Allen Watson Memoriam
I will never forget fetching the mail from the Circle’s P.O. box in Sedona, Arizona in the early 90s and discovering that someone had sent me two booklets by a man named Allen Watson. Even before leaving the post office I started reading one of them, a commentary on “The Fear of Redemption” section in the Text. I was instantly impressed. The writing was clear, emotional, and true to the Course. I thought “This guy really has something.”
I reached out to Allen and after a couple of years of exploration, in person and through the mail, we realized we had so much in common in how we saw the Course that, in 1993, Allen decided to move from New Jersey to Sedona to join us in the newly incorporated Circle of Atonement.
His influence was felt instantly. While I liked to do topical classes, he urged us to take our students through the entire Text, section by section, which we did, over four years. It was a landmark time in the spiritual journey of all who attended.
But his influence was also felt in a deeper way. While I liked to pull topics together from all over the Course, Allen’s Bible background had trained him to carefully draw out each sentence and indeed each word. He would often read a sentence aloud and, by putting the emphasis on a particular word, open up a whole new meaning for me.
I had been working on a summary of the Text in which I compressed every paragraph into half its length, stripping out “unnecessary” verbiage. Once he was in Sedona, I shared my draft with Allen, hoping he’d be impressed. Instead, he simply said, “But it’s already compressed.” He was right, and I abandoned the project. It was a fundamental shift for me to focus on drawing out the wealth that was hidden in each line, a shift I received from Allen.
His writing was all about drawing out that wealth, in a way that made you understand it, but also that made you feel it, adding stories, quotes, and personal anecdotes. This is no doubt why his beloved Workbook Companion commentaries remain the most popular thing on our site to this day. I can still see him working on those every night out on the deck at the house we shared in Sedona. Allen and I taught countless classes, workshops, and retreats together, often leading us through his original Course music. He finally retired from the Circle in 2006, but he kept teaching in Portland and writing commentaries.
When he came to our thirtieth anniversary celebration last year in October, he sat Emily and I down and asked, with emotion in his voice, if we would house his Text commentaries on the Circle’s website in perpetuity. He had been working on these for over twenty years. We were honored and immediately said yes. But right or wrong, we also took away the impression that he didn’t think he would be around very long.
Allen was a gentle soul. A mutual friend called him “the quintessential reasonable man.” He gave so much to students of A Course in Miracles. Even if you don’t know his writings, all of those who have benefited from the Circle’s work, and all of us at the Circle, me very much included, owe him a deep debt of gratitude.
With love,
Robert Perry