That only love is real.
May I see through this veil
To the light beyond,
That Your love might heal my heart.
Amen
FREEDOM FROM THE PAST
Clearly, there is evil in the world. Forgiveness is not a topic that underestimates the reality of evil, glibly advising us to pour pink paint over something terrible and pretend that it didn’t happen. Love doesn’t destroy our brain cells or lower our IQs. We can recognize that something bad happened but still see the futility of fury and the self-indulgence of outsized anger.
God does not need us to police the universe. Our anger, our bitterness, only deflects His miracles. The spiritual universe is self-correcting. Despite what anyone might have done to you in the past, God has a mysterious plan by which your future is programmed to be better. Nothing anyone did to you, but only your anger at them for having done so, can stop the miraculous flow of love to your door.
A Course in Miracles asks if we prefer to be right or to be happy. Forgiveness does not mean we’re condoning something we think should not be condoned. It means only that we’re freeing ourselves from the agony of its effects. We forgive the past in order to be free of it.
My friend Naomi Warren spent two years of her life, from ages twenty-one to twenty-three, in Auschwitz. She told me that upon her liberation, her thought was this: “Hitler got two years of my life. He will not get another day.” The fact that someone who has experienced the horror of a Nazi concentration camp can not only survive but thrive proves the psyche’s profound ability to heal itself. I have known others like Naomi—people who have experienced things that would make most of us buckle under the pain, from the murder of a child to heinous abuse during their own childhoods. All of them are beacons of possibility and an honor to know, embodying the miracle of God’s specialty at bringing forth light from total darkness. They are demonstrations of a holy consciousness at work, inspirations to those of us whose own struggles to survive seem so small in comparison. If people who have suffered at the hands of genuine evil are able to move on in their lives, then surely those of us who suffer things far less onerous can find the strength to get on with ours.
FORGIVING OURSELVES
There are times in life when our greatest challenge is to forgive ourselves. A Course in Miracles says that we pay a very high price for refusing to take responsibility for our experience: the price of not being able to change it. The fact that it makes us feel bad to realize that we might have done wrong is simply the sign of a healthy personality. When people tell us, “You can’t make a mistake,” but we know we did, their advice, however well-intentioned, isn’t helpful. It is important to own our mistakes in order to learn from them.
Perhaps we did screw up. Perhaps we did behave irresponsibly and recklessly. Perhaps we did do something egregious. We might realize that what went wrong in a situation was at least partly due to our own mistakes, and now we’re suffering paroxysms of self-hatred. The ego is fine with that, because it doesn’t really care who we’re attacking as long as we’re attacking someone. Its first response to our past errors is to refuse to own them, but if that doesn’t work, it turns to self-flagellation. The ego is that which both leads us to do the wrong thing and then punishes us savagely for having done so.
The important thing to do when we know in our hearts that we’ve been wrong is to look open-eyed, even if teary-eyed, at exactly what we did and why we did it. It’s very important to own our mistakes if indeed we made them. We may end up with a painful conscience, but that’s appropriate, for only a sociopath has no remorse. Minimizing our regret, numbing the pain of conscience, dulling our own lamentation is not the way to enlightenment. This is one of the areas in life where only burning through the pain will get us to the gain. Grown-ups own up to our mistakes, and grow from them.
And when we do take an honest look at the darkness in our hearts, we might be surprised at what we see there. We find that our mistakes, our character defects, are simply the coping mechanisms of the frightened child who still lives within us. We had to have been very hurt in life to have concocted such a dysfunctional way of dealing with things. Behind the blackened heart is a fragile heart—in all of us.
God would have us look on ourselves, and on each other, as He does. God is love, and He created us in his image. An angry God is the ego’s fiction, created in its image. This does not, however, change who God really is or how He really works. Our mistakes are met not by His wrath, but by His mercy.
God would have us show to ourselves, and to each other, the mercy He shows to us. It is as blasphemous to attack ourselves as it is to attack others. In any moment when we made a mistake, when we downloaded into the world a version of ourselves that is at odds with who we really are, then we did not uncreate who we really are; we simply chose not to express it. And we would have done differently had some wires not gotten crossed in our brains, had we felt that we could show our love in that moment and still get our needs met. When I have made my worst mistakes, I didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “I think I’ll be a jerk today!” Rather, in my mistaken moments, I got deeply, insanely, terrifyingly confused, as did anyone else who ever acted out of fear.
Having made a mistake, we should feel appropriate remorse, yes—but not gorge on feelings of guilt and self-condemnation. God calls us not to punish ourselves, but to atone for our errors and go forward on higher ground. Only the ego would have us tarry in the fields of self-hatred. The only antidote to self-hatred is self-respect, and self-respect can come only when we know we’re doing everything possible to be better people now.
All of us have done things we regret and lived through situations that make us cringe when we remember them. The ego’s response to past error is psychological imprisonment through emotional self-punishment. God’s response is psychological liberation through the power of the Atonement.
The Atonement is the correction of our perceptions. It is one of God’s greatest gifts. Expressed in the Catholic practice of confession, the Jewish Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, and Alcoholics Anonymous through the taking of a fearless moral inventory and the making of amends, the Atonement principle is the cosmic reset button through which we are released from the otherwise negative consequences of wrong-minded action. Once we have atoned for a mistake, it no longer creates karmic consequences.
God sees our deviations from love not as sins to be punished but as errors to be corrected. As it says in A Course in Miracles, “All our sins are washed away by realizing they were but mistakes.”
Dear God,
I know that I did wrong.
I place this situation in your hands
And look clearly at the things I did,
Or the things I did not do,
By which I deviated from love.
Having made a wrong decision,
I make a different decision now.
Dear God, please correct my path.
Remove from me my feelings of guilt,
And make me a better person.
May I be ever more devoted
To doing what is right.
Release others from the consequences of
Any mistakes that I have made,
And please release me too.
Amen
MERCY, MERCY
Imagine your life as a computer. A permanent, undeletable file is available called “God’s Will,” literally meaning “Love’s Thought.” The file is always there, available for download. The only question is whether or not we choose to download it.
Obviously, ours is a world where the file of infinite, unconditional love is not downloaded nearly enough. Too often we download the energy of our broken, tortured, frightened selves, manifesting the subtle and not-so-subtle violence in our hearts—hence the consciousness of the human race and the state of the world in which we live.
But even though love can be unchosen, it cannot be uncreated. When any of us expresses fear instead of love, the love we could h
ave expressed remains safely ensconced in the Mind of God. According to A Course in Miracles, whatever miracle we’ve deflected is held in trust for us until we are ready to receive it. The Atonement allows us to reclaim whatever good we might have denied ourselves. Situations will come around again, returning to us “the years that the locusts have eaten.”
What the ego steals, God gives back.
Seeing how opportunities reemerge after we have genuinely atoned, we glimpse God’s mercy. “Mercy” is a word that means very little until we have actually felt it. And once we do, we are changed forever. We are in awe of the way the universe rearranges itself to give us yet another chance.
The concept of religious sanctuary is an old one: no matter what crime someone had committed, if that person made it into a church, or other sanctuary zone, and claimed “Mercy,” then they could not be arrested for a crime. It was believed that in that moment, they aligned themselves with God’s power such that all judgment upon them was nullified. While few today would see this as a reasonable practice for law enforcement, the spiritual principle involved has profound relevance to personal relationships.
God is not under the impression that we never make mistakes. Given the fact that the thinking of the world is so deeply insane, it’s almost surprising that we don’t make bigger mistakes more often! And it is only the ego’s arrogance that might have ever tempted us to believe we were incapable of error. All of us are growing, and all of us stumble at times. Anything can become a platform for a miracle, and sometimes the fact that we do stumble makes us better people afterward. Among other things, feeling God’s mercy on us increases our mercifulness toward others. Having experienced mercy, we become better at mercy. For instance, I’ve caught myself about to judge a young woman for irresponsibly throwing around her sexual energy, and then reminded myself, “Uh, Marianne, she’s nothing compared with what you were like!”
God’s love for us does not waver. He loves each of us as He loves all of us: not because of what we’ve done or not done, but because of who we are. He knows who you are because He created you, and God’s creation cannot be changed. He knows that your mistakes occurred only within the realm of illusion. He is ready to begin again whenever you are.
Earlier in my life, I would atone for mistakes easily enough but then too often stray back into the same mistaken behavior. And then I’d start the process all over again. After repeated cycles of mess-up-your-life-then-fall-to-your-knees, mess-up-your-life-then-fall-to-your-knees, one day I finally said to myself, “Next time you’re down on your knees, Marianne, just stay there!”
Sometimes, it’s having made enough mistakes that then inspires us to live differently. The Atonement becomes more than just something that helped to ease our pain; once our hearts are acquainted with its power, trying to live it becomes a consistent way of life.
Forgiveness is ultimately not just an act, but an attitude; not a relationship tool, but a state of mind. And it is not just an attitude toward people, but toward life itself. Forgiveness is the ultimate correction of perception that dissolves all the darkness of the world. It is a tincture of pure, unadulterated light.
FORGIVENESS AS THE WAY
The veil that separates this world from the celestial order is like gossamer silk with the strength of titanium. On one hand, it is simply a thought; but on the other hand, every thought is powerful. Thoughts of guilt and fear are a living hell from which forgiveness and love deliver us.
From losing a job unfairly to losing a relationship, from being betrayed to being victimized, from feeling abandoned to feeling oppressed—events are transformed, and the suffering they cause us is assuaged, as we learn to forgive them. Forgiveness isn’t always easy—sometimes it’s a process—but it is never without its rewards.
Some might argue that reinterpreting life through the eyes of love is simply looking at it through rose-colored glasses. Yet the “observer effect” in science posits that when the perceiver changes, so does that which is perceived. If someone tells you that you’re being an overly optimistic Pollyanna, just thank them for the compliment. For Pollyanna is the story of a miracle-worker. She did not just see the love in people despite their loveless behavior; through her seeing she invoked their love, and their behavior ultimately changed.
The ego keeps us bound to the illusion that we exist entirely subject to the material world, when in fact the world is nothing but the projection of our thoughts. Beyond this world there is a truer one; as we extend our perceptions beyond what our physical senses perceive to what we know to be true in our hearts, we are delivered to the world that lies beyond. As we extend our perceptions beyond the veil of physicality, we experience the miracle of deliverance from all the suffering of the world.
Within the three dimensions of our worldly experience, this or that circumstance did or does exist. But how we choose to look at the circumstance will determine how it ultimately affects us. To forgive is to remember that only love is real and nothing else exists, and what does not exist cannot defeat you. In every moment we forgive, we remember this. In every moment we forgive, we awaken from our suffering. In every moment we forgive, another tear begins to dry.
Dear God,
I give to you my pain and despair.
I know that I suffer
Because I see what is not there.
I know that I cry
Because my faith in You is weak.
Please open my mind
That I might know,
And open my eyes
That I might see.
Bring comfort to my soul, dear God,
And forgiveness to my heart.
Amen
SEVEN
Relationship Heaven, Relationship Hell
The pain of relationship difficulties—both while we’re in them and when we’re losing them—can be excruciating. Here, as with everything else, an understanding of spiritual reality is key to attaining a peaceful heart.
When we think with love, we are being ourselves. The mind when it is wholly loving is whole, or holy. That is the source of happiness.
When we hold a grievance against someone, however, we are using our minds noncreatively, or destructively. This splits the mind in two and puts us at war against ourselves. That is the source of mental anguish.
Taking responsibility for the nature of our thinking is thus our greatest power to heal our lives. The dominant thought system of the world constantly tempts us to attack others, thereby attacking ourselves. But when we give our minds to God to use for His purposes, they become holy touchstones of another way of thinking and being. Our purpose on the earth is to see every moment as an opportunity to love. We thus become miracle-workers, or transformers of darkness into light.
Every moment of every day, whether someone is in a room with us or we’re just thinking about them, we’re faced with the decision: Will I bless this person, or will I judge them? It is quite astonishing to bear witness to what we’re actually thinking. Of the many thousands of thoughts that we think each day, most of them take issue on some level with what someone did or does. Whether it’s something seemingly innocuous, such as “She should have put that glass in the dishwasher,” or something truly negative, such as “I hate that bastard,” a grievance is a grievance. According to A Course in Miracles, any grievance we hold against anyone for any reason is an attack upon ourselves.
You can’t stop the war against yourself by ending only some of the battles. In taking up a spiritual path, we seek a loving attitude toward all—not just some. None of this has to do with how we “should” think or “should” be; it simply has to do with understanding the power of every thought.
We’re often deluded by the myth of neutrality—the idea that if we don’t actively wish anyone harm, then that is enough. But in fact there are no neutral thoughts. Our thinking can be mismanaged, but its power cannot be diminished; every single thought is a cause that will lead to an effect.
Sometimes I’ll be rushing through an airport w
ith all the other travelers to this or that gate, to reach a plane that will take me to yet another city, to repeat the same pattern of speaking and book signing, and then return home exhausted. If my mind is attuned only to that physical reality, then I can feel overwhelmed and depleted.
Or, I can choose again. “Snap out of it, Marianne,” I’ll say to myself. And then, instead of closing myself off in an effort to protect myself from the mental jangle around me, I’ll look around at the people in the airport and send them my love. I will think about who they are, where they’re going, how many of them might be enduring hardships in their lives. How many of them might be ill or grieving. How many of them might be stressed about finances, or their marriages, or their children. How most of them are good, noble people, trying their best to live decent lives. When I do this, the greatest medicine—compassion—begins to flood my heart. My experience of my experience changes. What my ego had interpreted as “just another airport” becomes a holy temple where I have the extraordinary privilege of trying to love as God loves. My heart, my mind, even my body rise above the ego as I remember the truth of who I am by remembering the truth of who others are. A contented smile replaces a stressed-out frown.
The problem is not that doing this is difficult so much as it’s different. Training ourselves to use our minds as vessels of love runs against the grain of our usual mental habits. Yet it is the only true deliverance from the sorrow in our hearts.
Someone might say, “All that’s wonderful, Marianne, but right now I’ve got bigger issues to deal with than going around blessing strangers.” And we all do. But one of the problems with sadness, depression, and anxiety is that they tempt us to isolate ourselves—if not physically, then at least mentally and emotionally. Yet no matter how much pain we’re in, we can choose to love others. No matter how many tears we might have cried today, we can still look out upon someone else with an open heart. In truth, they probably cried as many tears as we have. In our compassion for what others have been through, the universe pours forth its compassion on us. We never really know what lies in the hearts of other people, but once we consider that everyone else is as sensitive as we are, and everyone else has hurt as much as we have, then our hearts are flooded with divine light and no darkness can hold us back. No matter what our pain or heartbreak, as long as we keep our hearts open to others, then new life will spring up around us.
Tears to Triumph Page 9