirit connected to the greater spirit.”¹⁴

She has ascended into ethereal ranks and the mountain now bows to her. For this little kid, for whom so much had gone wrong so early, to reach these plateaus is miraculous in people’s eyes. She has turned stones into bread and gained all the kingdoms of this world.

Early in her success, she told a friend that it was all God’s plan and doing for her.¹⁵ But in an ironic shift, as the years went by and a relative asked her why she embellished stories about her childhood so much until they became lies she said, “Because that is what people want to hear.” The visual media had done its work. One is tempted to pun on the word, hence, I italicize it.

The seduction was complete. The lie is what people want, so why get hung up on the truth? All she wanted in the beginning was the truth. Now, if this is true, a lie is acceptable because that is what the audience wants to hear. Only very recently, she discovered she had a half sister. If anything needed to be a private moment, one would think that the first meeting of siblings would be it. No, not for a performer. The cameras were positioned so that the tears could flow for the viewers, garnering more publicity. Something so manufactured ought to be seen through, but astonishingly it is just regarded as even greater evidence of her greatness and another cause for applause. This life’s dim window of the soul has beguiled the soul once again.

Truth and authenticity are easy casualties before the power of the lens. Between Deepak Chopra’s co-opting of quantum terminology to support his version of spirituality, Oprah’s capacity with telegenic splendor to blur the lines between fact and fancy, and the empty rhetoric of televangelists with their perfect coiffures and elaborate stage sets that are inversely proportional to the substance of what they are saying, we will never be able to roll back the clock. But maybe we can find a true point of reference for time. Between the ancient and the postmodern there may not be much of a difference except in the inferences we have drawn.

Having said all that, if I had the opportunity to talk to Oprah one-on-one, I would have some questions for her. Those questions I shall pose and attempt to answer myself in the pages to come. How can someone this accomplished and clear in her speech draw near to things spiritual yet remain muddied in her spiritual thinking? That, to me, is the bottom line of a life that has been so successful and so shaped by the influence of converging and conflicting views.

Here are some of the questions I would initially ask:

I believe the answers to these questions will tell me not what she believes, but why she believes it.

That said, it was quite amazing to hear her closing words at the end of the last taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the end of this phase of her career. I do not think for a moment that this is a farewell. I think it is a fork in the road. And how could one blame her? With the kind of following she has and the power that comes with that, it will be hard to escape the camera. But her closing comments may well be the twin shades of her spirituality. That she gave God the glory for her success and mentioned Jesus and “the Alpha and the Omega” did not escape discussion everywhere.

Ultimately, only God knows a person’s heart. As I see it, deep inside her is that childlike faith and the memory of all that has happened to bring her this far. But the tug of the camera and of the Spirit of the Age, and a desire to make spiritual truth accessible and not dogmatic, may well have led her to say things that she thought would draw people closer to decency in their inner lives, even if she didn’t fully believe those things herself. Who knows? But that is precisely the game that can be played under the lights. Farewells bring out emotions that cannot suppress some beliefs. But with time and fame, the line between trusting God and playing God can easily be erased. When we are at the peak of success we may lead other people to believe that we are God. When we say good-bye, we know we are not.

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