The Age of Miracles (8 page)
Read The Age of Miracles Online
Authors: Marianne Williamson
I
always intuited that when I was in my 50s, I would allow myself to stop hiding. I found the world so frightening when I was younger, so unexplainable or perhaps just unexplained to
me,
that I struggled to cope by trying to hide. Some people would look at my career and say, “I would hardly call that hiding,” but no one really knows what other people might be holding inside, not allowing themselves to express.
I experienced a peculiarly American split, a neurotic affliction that women of my generation were particularly prey to. I didn’t realize it consciously—few of us did—but the message we internalized in the name of liberation was that we could only be liberated if we became like men. We could be hot and sexy, or we could be smart and taken seriously; we could not be both. So many of us did what we thought we had to do: We suppressed the goddess, the wild wise woman, in order to make it in a world that we’d subconsciously joined in its disdain for the essentially female.
I don’t think I fully enjoyed being a woman, without any sense of shame, until I was well into my 40s. Before that, I was ambivalent about it. And my ambivalence about the juicier aspects of being female attracted ambivalence in men and women alike. If we feel guilty about something, whether we deserve the attack on ourselves or not, we’ll attract someone into our lives to reflect and articulate our self-condemnation. Whatever I’ve done in my life—no matter how outrageous—if I myself thought it was okay, then so did most of the people around me. But when I’ve been unclear or ashamed of something, then there’s always been someone there to take the emotional bludgeon to my heart. One of the gifts of age is that it finally becomes easier to ignore other people’s opinions. We’ve been through enough to know our own true feelings, and we’re ready to live the lives we would have lived all along if we had thought it was okay.
I was the classic Jungian “father’s daughter” subconsciously—or maybe not subconsciously—mimicking my father’s life while under the wrong impression that my mother’s wasn’t “important” enough. The psychic price I paid for what I now see to have been some delusion of masculine superiority was tremendous. My mother knew things—earthy things, wise things—and tried to tell them to me but I wouldn’t hear.
Once I was sitting around with girlfriends discussing another friend’s choice of whether or not to have an abortion, when my mother piped up, “Aren’t you girls old enough to know there’s no such thing as an illegitimate child?” One of my friends pointed out that there was a question about paternity, to which my mother responded icily, “Do you girls think that every person you knew growing up had a daddy who was
really
their daddy? In
my
day, women knew how to keep their
mouths shut!
” We were stunned, silent. A woman who we assumed didn’t know as much as we did in fact knew so much more—about the facts, and about being human.
Now it makes me proud to think that, yes, I am my father’s daughter … and I am my mother’s daughter, too.
Dear God,
To whatever extent
I fail to respect
the power and glory
of the female sex,
may my mind be corrected
and my heart be transformed.
Amen
I
N ANY ADVANCED MAMMALIAN SPECIES THAT SURVIVES
and thrives, there’s a common anthropological characteristic: The adult female of the species displays fierce behavior when she senses a threat to her young. Lionesses and tigresses grow fierce when they detect danger to their offspring. Among hyenas, hardly known as the most tender of creatures, the adult females encircle their cubs while they’re feeding, keeping adult males at bay until the babies have been fed.
You’d think the women of America would do better than the hyenas. Yet there are reasons why we don’t, and why we haven’t. Women of the Western world haven’t been held back by a lack of political power—not over the past hundred years or so, at least—but by centuries-old forces of female oppression. Emotional toxins are handed down through the ages. We stopped burning witches, but we still haven’t completely routed out of Western consciousness our suspicion of the powerful female.
During the Middle Ages, the word
witch
meant “wise woman”; the projection of “ugliness” onto witches was simply a caricature fabricated by the early church, intent on denigrating and suppressing female power. Our earthiness as well as our spirituality was deemed an enemy. Where pagan priestesses initiated men into their manhood through sexual rites, Christianity would declare our sexuality holy only if used for procreation.
A woman who could no longer make babies, then, had no “holy” function left. Indeed, during the witch burnings, older unmarried women were usually the first to die. If you weren’t cavorting with the church and its teachings, you were deemed to be cavorting with the devil. And while the notion is ridiculous, there’s nothing humorous about several hundred thousand or more women burning at the stake. The witch burnings were a female holocaust.
Women have been
afraid
to show our fierceness—on behalf of our children, our planet, or anything else—because we haven’t wanted to be labeled “witches.” The fact that the consonant has been changed from “w” to “b” has not changed the emotional reality for us. We don’t want to be seen as “bitchy,” “angry,” “strident.” And as a consequence, we too often grow silent about things that matter most.
Pagan women exalted the divine connection between an individual person and the natural world. Their priestesses ritualistically connected souls to each other and to the world around them. Their destruction at the hands of the early church was a tragedy not only for them, but also for the development of the Western world. For their disappearance in many ways presaged today’s environmental crisis, paving the way for an era in which it has been deemed acceptable for humanity to dominate nature. In order to end this global crisis, we must mantle the thought-forms that produced it. Part of our atonement for how we have desecrated the earth involves atonement for how we desecrated a culture in which the wisdom of women was given its true due.
The fact that today we can understand what happened to those women and reclaim their spiritual authority, provides hope that humanity can miraculously repair itself before it is too late.
Miracles arise from conviction, and there’s no conviction like mother conviction. When we women are in our right minds, we will not
allow
the destruction of the world. For we are the mothers of the world.
We are remembering at last our forgotten powers, not only to physically procreate but to spiritually regenerate. We’re going to change history; we’re going to turn the
Titanic
around this time before it hits the iceberg; we’re going to miraculously stop the insane, suicidal march now presided over by the governments of the world; and it’s going to happen
because we say so.
Women must reclaim the ecstatic feminine impulse before we can appear again in the fullness of our glory. The witches of yesterday will rest, I hope, having found in a new generation of women the pity and compassion they deserve. We grieve for them and for ourselves. For every woman who cannot find her voice or attract her love or express her power or heal our world, there was a woman burned alive for doing so. As we move forward, armed with new understanding, may we unearth our long-buried passion. And may they, our dear dishonored sisters, find peace.
A
S A LITTLE GIRL
, I
REMEMBER BEING DRAWN TO
girls a few years older than I was. I felt the same when I was 30 and 40, and I feel that way today. I’ve always felt that those who walked life’s path just a few years ahead of me had something important to show me.
And now I see the pattern from the other side: I have younger friends who feel to me, and I think to them as well, like my spiritual younger siblings. It’s as though they’re growing into their power, and show me the honor of valuing mine. It’s a very important role in life, doing everything we can to model impeccability to those younger than we. It doesn’t mean more years have made us perfect. Hardly. But it does mean that we take very seriously the effort to live as righteously as we can.
Mentoring isn’t just something nice you do, or even necessarily a conscious choice. It’s a pattern you magnetize to yourself as part of the natural order. As you yourself grow more mature, those behind you in time—ones who would be most served by your teaching—automatically appear in your life. And by teaching, I mean not only what you know but also what you demonstrate.
I can’t imagine where I’d be today had there not been those who arrived on my path to show me what I needed to see at just the moment when I needed to see it. Now it’s my turn, to try to put together some piece of life’s puzzle for those who look to me as one who’s done it herself. How we behave, how we do or do not seek to bring harmony to the world around us, are holographic teachings we’re beaming to those around us all the time. A younger friend, who is like a little sister to me, has said to me more than once, “You think I’m ignoring you, but I am listening to every word.”
Sometimes I meet younger people at my lectures whose eyes are aglow at something I’ve said. (Don’t get me wrong; I’ve also seen those whose eyes were rolling.) I know the thrill of being young and hearing ideas you haven’t heard before, seeing someone model a role in the culture that you feel beckoning to you. I was there once. And now I’m here. I meet the young woman telling me she wants to someday do what I do; I smile and say, “You go, girl.” I meet the young man who bows respectfully and hands me a rose; I receive it tenderly, respecting the generosity of his gesture.
The elders will be honored when we behave more honorably. Midlife doesn’t feel right if we don’t feel we’re dispensing the best we’ve got before we go. Or that at the very least, we’re trying.
Dear God,
May I be worthy
of an honored role
in the lives of those
who are younger than I.
Show me how
to use Your gifts well,
and how to pass them on.
Amen
I’
VE HEARD MYTHICAL AND NOT-SO-MYTHICAL STORIES OF OLDER WOMEN
who moved into a convent, as though their worldly ride was over and from here on out they would drop the veil on worldly concerns. But I’ve come to think that the convent experience is an inner domain, maybe externalized and maybe not. The convent that matters is a space in the heart, where you live for God—but that isn’t all. You live for God not as an escape from the world, but as an ultimate effort at right living in it. From your family to your friends to your citizenship to everyone and everything you know, you want at last to play the game of life correctly. The only way to do that, you finally understand, is to see it for what it is. And where it is. Life isn’t out there. Life is with God.
When I used to think of women in the Middle Ages going into a convent at middle age (that probably would have meant 30 or
35!), I felt so sorry for them. No fun. No excitement. No sex. And Lord, what boring bedrooms! But today the convent experience—the internal variety—means anything but that. It means no fun that isn’t laced with the sacred, no excitement that isn’t laced with the sacred, no sex that isn’t laced with the sacred. Or put another way, it means that the sacred, once you realize what it is, is actually fun and exciting and, where appropriate, sexual.
It’s important to celebrate your life, because it’s the one God gave you. If He were leaving you a text message, I think it would say: “Enjoy yourself.”
I read an interview with actress Cameron Diaz where she said that she didn’t think being light and bubbly was any less valid than being dark and moody. I took that in for a moment, realizing it had taken me decades longer to see this than it had taken her. Baby-boomer women wanted to be taken so
seriously,
primarily because our mothers weren’t. We suppressed our joy under the false assumption that joy is silly. In fact, it’s when you realize how very serious life truly is that you take every opportunity to laugh when it comes along. Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl, has said that happiness is an act of resistance.
There are so many ways we’re punished, including by ourselves, for the ecstatic impulse that runs through our veins. Whenever I see a homeless person walking down the street in some absurd and ridiculous outfit—usually sporting something like a hat with rabbit ears or lots of buttons proclaiming a UFO invasion—part of me thinks,
Oh, poor lost soul,
and part of me thinks,
I wish I had the nerve to wear that.
It has occurred to me that I’ve never seen a statue of a Greek or Hindu goddess in which she wasn’t dressed to the nines. The idea that a
spiritual
woman chooses to have less going on for her in the looks department was introduced into our thought system by a womanhating institution, let’s remember—the same club that used to burn women at the stake. So when they suggest a woman should dress plainly and simply in order to show her piety, I rush to put on a camisole. Makeup and jewelry go back longer than
they
do; thousands of years ago, women wore rouge and rubies and knew exactly what they were doing. Queen Esther didn’t save her people by looking unattractive that night. Any effort to desexualize women is an effort to disempower us, and making us feel guilty about wanting to look good is more of the same oppressive game.
Our society is of two minds about a mature woman trying to look good. She’s shamed for “letting herself go,” yet she’s often shamed for trying to hold it together. All this talk about “natural aging” is sort of ridiculous. Can we talk about pesticides, pollution, carcinogens, the hole in the ozone, worry, economic anxiety, and divorce statistics? There’s nothing necessarily
natural
about all that stress on your face. If a woman wants to order the newest antiaging cream from an 800 number, get Botox, or employ any other cosmetic procedure, then I think she should do it. I don’t see aging with a kick-ass regimen for staying hot and happening as any less
graceful
than simply appreciating your wrinkles.
It’s not “serious” to want to look good? What’s so serious about
not
looking good? Seriously gorgeous and ageless Gloria Vanderbilt has said that beauty is a gift from God, which we have a responsibility to care for as long as we can. In any case, I don’t see where my looking haggard helps a woman in a poverty-stricken area rise up. In fact, I
do
see where my wanting excellence in every area of my life lifts me to a level of achievement where it’s more likely that I can help her.
Denying care to oneself doesn’t translate into care for others. A woman taking care of herself—both in body and in spirit—is part of her participation in a wild and wonderful female adventure. That adventure is emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and sexual.
I realize that more fuel for the engine of my life—as a mother, an activist, a writer, a citizen, a creator in any area—comes from my bedroom and what goes on there than in any other place. I could buy a hundred desks, and I would still write sitting up on my bed. The library is not my engine room. My office is not my engine room. The kitchen is not my engine room. Where I live in my most passionate places is my engine room. And there are goddesses from every culture and every age who agree. The ancient world was dotted with romantic and erotic temples. I don’t have a temple per se, but I have a bedroom, so I start with that.
Sometimes when I think about all the suffering in the world—from torture to slavery to war to child abuse—I’m awed by the realization there must be some tremendous counterforce keeping humanity from completely self-destructing. Consider the fact that every second, someone is born. Every second, someone is dying. The cycles of life continue, circling the globe at every moment. And consider this: Every second (or so I hope), someone somewhere is having an ecstatic orgasm with someone he or she loves. I think this circle of ecstasy is probably doing as much to keep the world from flying apart as is any other force.
Words of hate, acts of violence, horrible things done in the light of day—none have ultimate power before true acts of love, many of which are done in the dark of night. It’s part of the archetypal mission of the human female to take care of the home, and that beautiful moment in the dark
is
home. We should honor our function as keepers of the erotic flame. The bedroom is where we both conceive our children and repair our lovers, both of which fuel the survival of the human race.
This is all the more important as a woman ages, because we’re using the power of consciousness to compensate for ways that nature has passed us by. Once we’ve completed our childbearing years, nature doesn’t really
care
whether we ever have sex again or not! We’re not getting a lot of
help
from nature the way we used to.
But our sexual magic is not simply about babies; it’s about enchantment. We don’t lure men into bed only in order to procreate; we lure them into bed in order to set their hearts on fire. We lure them into a bewitched and bewitching space so that the romantic alchemy of love can help deliver them to their greatness, and us to ours. This isn’t a job that stops when we age; in a way, it’s a job we don’t even
understand
until we age. Midlife is
not
the time to disenchant ourselves. It’s a time to turn on all our magic in full force.