The Age of Miracles (11 page)
Read The Age of Miracles Online
Authors: Marianne Williamson
B
EYOND OBVIOUS PROPRIETIES
, I
DON’T THINK IT SHOULD MATTER
how old your lover is any more than it should matter how old your doctor, teacher, or car-insurance salesperson is. What matters is the soul growth that brings two hearts together. Every relationship has a natural arc, a time that’s perfect for the lessons that the relationship is here to teach us. Some are long and some are short. Love will never bow to time because love is real and time is not. A moment of true love is more important to some of us than decades of domestic timeshare.
Love is an adventure of the soul, whether as a love affair that is short but intense, or as a marriage that lasts until death do us part. In the words of Ram Dass, we are brought into each other’s lives “for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” It isn’t the length of time, but rather the depth of knowing and forgiveness and growth that occurs, which determines the meaning of a connection between two people. I love the Joni Mitchell lyric that love is souls touching souls. Some people have slept together for 30 years but their souls have never touched. By some estimation, theirs is still a successful marriage … but there are many ways to estimate love.
I once knew a man who was younger than I was chronologically, but much more firmly grounded in the truth of his being than I was in mine. I kept up this inauthentic mantra about how he was much too young for me, until one day I realized that the quizzical look on his face wasn’t disappointment, it was disrespect. He had expected more of me. He expected me to be more honest.
What a convenient front for my fear it was to go on and on about how he hadn’t had his babies yet and since I couldn’t give him those then of course I wasn’t the woman for him. “For a lifetime, you’re probably right,” he said. “But I didn’t ask you for a lifetime. I asked you for Saturday night.”
But how can I relax on Saturday night,
I thought,
when I already know that this is a limited run?
I saw an episode on
Sex and the City
where that’s called “expiration dating”: You know in advance that there’s a date past which you can’t continue this. It took a while for me to realize that that had never stopped me from enjoying yogurt, so it didn’t have to stop me from enjoying men either.
The idea of falling for someone with whom there was a built-in time limit seemed terrifying at first, until I realized,
But isn’t that what death is?
Had I ever said, “Sorry, I can’t love you—after 40 or 50 years, you’ll probably be out of here”? No. We have the double illusion that life is long and love is short. In fact, life is short but love lasts forever.
So I gave the young man a chance—as though I had so much to teach him, you see. And the irony, which was no irony at all to him but simply an obvious point, was that he, carrying so much less fear than I, came to the experience with more wisdom and strength. Whatever I had in accumulated knowledge, he bested with his more open mind: fewer rules, fewer limits, fewer affectations of knowing things that can’t be known. It wasn’t I who was the guru at love here; it was he. I thought he might be blessed by the love of someone more knowing than he, but I think I was more blessed to be loved by someone more
unknowing
than I. People are matched perfectly for the gifts they bring to each other, and sometimes it’s those who teach us when
not
to reason who are as important as those who teach us how to. Knowledge has many dimensions.
A Course in Miracles
states that love restores reason and not the other way around.
Sometimes the value of a liaison with a younger person is that they remind us we’re not dead yet. They bring energy like the sun breaking through, after too much fog and rain had made us think that the light might not ever return. They bring the sun because they still
are
the sun. Having not yet experienced their own late afternoon, they don’t trigger the grief you feel over what happened during yours.
A relationship might not be something that lasts a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a temple experience. The sanctity of a connection is determined by how much respect and honor we show it. People are drawn to people whom they can learn from, and intimacy is a deep learning. Years together can be a deep learning, and three days in Paris where all you do is eat and sleep and make love and pray and talk about everything that’s ever happened to you can also be a deep learning. The only thing that ruins that one is when someone doesn’t know how to let what happened in Paris be simply that. It takes a high level of spiritual as well as emotional evolution to be able to go deep with someone with whom the connection is best kept limited in time. I’m not justifying casual sex here; the sex in this case would be anything but casual. This isn’t that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” It’s that “what happens in Paris stays in our hearts to bless us forever.”
And by the way: if it happened in Las Vegas, that’s okay, too.
T
HERE ARE MANY MANSIONS IN THE ROMANTIC HOUSE OF LOVE
. The exchange is uniquely wonderful with someone who knows the lyrics to the same songs you do. I think of one who has walked the path with me when it was smooth and when it was rocky, when it was cool to know me and when it was cool to put me down, when I was laughing like a loon and when I was crying like a child. He is the one who has
seen
me. That is the ultimate value, I think, of relationships that move through the years without dissolving. Someone bears witness to your life. You don’t experience yourself in a vacuum; someone else knows your story. They were as excited as you were when something marvelous happened to you, and they never said, “I told you so,” when you did something stupid you would later regret. They have faith in the longer narrative of your life. They’ve seen you grow from your losses as well as your wins.
The key to long-term relationships is letting someone be different today than they were yesterday. I think one of the main reasons for divorce is that couples don’t always create the emotional space between them to allow for constant and continuous change. When people say, “We grew apart,” it’s often a sign that when they entered the marriage, their emotional contract didn’t include this clause: “I’ll let you grow. You’ll let me grow. We’ll learn from each other, and we can grow together.”
At midlife we all need to shed our skin and grow a new one. The soul hungers for a chance to expand itself. The tragedy between partners is when they don’t know enough to honor this need, recognizing that it carries within it a chance to regreen the relationship.
I once knew a man who left his wife because he felt that he couldn’t become
himself
in the marriage. He felt that he couldn’t find his manhood within the context of their connection, as if she took up too much of the oxygen. He felt that in leaving her, he was going through a male initiation of sorts. Then and only then could he become the man he wanted to be.
But I felt in observing them that perhaps the truest initiation into his manhood would have been if, within the context of the marriage, he’d owned his own power enough to simply tell her to back off. A real man does set boundaries. A real man does demand his own psychic space. A real man does not let a woman dominate or control him. But a real man
claims
all that for himself; he doesn’t just slink away and call leaving his marriage some assumption of male power.
Sometimes marriages are simply over—the maximum opportunity for learning has occurred, and it’s time to let go—but sometimes people leave for no other reason than that their spouses aren’t providing them with what only they can provide for themselves. The fact that a relationship is reminding you that you’re not strong enough yet isn’t of itself a
bad
thing. It’s part of the value of the relationship that it’s showing you to yourself. Moving on to another situation where you’re stuck in the same pattern but can easily pretend you’re not has never in my experience provided clarity or strength.
I’ve gained a lot in my life from moving on, when moving on was the call of my soul. I’ve gained just as much from staying in the struggle with self while standing still, when my soul made it clear that this was where I belonged for now … that the real problem was not with him but with you-know-who. And it is incredible, once you’ve made the breakthrough or made the change, when the person in front of you is the same one who was there before.
I once had a relationship with a man who told me often, “You’re so hard to please.” It was an ongoing issue that became a major one, as I’d always find a way to create a problem where there didn’t have to be one. I got the point and sought to address within myself why I was behaving in such a self-defeating way, why I was so invested in that drama and so forth. I asked for God’s help, tried to snap out of it, and modified my behavior as best I could. One day many months later, I asked my friend for another serving of half-and-half in my coffee, to which he responded laughingly, “You’re so hard to please.” I had made it. I had changed. And he was still there.
Dear God,
I surrender to You my relationships.
Please purify my thoughts about them,
so only love remains.
In this, and in all things, dear God,
may Your will alone
be done.
Amen
*I told him about a book called
Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress,
and shared with him how much I had learned from psychologist Pat Allen in Southern California.
W
ith the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, anyone who needed to grow up and basically hadn’t done it yet, did. The prolonged post-adolescence of at least one generation ended at last. On that day, the music died.
And now what will we do? Everyone I know is waiting for the world to change.
It’s unbelievable how far we’ve fallen. In the 1960s we listened to the likes of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., articulate the vision of an America, and a world, delivered to its highest possibility. We provided music that was a perfect soundtrack to their dreams, singing “All You Need Is Love” at political rallies. It’s true that many of us were stoned out of our minds at the time—but we’re not now, and that means something. It might have taken us 40 years, but we’ve finally matured to the point where we’re ready to manifest dreams we embraced a long time ago.
What took us so long? Why 40 years? What stopped us?
More than anything, I think, murder stopped us. The voices of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., along with the four students at Kent State University, were silenced violently and abruptly right in front of our eyes. Those bullets weren’t just for them; psychically they were for all of us, and we knew it. The unspoken message of those assassinations could not have been louder. There would be no further protest. We were to go home now. We could do whatever we wanted to do within the private sector, but were to leave the public sector to whoever wanted it so much that they were willing to kill in order to control it.
And leave it alone we did. A generation with as much talent and privilege as any that has ever walked the earth poured the majority of our gifts into private concerns—mostly things of ultimate irrelevance—while mostly leaving the political sphere to others. And for a few decades, that seemed to work. America can be likened to a house, in which many of us ran to the second floor (art, spirituality, careers,
fun
) and left the downstairs (traditional politics) to less inspired thinkers. We kidded ourselves that it was an okay arrangement, until those of us on the balcony began to smell the unmistakable odor of a house burning down.
Shouldn’t someone about now be yelling, “Fire!”?
Collectively, our script has been returned to us for a rewrite. We get another chance to determine the end. The first time around, we allowed ourselves to be silenced. It remains to be seen if we will be silenced now.
Dear God,
At this time of global peril,
may I be a conduit of Your miracles.
Heal me that I
might heal others,
and help bring forth
a more beautiful world.
Amen
D
URING HIS SECOND TERM IN OFFICE
, President Bill Clinton proposed a national conversation about race. People tried their best to live up to the proposition, but soon enough the idea seemed to fizzle. From a transformational perspective—one that recognizes the importance of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors, as well as material ones—this came as no surprise. You can’t have a real “conversation” about race—one that’s authentic and meaningful, with any hope of real breakthrough—unless some of the people involved have a chance to express anger that’s been built up over hundreds of years.
Having led spiritual support groups for more than 20 years, I’ve had a bit of experience facilitating the kind of sacred space that allows for deep conversation. A unique energy must be brought forth in such groups, ensuring the emotional safety and well-being of all its participants. Most of us have felt this kind of energy in therapy, during religious ritual, or what have you. It’s a distinctly different vibration from normal conversation, stemming from a different set of brain waves.
When Mary was looking for her son Jesus, she found him in the temple. And there was a reason for that. No soul finds any soul except in sacred space.
Within that space, all is revealed—total communication is given and received, and miracles occur naturally. Until we reach that depth of dialogue within ourselves and with others, there can be no deeper breakthroughs regarding our most urgent problems. What will
not
solve today’s problems is conventional thought. What will
not
solve today’s problems is old tried-and-no-longer-true formulas. What will
not
solve today’s problems is endless attack and defense. What will
not
solve today’s problems is shallow conversation.
What
will
solve today’s problems is new consciousness, from which will emerge new thinking and new hope. The planet needs a new story, and so do we.
Who would be better to help create a new story for the planet than those of us who just happen to be involved with creating a new story for ourselves? A problem of midlife is the temptation to be redundant, simply imitating ourselves by doing the same things we’ve always done but with less verve. But the pulse of the moment—both personally and globally—is to let go now of what needs to be let go, to disenthrall ourselves of what used to be, and embrace a radically new kind of life. It is there for us. It’s there for us as individuals, and it’s there for us as a species. It’s alive in our imagination, and we can claim it if we wish to. Each of us is coded to play a maximally effective role helping to change the world, to the extent to which we are willing to
be changed.
I was once privy to a fascinating moment at a private party, where I saw the musical producer and performer Babyface sit strumming a guitar and singing his song “Change the World,” while former mayor of Atlanta, UN ambassador, and civil-rights legend Andrew Young sat a few feet away, listening and staring out into the distance. One man sang of wanting to change the world, while the other had memories of how much he’d already tried. Yet both received their intimations of possibility from the same internal source, from which all of us should now be drawing our inspiration and hope.
Real vision comes not from what we see in the past or the future; it emerges from what we see within. The soul is the only safe repository for our dreams of a reborn world. It is the soul that will direct us—no matter what our age—to the role we can best play in realigning the earth with the consciousness of heaven. We have within us, through an internal guidance system created by God Himself, all the instructions we need in order to midwife a new world. Both our temporal and eternal selves are programmed perfectly for what we need to do now.
And I do mean now.
Dear God,
Please prepare me,
heart and soul,
to bring light into darkened times.
Amen
H
ISTORY MOVES FORWARD ONE INSIGHT AT A TIME
. From the Jewish embrace of a monotheistic God to Buddha’s vision of compassion; from the teaching of Jesus that God is love to Martin Luther’s insistence that we can talk to Him ourselves; from the individual’s creative genius spurred by the Italian Renaissance to the philosophical maturity of the European Enlightenment; from the genius of the American Experiment to the invention of quantum physics—the march of armies is creatively small compared to the march of ideas. And that is the purpose of time, for both the individual and the species: that as life progresses, our understanding can mature.
All of us take two steps forward and one step back at times, but there is nevertheless an evolutionary impulse—within every heart, every cell, and every aspect of life—marching ahead despite all resistance. Our task is to consciously conspire with that impulse, in full partnership with the force of love at the center of all things, entwined with its divine pulsation and heat, both riding and directing the wave by which humanity shall rise up at last.
I
T’S AMAZING HOW MANY PEOPLE TODAY
do not take it for granted that the planet will survive the next 50 years. Whether from weather disasters or military misadventures, there are so many ways we could be destroyed.
Rationally, this is certainly true. But spiritual power is nonrational. That’s not to say it’s
irrational;
just nonrational. It springs forth from a quantum field not limited by mortal circumstances. The catastrophic possibilities that threaten the world today reflect who we have been until now, and they’ll stay the way they are for as long as we stay the way
we
are. The possibility for a miraculous change in global affairs reflects the possibility for miraculous change in us.
Spiritual transformation, not human manipulation, is the only level fundamentally deep enough to alter the now dangerous trajectory of human history. We can’t just “fix” our way out of what’s going on now. We need a miracle, which we will only have if we ourselves become miracle workers.
Miracles occur naturally in the presence of love. In our natural state, we
are
miracle workers because love is who we are. Talk about personal transformation—the journey from fear to love—is not a narcissistic exercise. It’s not fuzzy thinking or soft-brained New Ageism. It’s the most necessary component to our re-creating human society and affecting the course of history.
The problem with the world is that we’ve been torn from our original nature. Torn from ourselves, we become addicts. Torn from each other, we become abusers. Torn from the earth, we become its destroyers. And that tear—a separation from our divine oneness—is not a metaphor. It is not a symbol. It is a literal, vicious, insidiously progressive disease of the human spirit. It is
force
. And it has at its command the same sophisticated level of mental operating skills as does the better part of us. It is our dark side, and underestimating its sway is naive.
I gave a talk once where I mentioned the word
evil.
A woman then stood up in the back of the room and said, “I don’t believe in evil. Where some see evil, I see wounding and pain.” I told her that the the pain she refers to is often the
cause
of evil, absolutely. But I don’t understand where acknowledging the cause involves denying the effect.
Were the witch-burnings not evil? Is genocide not evil? Are children having their throats slit, or being bought and sold as sex slaves, or having their limbs cut off one by one, not evil? Is a man tied up in his basement, forced to hear the sounds of his wife and daughters raped repeatedly and then set on fire, not evil? Where do we get this notion that it could somehow be “spiritual” to minimize evil?
As a student of
A Course in Miracles,
I certainly understand that in Reality, all that exists is love. But the planet we live on is
not
ultimate reality; it is a mass illusion, as powerful in its effects as is the truth. And here, in this collective illusion, what-is-not love still holds sway. The ego, according to
A Course in Miracles,
is suspicious at best and vicious at worst.
The miracle minded are not naïve about darkness; we don’t just carry around cans of pink paint and pour it over everything so we can pretend things are fine. We can’t invoke the dawn if we deny that night occurred. What could possibly serve darkness more than people failing to realize its sly and insidious nature? A serious grown-up is not someone who looks away from the pain of the world; a serious grown-up is someone who sees the point of our lives as committing ourselves to healing it.
That, in a way, is what our generation had to learn. In a part of the world where we had it so easy, perhaps we subconsciously manifest our own private hells to make sure we would finally wake up to the hell of so many people elsewhere. Maybe we needed a bridge in Minnesota to fall, so we could begin to imagine what it feels like to have your city, your country, your bridges, your hospitals, your markets, your schools, and your children bombarded every single day.
Perhaps we will come collectively to the place many of us have been in the privacy of our own hearts, crying out with horror,
“Oh my God, what have we done?!”
Then, in a moment of genuine sorrow for ways we have behaved so irresponsibly, we will begin to atone as a nation, and as a civilization, in the way that so many of us have atoned as individuals. We will recognize that we were wrong, surrender our souls to God, and pray fervently for another chance.
Dear God,
Please forgive us for the wounded earth,
and the needless suffering that
afflicts its people today.
Intercede on behalf of our better selves
and repair the damage done.
Replace our fear with hope, dear God,
and turn all hate to love.
Amen
D
ESCARTES SAID
, “I
THINK, THEREFORE
I
AM
.” The way I see it, I’m connected to God, therefore I am. Without my faith, I feel that I’d be nothing but a disconnected array of thoughts and feelings without any sense of true meaning or purpose.
I don’t mean that without my religion I’d be nothing—although I think I would be less. I mean I derive my emotional security from my belief that I’m not alone in the universe—that I’m supported by what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “cosmic companionship.” I can’t imagine how cold this world must feel—particularly these days—for those who have no larger, otherworldly context for their human existence. Without a spiritual perspective, I don’t know how people do it.
Every once in a while, people ask me what I think I would have done with my life if I hadn’t found
A Course in Miracles.
I usually mention Edina on the British TV comedy
Absolutely Fabulous.
If you haven’t seen it, trust me—not a pretty sight. Like that character, some people get stuck in life, circling over and over to the same old spots because they can’t find the door to another realm of options. Most of us at one point or another can relate to that. All I know is that the only escape for me has been a door I cannot open by myself.
In college, I took classes where I read books about philosophical states of “ennui,” a sense of isolation in the universe and existential despair. But at that point in my life I couldn’t fully appreciate what any of that meant. It’s only with the passage of years, as each layer of worldly illusion falls away before your eyes, that you come to appreciate an otherworldly constant. Unless you have contact with a higher power, the lower ones can really do you in.