The Woman Who Hid God in a Creativity Book
Julia Cameron is Catholic. Her book is a prayer manual. Five million copies sold. Almost nobody noticed.
She got sober in January of 1978.
She had an office on the Paramount lot. She’d been married to Martin Scorsese and had a daughter and was writing screenplays and drinking, and the writing came in spurts, like blood from a wound she kept reopening. Willpower creativity. You hurl yourself at the wall, you bleed on the page, you call it art. She’d been doing it for a decade.
Then the drinking nearly killed her. And she stopped.
The writing stopped too.
She moved to Taos, New Mexico. A small adobe house that looked north to Taos Mountain. She sat at a wooden table and started doing something she had no name for. Three pages. Longhand. First thing in the morning. Whatever came out. No agenda. No audience. Just the pen moving across the page and a mountain out the window raising questions she couldn’t answer.
She called them Morning Pages.
One wet morning, a character named Johnny walked into her pages uninvited. She was writing a novel and hadn’t planned to. The pages had shown her a way.
She spent the next decade teaching what she’d learned. From the floor. From the January she got sober and had to find a new path to the thing she thought alcohol had been giving her. What she found instead was that the path had always been there. She’d just been too loud to hear it.
In 1992 she published The Artist’s Way. Five million copies later, it’s the most successful creative recovery program in history.
Julia Cameron is Catholic. She has been her entire life. Prayers to the Great Creator. God Is No Laughing Matter. Answered Prayers and Blessings and Faith and Will.
Look at her bibliography. The woman has written over forty books. An entire shelf of them are prayer books and books about God. She wrote the tenth basic principle of her program as: “Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”
She wrote that the morning pages are, and I’ll use her exact phrase, “a spiritual ham-radio set to contact the Creator Within.”
She quotes Christ in the Spiritual Electricity chapter. She calls herself an “inspired teacher” and means it literally. The creative pulse within us IS God’s creative pulse.
On page two of her introduction, she apologizes.
She writes that the book uses the word God. She warns the reader that this may be “volatile.” She offers escape routes: call it Goddess. Call it Mind. Call it Universe. Call it Source. Call it the Force, for all she cares. She writes, essentially: please don’t leave. I know the word scares you. Just substitute whatever makes you comfortable and keep reading.
A Catholic woman had to beg five million people not to flinch at the name of God.
And it worked. They didn’t flinch. They stayed. Because she gave them permission to sand off the three letters that hurt.
What had to break for five million people to need that permission.
She wasn’t hiding Him from you. She was hiding Him for you.
Cameron got sober through the twelve-step process. Alcoholics Anonymous. And the architecture of The Artist’s Way is the twelve-step architecture, transplanted root and branch.
Twelve weeks. Twelve steps. The same bones.
AA starts with admission: I am powerless and my life has become unmanageable. Cameron starts with safety: I am creatively blocked and I need permission to recover. Same surrender, different substance.
AA’s second step: came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Cameron’s entire program runs on this sentence. She just files the capital letters down so nobody cuts themselves on it.
AA meetings happen in church basements with bad coffee and fluorescent lights. Strangers sit in circles and confess what they’ve done and what was done to them. They share. They listen. They come back next week.
Cameron groups happen in living rooms and coffee shops and community centers. Strangers sit in circles and share what they wrote in their Morning Pages and what surfaced during their Artist Dates. They confess the dreams they buried. They come back next week.
Same room. Same confession. Same slow, terrifying surrender to a power you can’t control and didn’t earn.
AA asks you to call it your Higher Power. Cameron asks you to call it your Great Creator. Both of them are standing in the doorway of the same house, and both of them know whose house it is, and neither of them will say the name until you’re ready to hear it.
Three positions in every fight that matters.
On one side: institutional religion. Come to the building. Sit in the pew. Tithe. Obey the pastor. Access God through the structure we built for you. The toll booth on the road to the Father.
On the other side: secular spirituality. You don’t need God. You need the Universe. Energy. Flow. Creative force. The word God is patriarchal, oppressive, institutional, loaded. Drop it. You can have the practice without the Person.
Both of those positions are loud. Cameron’s followers hold the second one. They do Morning Pages and feel something move inside them and they call it “creative flow” or “inner wisdom” or “the Universe” and they mean it. They’ve built weekly gatherings and spiritual disciplines and confessional honesty. They built everything the early church was. Before the budgets and the buildings and the politics.
They built church. They just will not say the word.
And the reason they won’t say it is the reason Cameron had to apologize on page two. Someone broke the word for them. A pastor. A father. A system that put conditions on the love of God. That told them access to the Father required obedience to the building. That the road to God had a toll, and the toll was your silence, your money, your compliance, your guilt.
After you’ve been charged enough times, you stop using the road.
But you don’t stop needing to get there. So you build a path through the woods. And you call it Morning Pages.
Cameron knows.
Her bibliography confesses louder than her introduction.
The practice works because the Person is real.
The morning pages work because there IS a voice on the other end of the line. You sit down at six in the morning with a spiral notebook and you write three pages of garbage and somewhere in the second page the garbage clears and something else starts speaking. Something that knows you. Something patient and specific and unbothered by your mood.
Cameron wrote to her inner self, “LJ” for Little Julie, and asked what she should tell people about the pages. The answer came back in her own handwriting: “Tell them everyone has a direct dial to God. No one needs to go through an operator.”
She published that in the book. In plain sight. The woman who apologized for the word God on page two told you, forty pages later, that you have a direct line and nobody stands between you and Him.
The toll booth is a lie. The road to the Father was never closed. You just stopped walking it because the people who claimed to own the road made you pay to use it.
What Cameron built is what the early church actually was. Before Constantine. Before the councils. Before the buildings.
People in rooms. Sharing bread. Telling each other what happened to them. Practicing a way of living that made them more alive. No hierarchy to speak of. No budget. No denomination. Just “wherever two or more are gathered.”
Cameron’s groups are the same room.
The grandmother in Tulsa who does Morning Pages at 5:30 AM and feels something open up in her chest that she hasn’t felt since she left the Baptist church in 1994, she’s praying. She doesn’t call it that. She calls it journaling, or creative practice, or “my Cameron time.” But she’s sitting in the silence, and the silence is speaking back, and the voice she hears is the same voice that spoke to Moses from a bush that burned without burning up.
She just doesn’t know it yet. Or she does know it, in the place beneath knowing, and she’s afraid to say it out loud because the last time she said it out loud someone told her she was doing it wrong.
Nobody is doing it wrong.
Cameron turned seventy-eight this month. Over forty books. Most of them are about God. The one that sold five million copies is the one where she had to hide Him.
I want to give you permission to name Him.
I’m going through Cameron’s twelve weeks. Her program. Her tools. Morning Pages every morning. Artist Dates every week. Writing about it here, weekly, in a series I’m calling Morning Work.
Not as a teacher. As someone who buried his own artist under the production schedule and knows it’s time to dig. Cameron built the bridge. I’m just crossing it in front of you.
If you used to make things and stopped. If someone told you it was selfish or impractical or too late. If you’ve been faithful in your service and starved your own soul.
Come with me.
<3 EKO
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If you’re new here: I’ve now published 10 books in the Unsealed Archives. Start anywhere. Or start with One Whale, a personal parable that came to me while doing my morning pages. Dozens of folks have since told me they know think of themselves as the whale.
And if you missed Friday’s lineage…
Her work is amazing! I have read all her books and continued the Morning Pages everyday for over 2 years now. They keep me grounded and attuned within. Life changing!
Dear EKO, she didn't originate this..there is a book maybe written in the 30ies..it's name I'd GOD Calling..about 2 elder ladies who do the same. Sit, be still and let GOD, the Great I AM, speak to them. I was first introduced to this book 22yrs ago. I have given many away. This is real. This is true. GOD does speak to any and everyone who is receptive and sincerely wants to listen. GOD gave us instructions on how each of us needs to live for HIM to heal our lands. Each individual has the ability to help bring HIS healing. YESHUA split the curtain separating us from HIS FATHER, the Great I AM. By HIS sacrifice not only did HE pay the death penalty for sin but by HIS name we have direct access to the FATHER. HE and HE alone is our intercessor.