THE LECTURE ISN'T SCHEDULED TO START FOR AN HOUR, BUT already the line outside the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles snakes well around the block. It's a friendly crowd, mostly young and casually dressed, equal parts men and women. They might be waiting on line for a movie or a concert. But instead, they are queuing up for God. Or, more precisely, for a spiritual booster shot delivered by Marianne Williamson.

If you haven't heard of her yet, you will soon. Williamson, 40, is today's hottest-and, at a shade over five feet, probably its shortest-spiritual guru. She affects a commanding, almost regal presence as she strides onstage to a warm ovation, smiling and waving as she moves past a baby grand piano to a Plexiglas podium. A vase of exotic flowers rests at her feet. On the lighted backdrop, for wispy clouds float in a simulated blue sky. But Williamson looks more corporate than metaphysical in a long dark skirt, fitted jacket, high heels, and not a crystal in sight.

She leads the crowd of a thousand or so in a brief, trademark meditation ("We see in the middle of our minds a little ball of golden light . . .") before setting off on the evening's lecture. "A lot of people are trying to figure out how to win in this world," says Williamson. "But the spiritual life is about effectively transcending that way of thinking. Remember the basic principles. First of all, God's desire is that you experience total joy."

This pint-size prophet is selling nothing less: Williamson promises happiness on all fronts if you love yourself and accept that God loves you, just the way you are. Of course, she would never say it in such simple, bumper-sticker slogans, but pare away the new-age doublespeak and clever one-liners and that'' what it boils down to. Williamson applies her spiritual Band-Aid to every problem anyone anywhere ever had. And people are buying it.

In her many roles as best-selling author, bicoastal lecturer, teacher, counselor, and nondenominational minister, Williamson has managed to touch the lives of millions with her message of love and forgiveness. What she has to say may be timeless, but to devotees it feels brand new.

"These pseudoreligious institutions tell you that God's a little happier if you suffer just a bit, Williamson is saying in the nasal singsong twang that betrays her Texas and Jewish roots. "The truth is, it's the pseudoreligious institutions that are happy if we suffer, because if we're suffering we're easier to control. The most outrageous thing to say this year is I will know joy."

Listening to Williamson speak is a little like hurtling down a highway in a sports car guide who is cocksure and comic, and determined to point out every sight along the way. She speaks for two hours tonight without notes or hesitation, weaving together personal anecdotes, observations about Russian Olympic swimmers, health clubs, Eastern philosophy, the Mists of Avalon, Simone de Beauvoir and President Clinton.

After her lecture, Williamson descends into the audience for questions. Microphone in hand, she slips up and down the aisles with the easy charm of Oprah Winfrey. The first question comes from Barb, who tearfully tells of a 19-year struggle to lose weight.

"The thing to remember," Williamson tells her, "is that this is not about food. One person says the problem is food, another person says the problem is relationships, another person has parents who are alcoholics. It's not about the dysfunctional pattern. It's about the absence of the right relationship with God. Say your prayers, but don't diet. It can't be about, Dear God, make me thin. You've got to say, "God, make me yours and I don't care what I weigh."

Barb, who seems buoyed, sits back down while Williamson continues her point. "If you have darkness sin your life, it's like a plane flying through rough weather. You have no choice but to fly at a higher altitude. You don't fight the darkness. You embrace the light."

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON NIBBLING a Cobb salad in a Sunset Boulevard bistro, doesn't look like anybody's idea of a prophet. She is dressed in a floppy brown hat, black tights, a long dark sweater, and high-heeled lace-up boots. Her chin-length brown hair is baby fine; her eyes are the color f chocolate. She's as animated at lunch as she was on stage. "I've always been very dramatic," she says. "I reject the notion that spiritual life means your pale beige. People who presume to know what 'spiritual' should look like perpetuate an unfortunate delusion that makes others reject the spiritual life."

Whether pulling herself up to make a pronouncement or slouching across the table to deliver a punch line, Williamson is anything but beige. She speaks quickly and continuously, segueing from some sober discourse on the world's ills to gossipy tidbits about some of her dates from hell.

Williamson considers herself a priestess of the new spiritual underground, but she rejects the assertion that she has followers, insisting instead that her popularity has to do with the message, not the messenger. "People are seeking greater love in their lives, because we are living in a time of collective heartbreak," she says. "You rarely meet a family today, no matter how rich, who have not been touched in some way by the horrors of our time. When we are pierced, we drop a lot of walls."

The message Williamson credits comes from a book called A Course in Miracles, which first appeared in 1975. The material was allegedly channeled by the late Helen Schucman, a New York psychologist who believed her source was Jesus Christ. Depending on whom you ask, A Course in Miracles will have the staying power of wither the Bible or the Hula-Hoop. So far, though, roughly 750,000 copies have been sold, and around the country students gather in groups to study its principles.

The basic premise of the book, which Williamson calls a "self-study program in spiritual psychotherapy," is that we begin life as extensions of God's love. Over time, however, that perfection gets buried beneath the meaningless values and trappings of the earthly world represented by the ego, which says Williamson, "teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment and small-mindedness."

Williamson has emerged as the Course's most famous teacher. Her Course-inspired lectures on topics such as "Commitment and Relationships," "Love Without an Agenda," "Giving Up Failure," and "Fear of Abandonment" draw standing-room only crowds. Her lectures on tape-over 100 and counting-sell briskly for $8.50 and are available in new-age bookstores as well as at every Williamson appearance (where you get a $1.50 discount). Devotees collect and trade the tapes, and listen to favorites over and over again.

In 1991, Williamson decided to turn her lectures into a book. When Oprah declared on her afternoon talk show that "I have never been as moved by a book," A Return to Love rocketed to the top of bestseller lists and Williamson became a national celebrity. Her second book, A Woman's Worth, is in bookstores this month.

Williamson's success is about more than just good publicity; she's struck a raw spiritual nerve, tapping into a yearning that's especially strong among baby boomers careening toward middle age. "We're beyond the Me generation," says Wade Clark Roof, professor of religion and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of A Generation of Seekers. "There's a kind of reaching out now, a desire to give your life to something that's bigger than yourself. The result is a redefinition of what is really important in life."

Profits from A Return to Love allowed Williamson to trade a beat-up Peugeot and modest two-bedroom apartment for a sleek Infiniti and a spacious new home, complete with swimming pool, in the Hollywood Hills. But success was not smooth. With it came the nasty whispers: Is Williamson the real thing, or just some good-looking charlatan getting rich and famous by serving up hip sermons to an emotionally crippled public?

AT THE CENTER OF WILLIAMSON'S private life is Emma, her two-year-old daughter. Williamson, who jokingly refers to herself as "an unwed Jewish mother," continues to keep Emma's paternity a secret, from the media at least, though she assures me that she knows who the father is. "Given the fact that we're not married, and that a child is involved," she says, "I just think it's nobody's business."

At the moment, Emma is sprawled on the large wooden coffee table in the living room, picking at a plate of chicken and broccoli while she waits for her mother. Williamson has just returned from conducting a memorial service for a young man who died of AIDS and the solemnity of the occasions till clings to her. But she has promised Emma a story, so she gamely opens a dog-eared paperback, takes a deep breath, and launches into Cinderella.

It's a spirited reading. Williamson delivers the wicked stepmother's lines in a breathy snarl that achieves the very height of haughty. Emma is rapt. When the clock strikes midnight, breaking the spell and leaving Cinderella alone by the roadside dressed in rags and the one remaining glass slipper, Williamson pauses to refill Emma's plate and I take the opportunity to confess that this part of the story has never made sense to me. If the coach, the footmen, the horses and the gown all changed back, who is Cinderella still wearing that one glass slipper? "Because," says Williamson, "once you've had a mystical experience, you remain touched."

Williamson's glass slipper, the mystical experience that left its footprint on her soul, was in the 1960s, the tumultuous time of ear and love-ins, protests and assassinations. Through the decade-long haze of drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll, says Williamson, "millions of people glimpsed a vision of a more loving world. However neurotically, we sought it at the time, and however stoned we were, we're back, we're sober, and we're serious."

Actually, her calling to take on the world began much earlier. She grew up in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three children in an upper middle-class Jewish family. Her mother, Sophie Ann, was a homemaker. Her father was an immigration lawyer and passionate left-wing activist. When she was five, Williamson recalls him thumping the dining room table and exhorting her to "grow up and change the world."

By the time she was ten, he had introduced her to Lenin, Stanislavsky, and The Communist Manifesto. He clearly made an impression. In A Woman's Worth, Williamson writes, "Unconsciously, I created a career for myself not unlike my father's. When I started lecturing, I found myself surrounded by people burdened with serious problems . . . and the moral as well as the professional imperative was that I be the strong one and hold other people up. I am what is called a father's daughter."

In 1970, Williamson left Houston for Pomona College, near Los Angeles, but she dropped out after her sophomore year to move to New Mexico with a boyfriend who designed geodesic domes. That was the start of what she calls "my wasted decade."

She abandoned the boyfriend and New Mexico in 1973. Over the next six years, she moved from Austin to New York City to San Francisco, leaving a string of odd jobs and bad relationships in her wake. Williamson was on the lam from herself, fleeing the burden of a considerable potential with no clue about where to go or what to do with her life. "By my mid-twenties," she says, "I was a total mess."

Unlike other spiritual leaders, who may have tried to rewrite their religious resumes to cover up such a period, Williamson has used this confused and checkered past to her advantage. The fact that she's been down and out, lovelorn, depressed and overweight gives her credibility.

Unbeknownst to Williamson, two developments during this period set her on her future course. The first was her stab at a singing career. For two years, she was a jazz singer in small nightclubs around New York City. "That's where I learned to talk to an audience," she says. "In fact, my patter between songs was better than the songs."

The other happened one night in 1977 when Williamson found A Course in Miracles on a coffee table in a friend's apartment. At first, she rejected the book's message, in part because, as a Jew, she felt uncomfortable with the Christian terminology. (Indeed, today Williamson says she "absolutely" still considers herself Jewish; she observes the holidays, occasionally goes to temple, and plans to raise Emma in the Jewish faith. "But the truth of God is greater than any particular take on it," she says. "And I'm really, like a lot of people, quite eclectic in my spiritual pursuits.)

Williamson returned to Houston in 1979, opened a new-age bookstore, and got married-a "15-minute" mistake she declines to talk about. Three months later she was divorced and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Emotionally splintered, and in therapy five days a week, Williamson finally embraced the Course and its principles. "I didn't get serious until I was on my knees," she writes in A Return to Love. "It was as though I heard God gently say, "Can we start now?'"

WILLIAMSON'S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY had officially begun. First stop, LA. Not long after arriving in 1983, she began leading small study groups on the Course. By 1987 she was speaking three nights a week to hundreds of people each time.

It was during this period that a close friend was fighting a losing battle with breast cancer. That inspired Williamson to found the Los Angeles Center for Living, a nonprofit organization that provides a variety of services-counseling, massage-to people with terminal diseases. Tow years later, in 1989, she started the Manhattan Center for Living in New York. It was through the centers that she began her work with AIDS, including a weekly HIV support group.

As a consequence of her work with AIDS, Williamson began rubbing shoulders with Hollywood celebrities. Bette Midler and Cher donated money and served on the honorary board of the Los Angeles Center for Living. Music Mogul David Geffen contributed $100,000 to the centers. After she officiated at the nuptials for another AIDS fundraiser, Elizabeth Taylor, when Taylor married Larry Fortensky, the press anointed Williamson the "guru to the stars."

"So much of that is a fiction created by the media," says Williamson with obvious frustration, " and it's used to diminish me. If you followed me around for six months, you might see me talk to one celebrity. That's one out of the thousand people I talk to."

Williamson's sudden upward mobility raised some more eyebrows. "I never made a cent off my AIDS work. No one of goodwill begrudges me a nice house. My book sold a lot of copies. And I wanted a real nice backyard for my baby."

She was caught off guard by the bad publicity that followed the behind-the-scenes squabbling at both the Los Angeles and Manhattan Centers for Living. The stories focused on disputes over decision making and control (such as should money be spent to air-condition the airplane hangar where a fundraiser was being held.) Disgruntled associates accused Williamson of being a "tyrant" whose " ego is going to destroy her."

As her first book scaled the bestseller lists, Williamson's spirits took a nosedive. "I'm very sensitive. And it's humiliating. How would you like it if you worked hard for years at a career and then you see an article where twenty million people read lies about you?"

Williamson pleads guilty to "about ten percent" of what was said about her. "Did I snap at people? Yes. But did I get mean and abusive and do cruel things? No! I'm not a perfect person nor have I ever claimed to be one. But I'm not the mean-spirited woman described in some of those stories."

IF FORGIVENESS HAS PROVEN HARD, true love is an even bigger challenge. Why, for instance, isn't the guru of love married? She bristles. "A lot of the most creative women in history haven't been married. I don't think the issue is whether or not to be married, but how to keep your spirits soaring. Besides, those men I love, I love well." She is involved with someone now, but is mum on the details.

Actually, Williamson is notorious for going through men. Maybe the roots of this are also in her childhood. She writes in A Woman's Worth about a problem common to many women: "When you were a little girl, Daddy told you in various ways that you weren't really all that great, so that any man who gives you the same message years later feels to you like the one you belong with. He's familiar in that he's remote and slightly disapproving."

It's this mix of head shrinking, cheerleading, and raging about women's plight in the world that is the subject of A Woman's Worth. "The world has very little use for your womanhood," she writes in the opening chapter, sounding more like Gloria Steinem than Shirley MacLaine. "You are considered a weaker sex and are treated like a sex object. You are thoroughly dispensable except for bearing children. Your youth is the measure of your worth." But Williamson helps women figure out how to undo all this by reclaiming the Goddess within and fulfilling their mystical purpose. In her next book, The Healing of America, she graduates from the problems of women to the problems of the nation, proposing her formula for solving the country's daunting social problems.

Despite her still hectic schedule, and because she writes at home, Williamson spends a good part of each day with Emma. (She employs a part-time nanny-legal, she says.) She typically brings Emma along to lunch appointments or when she travels to New York City. She is considering a television show as a way to extend her ministry without having to leave home.

Indeed, Williamson has been thinking about Emma's spiritual education lately. She is tying with the idea of starting a Sunday school based on Course in Miracles principles. "We teach kids things like spelling," she says, "But the world isn't falling apart because people don't know how to spell. It's falling apart because people don't know how to treat each other kindly. I'd like to try and teach children the importance of compassion."

Emma sometimes joins her mother in her twice-daily meditations. "She loves it, because she knows that it's one of the few times Mommy's just going to sit there and she can lie in my arms," says Williamson. I say, 'I'm going to meditate now,' and she says, 'Why?' Because I have to talk to God. 'Why?' Because you have to talk to God every day. 'Why?' Because that's how you'll be happy."

I CONFESS HAVING BEEN SKEPTICAL ABOUT Williamson at the start. I figured nothing short of a burning bush could get me to take religion seriously again, and surely not some glamorous new-age guru with a cell phone, a publicist and a Hollywood address. But it's her charity work that softened me. And it's not just the centers. Williamson has been known to pick up the tab for AZT treatments and let sick friends stay at her house. She has given away more money than most of us will ever make. Her lectures have been free of charge since A Return to Love became such a smash. Any money that is donated at the various lectures goes to various area charities.

Besides, there is something undeniably compelling about what Williamson says, and its effect is strangely cumulative. The longer you listen, the more sense it makes. There is an honesty, a vulnerability, a consequences-be-damned integrity about her that forces you to listen to the message, even if you don't embrace it.

Williamson understands the hesitation. She recognizes that many people dismiss her beliefs as self-serving, new-age mumbo jumbo. "What I call spiritual growth, the world calls crazy," she says. "But you know, it's not silly work I do. It's just that in the world today, love is a radical viewpoint."