Tears to Triumph

by Marianne Williamson

  Our civilization has an immature and neurotic obsession with always trying to be happy. And yet sometimes it is through having cried our tears that we can see at last our blessings. In the words of Ernest Hemingway, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” The real question, for anyone who suffers, is whether we want to be one of those who are strengthened by the experience.

  It’s a psychological art form, mastering the balance between permitting ourselves to honor our suffering and making a simultaneous commitment to surviving the experience. To say, “I know this is a terrible time. But it is not without meaning, and I am committed to finding out what that meaning is. I am committed to opening myself to the lessons to be learned here.” And the lesson is always, in some way, the expansion of our capacity to love.

  There is only one real problem in life: that someone turned their back on love. Yet no matter how intense the ego’s demonic hold on the mind—from mild annoyance to outright evil—God’s love is so great, and His mercy so infinite, that He will always have the final say. The universe is always ready to start again, to send another opportunity for love in a never-ending wave of “Try this, then.” The universe of love is incapable of exhaustion. It is always creating new possibilities, new varieties of miraculous opportunities. There is nothing that we could ever do or that could ever happen to us—nothing, no matter how sinister—that can ultimately prevail against the Will of God. Knowing this is the dawn of understanding. Believing it is the beginning of faith. Experiencing it is the miracle of new life.

  This mindset lifts even a painful experience to a higher emotional frequency, creating a sense that angels are holding us even while we cry. In the words of the Greek playwright Aeschylus, “He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

  TWO

  Through the Darkness into the Light

  Jonathan was wearing an expensive dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a beautiful necktie when he walked into my apartment. I could tell he didn’t exactly know who he was coming to see or whether he thought he should even be here. A psychiatrist friend had asked if we could visit.

  He couldn’t resist getting in some patronizing jabs about what he saw as my lack of credentials, making sure I knew he was too smart to see someone like myself under normal circumstances. But I silently surrendered my judgment of what I felt was an awfully smug attitude. Sitting down, I simply looked him in the eye and asked, “So why are you here, Jonathan?”

  “Oh,” he said with an artificial glibness. “Daniel just thought it might be a good idea for us to kick around a few ideas about some things I’ve been going through.”

  “Really?” I asked. Knowing Daniel, I felt it was highly unlikely he’d suggested that Jonathan come to me for a session so we could “kick around a few ideas.” I held his gaze.

  There was silence for a few seconds before he finally said, very quietly, “No, not really.”

  Then, looking as though he was in pain, his entire body went limp. He looked away from me and whispered the words, “I’ve lost everything.”

  I put a box of Kleenex on the table in front of him. I remained very quiet, wanting to meet him at the depth of his sorrow.

  Then I asked him gently, “Can you tell me what happened?”

  And he began to talk.

  Jonathan’s story, though deeply painful to him, was somewhat familiar in the annals of modern suffering. He’d had a beautiful wife, a large home, a large legal practice, and a large life—until the large bills got too much for him, and he made some desperate moves—not all of them legal. Ultimately, he lost his wife, lost his money, lost his home, lost his license to practice law, and just barely escaped prison. He was living now with his sister and her family, trying desperately to recover his sense of self-worth and find hope for a new beginning. Understandably, he was deeply depressed.

  With tears in his eyes, he continued: “I did know better. It’s not like I’m just an asshole and didn’t care about what I was doing. I was just . . . I kinda . . . things sort of got away from me.” He laughed sardonically.

  I waited a beat. “Were drugs or alcohol involved?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But they might as well have been. I feel like I was high on something.”

  “Yeah, well, you were sort of high on a certain kind of life,” I said.

  “Yes, I was,” he said. He sighed, “Yes, I was.”

  “So let me see,” I said slowly. “You used to be a big macher and now you’re not. The wife you thought would love you through thick and thin left you once things got too thin. You lost your way of making a living; you don’t have the money to pay rent; and you’re living at a relative’s house. Have I got this right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, as he reached for a Kleenex. His facial muscles were starting to relax now. The truth was out. The pretense was over.

  “So in other words, there’s nothing more to lose. There’s no façade to hold up. You can finally relax, because you’ve fallen all the way down.”

  Silence.

  “Does any little part of you feel relieved?” I asked.

  He didn’t know where I was going, but I could tell I had struck a chord. He smiled ruefully.

  “In a certain way, weirdly, yeah . . .”

  “You know, sometimes it’s when things are this terrible that they start to get better,” I said. “Your entire life is broken, I understand that. But are you open to the possibility that anything good could come from this?”

  “Well, I know that they can’t be worse. And I’m here. So obviously I’m looking for some hope.”

  “There’s a Zen Buddhist saying about emptying your cup so it can be filled,” I told him. “Sometimes the best thing that can happen is that our lives become empty, so they can be filled again with something better. I think that on a subconscious level, you emptied your cup.”

  A year earlier, Jonathan wouldn’t have heard a word I was saying. But where he was in his life at that moment, he was open in a way he would not have been before. He was seeking help, and he’d developed some humility before someone who might be able to provide some.

  Having lost everything that the world had to offer (or so he thought), Jonathan could now hear some ideas that didn’t fit his normal thought patterns. Sometimes it’s when we feel that all hope is lost that a better life begins to emerge. Our hearts crack open, and then our minds crack open. It’s when the ego says, “It’s all over,” that God says, “Now we can begin.”

  “Your pride has been destroyed by all this, right?” I asked.

  “That’s for sure,” he said.

  “But is pride a good thing?” I asked him softly. Emotionally, he was like a burn victim, and I wanted my words to be a salve, not an agitant.

  “I want to ask you a question, Jonathan. Was that life you were living really working for you?” I waited. “Because you destroyed it yourself, you know,” I continued. “None of that stuff happened out of nowhere. You subconsciously ripped apart your own life. Do you know why you did that?”

  He thought for a moment. “No,” he said quietly. “I was obviously crazy.”

  “Maybe you were,” I said. “You were definitely crazy to self-sabotage, but on another level you weren’t crazy at all to blow it all up.

  “The life you had created was unsustainable. It was a tall tree with very shallow roots. The universe always destroys what is ultimately unsound, but it doesn’t destroy you, Jonathan. In fact, all those things were coming down around you so that the real you could rise up!

  “Even our mistakes can lead us to a better place, once we surrender to what we obviously hadn’t been surrendered to before. The issue is to become now who you weren’t before so you can start again from a different place. Is there any way that you’re a better person for having gone through all this?”

  He looked a
s though to a far horizon, but said nothing.

  “Look,” I said. “There is a lot to deconstruct here. You’re going to have to look at issues that your entire life was set up to help you avoid. Like, why you married someone who was only in it for the money. And I’m sorry, but on some level you knew. And why you wanted to live such a grandiose life to begin with when you knew it was more than you could handle. And why you were willing to break the law when you knew not only that it was wrong, but also that it could bring the entire house down. A lot of self-hatred was bound up in all that behavior, you know. If you want to heal and start over, you’re going to have to look at all this, Jonathan. And it will feel horrible at times. It will feel like you are sticking needles in your eyes. But your willingness to do it, to face what really happened here—to atone for your mistakes and forgive everyone else for theirs—is everything.”

  I waited a few seconds. “There’s bad news here, but there’s good news, too,” I said slowly. “The bad news is, you lost everything. But the good news is, you’re down to your true, authentic, heartbroken self now. I know you’re humiliated and you hate yourself and you’re frightened at the moment, but be very clear: you set this up because on some level you wanted it to happen. You wanted that entire ridiculous lifestyle to crash, because you knew on some level it was bull. You turned a lot of things into idols, and idols always fall. You wanted to get caught because you knew on some level you deserved to. And you wanted to lose everything because you knew on some level it was the only way you would humble yourself enough to ever know anything that was real or important.”

  He nodded slowly.

  To Jonathan right then it seemed like the worst thing that could have happened, had happened. But he would slowly see that this could also be the best thing. Most importantly, that it was an inevitable thing; for a house comes down when its foundation is rotten. Recognizing that, he could rebuild his life from a new foundation. Yes, he had a lot of reconciling to do, beginning with himself. He had a lot of atoning to do, and a lot of shadows he needed to face. The process would not be fun. But it was also true that he was getting his first glimpses of the spiritual journey, discovering a path that would take him out of his current darkness. Using this experience to mine the inner gold of self-awareness, he would learn to realign his thinking, forgive himself and others, and rise to a better place than he had ever been.

  “Your mistakes don’t make you less lovable, Jonathan. I know you feel like you are unlovable, but you’re not. People make mistakes; you just happened to make a whole lot of them at one time!

  “You might not believe me when I say this, but a time will come when you will value some things you never valued before, and you won’t even care that much what it took to get you there.”

  “I already do, in a way,” he said. “I never thought I’d be so grateful for things. My four-year-old niece came into my room this morning with pancakes she said she made for me, and I started crying.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re insane, you know. It means you’re finally getting sane enough to know what’s really important. I know it’s a terrible ego bruise that you lost so much. I know you’re depressed and shattered right now. It happens.

  “But welcome to the club, Jonathan. You and I and pretty much everyone at some point have swerved from who we really are and then crashed against a wall. It doesn’t mean we’re any worse than anyone else. It just means that personal power is a sad thing to mismanage. You had to have been very powerful to mess things up so badly, don’t you think?”

  He had a faint smile on his face now.

  “When I was a little girl, my father used to say, ‘Proud days soon pass.’ You were a bit of a golden prince, Jonathan, and you got struck down because it had to happen. For all your talent and all your intelligence, the universe had to show you who’s God. This was all just one huge initiation, actually. And now you will become a king—inside, for real.”

  Jonathan laughed. A big, hearty laugh. He was quiet for a few moments and then said, “I was such a jerk.”

  “So this is a surprise to you?” And I laughed too. “But all of us are jerks at times, Jonathan. It’s going to make you more merciful to others when you see all the mercy God’s going to show you.

  “The point here isn’t that your career will come back, though if you work for it, then of course it will. The point isn’t that you’ll get back on your feet financially, though in time I know you will. The point isn’t that you will love again, though you know as well as I do that of course you will. Yet none of those things will represent your triumph. Your triumph will lie in understanding that there is no reason to do anything, or even to live at all, except to become the man you’re capable of being. Once you see this—this blazing light of spiritual realization that all of us are bound to see in time—then everything else will follow. You’ll fall to your knees and then rise to new heights. All the good things will come back again, but this time they’ll be built on a solid foundation, and this time they will stay.”

  Our session that day didn’t take away all of Jonathan’s sadness, but it helped start him on a new journey. He knew he would have to go through this dark night of the soul and learn from it; it wouldn’t be easy, but he was prepared to begin. There would be books for him to read, spiritual paths for him to discover, and most importantly, insights and epiphanies about himself and his life that he would not be privy to unless he did the deep inner digging necessary.

  Not everything he needed to think about would be fun to remember, and some of it would clearly be awful. But such memories, should he meet them with genuine atonement and humility before God, would turn into diamonds that would illumine his life if he allowed them to.

  We were silent for a couple of minutes, and I asked him whether he’d like to say a prayer.

  “Yes, please.”

  And we did.

  Dear God,

  I surrender to You

  The pain that is in my heart.

  I give to you my failure,

  My shame,

  My loss,

  My devastation.

  I know that in You, dear God,

  All darkness is turned into light.

  Pour forth Your Spirit

  Upon my mind,

  And help me to forgive my past.

  Make my life begin again.

  Restore my soul

  And bring me peace.

  Comfort me in this painful hour,

  That I might see again

  My innocence and good.

  I have fallen, dear God,

  And I feel I cannot rise.

  Please lift me up and give me strength.

  Set my feet upon the path to peace

  And help me not to stray again.

  I pray for forgiveness.

  I am crushed by my failure.

  Please show me who I am to You,

  That self-hate shall not defeat me.

  Help me remember and reclaim my good.

  Help me become

  Who You would have me be,

  And live the life you would have me live,

  That my tears shall be no more.

  Amen

  When we ended the prayer, he wiped tears from his eyes.

  As we walked to the door, I saw a lightness in his gait that hadn’t been there when he arrived. The last thing he said to me that day was “Thank you.” It seemed to come from a very tender place.

  EATING THORNS

  In order to create their beautiful plumage, peacocks sometimes eat thorns. Hard, pointed, razorlike objects are processed in their abdomens and then contribute to feathers with colors and shapes unmatched throughout nature for their extraordinary beauty. So it is with us.

  Often, that which is the hardest to digest, to process, to integrate into our life experiences is what ultimately transforms us in a positive way. We become who we are meant to be sometimes by having to eat some hard-edged, bitter thorns of human experience. Jonathan is not all that different fr
om all of us. Who among us hasn’t stumbled?

  We failed at relationships, and then those failures propelled us to more deeply understand what relationships are for and how to master the art of loving. We grieved the loss of a loved one and then came through the experience more appreciative of every day we have with those we love. We lost at business and then looked back at the loss as the business education we obviously needed. We were betrayed and then experienced the incredible power of forgiveness. We made mistakes and then experienced God’s mercy as we acknowledged, atoned for, and made amends for them all. Anything and everything can be a platform for a miracle.

  Sometimes it is our suffering that mysteriously delivers us to the holiness within ourselves. Having tasted that which is most bitter, we often taste that which is most sweet. Our hearts having been broken, they then can break open. The tiny light of hope that we glimpse in the midst of our suffering can become a light so bright that the immensity of its power seems second only to the depth of its tenderness. Having entered the regions of our personal hopelessness, we find at last where true hope lies. We come to understand more clearly who we are and why we are on the earth. The light that can lead us out of suffering leads us into the arms of God.

  The most depressed periods of life can be initiations into our spiritual power, as we come to take an honest look at the deeper forces at play in our personal dramas.

  Such is the spiritual path, and it is indeed a hero’s journey. The hero’s name might be Jonathan, or something else—it is your name and my name and everyone’s name. It is the journey away from the ego’s destructiveness, as we rise, however bloodied from the climb, to the emotional peak of nakedness before God, there to drop our masks and embrace our true selves. Of course it is painful to endure the death throes of the false self, that self-sabotaging enemy who, if allowed to, runs rampant through every corner of our lives. But as false parts of our personalities begin to die, the truth of who we are gets a chance at last to breathe. Every thought of fear, every behavioral pattern that is based on fear, and every mask we wear that is filled with fear is hiding a light so bright within us that its gorgeousness exceeds the beauty of any beauty in the world.