WHEN RELATIONSHIPS CHANGE FORM
Relationships at their deepest level are not of the body, but of the spirit, and in that sense they are never over.
The crux of a relationship lies not in its form, but in its content, and change in form does not mean the end to a relationship at all. Even when we separate from someone, we are only appearing to do so because relationships are of the mind.
A couple who divorces, for instance, does not “end” a relationship, but merely changes its form. Understanding this perspective can make a huge emotional difference to a person who is having a hard time giving up attachment to the previous form of a relationship. When someone has left a relationship that we would have preferred to continue, or when someone has passed from this world and we’re grieving their loss, the pain we feel can be crushing. But understanding the eternal nature of relationships—and the eternal nature of love—brings peace to even a tormented heart.
Sometimes we feel abandoned, betrayed, victimized, and heartbroken when a relationship changes form. But love to your door only stops if you stop it. That is why praying for the happiness of the lost lover is the surest way to transform your feelings. There is great emotional power in repeating about an estranged mate, over and over, “May he be blessed. May he be happy. May he be loved.”
Some might say, “But how can I pray for his happiness? I hate him right now!” But blaming the other person for “abandoning” us, or refusing to respect his or her choice to move in another direction, is an attack on ourselves as much as an attack on them. It deflects the miracle we need right then. Such thinking, and the behavior it gives rise to, will only repel them and create more distance. And even more importantly, it will make it harder for us to move on; our hearts will be cramped in bitterness rather than be open to new love. When we ground ourselves in the realization that such a relationship is only changing form, we find ourselves able to release others to do what they need to do and to be where they need to be. Depending on our own mental choices, we can be a victim or a victor in love.
Dear God,
Please heal my shattered heart.
May I see only what is truly there
And not be tempted to judge my brother.
Despite my tears,
I pray that he be happy.
I bless him on his path
Though it has led him away from me.
Purify my mind of all thoughts of guilt
That we might both be free.
Create a path of light
For both of us.
Dissolve the cords that no longer serve,
And strengthen ones that do.
Bless my brother in all he does,
And please, dear God,
Bless me.
Amen
LOSING PEOPLE, LOSING THINGS
According to A Course in Miracles, everything is a relationship. Sometimes our relationship is with another person, but sometimes it’s with a thing, a place, or even a dream we’ve cherished. Those relationships too can crash and burn.
I’ve known people who lost their entire life savings in an economic meltdown; soldiers who lost their limbs in war; people who lost their eyesight, their tongues, the use of their hands and feet due to disease; and people who survived years of abuse. I’ve known people so crumpled over from loss that they could hardly breathe. Yet I’ve also known people who rose above such things and survived to live a happy life.
We’re human beings, of course, so it’s impossible to live our lives completely detached from the things of the world. But what we think while in the midst of darkness determines how quickly the light will come. When we are suffering through the pain of loss, miracles emerge when we realize that despite appearances, loss is an illusion. In God’s universe there is no loss.
Only form can change, and only form can disappear. Content is changeless. The cycles of life and death are endless. What is yours is yours forever, and who is yours is yours forever. The universe is programmed for your happiness and automatically compensates in the realm of spiritual substance for any diminishment on the material plane. In a self-organizing, self-correcting universe, celestial forces immediately respond to all loss. For who you are cannot be diminished, and neither can your world. Not really. The changing miasma of the mortal world is merely an illusion, but you are not.
WHEN A LOVED ONE DIES
Because the ego posits that the life of the body is the only life, we interpret the death of the body as life’s end. We are crushed when someone whom we loved has died, thinking that our relationship with him or her is over. I remember when my mother died, thinking I hadn’t realized sadness could be so deep.
Having lost both my parents, my sister, and a best friend of thirty years, I’ve cried many tears over the death of loved ones. I’ve sat with parents who had to decide when to take their children off life support. I’ve grieved with young people who knew that the disease destroying them would kill them before the age of thirty. I’ve officiated at memorials of people who were murdered, and sat with their families while the horror set in. I am familiar with the reality of grief, both in my own life and in bearing witness to the agony of others.
According to A Course in Miracles and many religious philosophies, life does not end with the death of the physical body. Birth of the physical body is not a beginning but a continuation, and the death of the physical body is not an end but a continuation. In an ultimate sense, death does not exist because those who live in the Mind of God live forever. The body is like a suit of clothes that we simply take off when it’s no longer needed.
Faith does not keep us from grieving our lost loved ones, but it takes away the barbed wire otherwise wrapped around our hearts as we do. We can miss someone terribly yet be comforted by the realization that they’re alive on another plane of existence. When I think of the family in which I grew up, I don’t think of my father and my mother and my sister as gone, with only my brother and myself remaining. Rather, I see in my mind a photograph in which the three of them show in the negative and the images of Peter and me are exposed. But all five of us are still there.
Death does not end our relationships with those who passed. Life is a book without end; a single physical incarnation is simply one chapter of the book. In the next chapter, just as real, one person remains incarnate while the other lives on in invisible realms. Whom God hath brought together, no one and nothing—not even death itself—can put asunder.
In fact, amid grief, relationships can even improve. Forgiveness becomes easier when old hurts are seen in retrospect to have been unimportant. There is a way in which we see people more clearly once they’ve passed, and perhaps they see us more clearly, too.
When I think of my parents now, I am so much clearer about the gifts they gave me and so uninterested in the minor neuroses that mark the life of any family. I can rejoice that neither of them struggles with the challenges of sickness or old age any longer. Having felt at the time of my mother’s death as though my umbilical cord had been turned backward and I wasn’t sure that I even existed anymore, I now feel her invisible presence as a constant blessing in my life.
If I’m sad because I lost someone but feel deep inside that someday I will see that person again—that they are just in another room, in another dimension somewhere, still broadcasting although my set doesn’t pick up their station—then I can move past my suffering more easily. I can find peace in something that is more than a memory—that is a living reality in my heart. If, on the other hand, I think death is a finite end, past which there is no further life of any kind, then a loved one’s death remains a burden on my heart. Once again, the depth of my suffering depends to a large degree on how I interpret the experience.
I have come to trust the process of grief in my life and in the lives of others I’ve known. Suppressed tears are more dangerous than those that fall. Tears we cry can heal us, and tears we don’t cry can hurt us. Among other things, denying ourselves permission to feel our sadness can d
esensitize us to the pain of others. And that is never a good thing. A period of mourning—with all its wailing, its tears, and its suffering—isn’t necessarily the sign of a problem. It’s simply the sign of love.
No one escapes permanently the experience of our death, and few of us escape the experience of mourning someone we love. These things are part of life. In older societies, death was more familiar because it was all around us. While of course we celebrate the fact that modern medicine has extended the average life span, we’ve paid a heavy price for pushing death to the periphery of our lives the way we have. Pushing it out of our homes, or even out of our minds, is not the answer—particularly as we age. In fact, in the words of Carl Jung, “Shrinking away from [death] is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.” We suffer more from death because we misinterpret it than because it exists. It is our fear and misunderstanding of death that causes most of our suffering—not death itself.
Dear God,
I place in Your hands the tears I cry
Over the death of my beloved.
May she rest forever in Your arms
And be at peace in her eternal home.
Send Your angels to comfort me as well,
That my eyes might be opened
To the nonreality of death.
Connect me, God, by a golden cord,
To the heart of my beloved.
For I would know that in Your love
She and I are one forever.
Amen
For some, the heartbreak is over our own impending death. It is a task of maturity to surrender into the knowledge that we too one day will die, relaxing into the eternal knowing that when we leave this life we do not really leave so much as expand into the cosmic space of All That Is. A Course in Miracles says that one day we will realize that death is not a punishment, but a reward. It says we will one day evolve to the point where physical death will not cause anyone sorrow. For we will know that in reality, there is no death.
For those who feel in their hearts that their time may be near, a prayer for comfort and peace—
Dear God,
Please take away my fear of death.
The pain in my heart, I surrender to You.
Please take away my suffering
And the suffering of those I love.
Open my eyes that I might see
The light beyond the veil.
Show me the truth of eternal life
That I might fear no more.
Take care of those
I leave behind.
Bring comfort to them and comfort to me.
Death has my heart so frightened now.
Please deliver me to peace.
Amen
EIGHT
Changing Ourselves, Changing the World
Many years ago during a period of time when I was deeply depressed, I often felt a strange presence, like someone sitting on the edge of my bed in the wee hours of the morning. This presence was a tall, thin shade sitting erect and very still, facing in a direction perpendicular to my body. I knew he wasn’t a physical being, but I knew he was there. And I knew who he was.
I cannot describe what it meant to me that he was present. He never said any words or gave me any message. He was simply there. And I felt him around, not just at night. Although I sensed his actual presence at the end of my bed at night, during the day I simply felt him keeping watch.
Depressed and lonely, I was such a mess in those days. I knew I had turned into a rather pathetic person. I realized people looked at me with pity, thinking, “Too bad about Marianne.” My cousin told me years later that during that time, my father said to her with tears in his eyes, “I don’t know what to do with an afflicted child.”
And afflicted I was. I knew I was in trouble, and it wasn’t a given that I would ever again be the person I had been before. In my desperation, I began trying to negotiate with God. If He would help me—if He would lift me up and give me back my life—then I would surrender the rest of my life to Him. I would do whatever He wanted me to do.
Months passed, and slowly but surely—with the help of an excellent psychiatrist, the love of family and friends, and surely God’s help—my life began to come back together. I remember one day being at work and feeling once again the presence that had been around me all those months. This time, however, it didn’t feel comforting so much as slightly encroaching.
Inwardly, I spoke to him: “Look, I’m really grateful to you for being here so long. You really helped me, and I’m very, very grateful. But I’m really doing well, and I’m sure you have so many other people to help. I’m absolutely fine. Thank you so, so much, and I will never forget how nice you were to me when I needed it.”
I was telling God He could go now.
A few weeks later, I was at a formal cocktail party, wandering through the very large house by myself. I entered a room where a small circle of men in tuxedos were talking to one another, with drinks in their hands. One of the men turned and looked at me. Clearly, at this point, I was daydreaming. The man was Jesus.
He looked at me, and with no emotion, no recrimination, no attitude whatsoever, he said very simply, “I thought we had a deal.”
And that was it. In that moment, I began my journey to a destiny that’s nothing like I would ever have imagined. Whenever people ask me “How did your career begin?” I always think of Jesus at that cocktail party all those years ago.
During that period of my life, I felt like my skull was a priceless ancient vase that had been smashed. Its shattered pieces, too numerous to count, had exploded into outer space. And this turned out to be the opening to a whole new life for me. As my skull came fully back into place, it seemed that something entered my head which hadn’t been there before.
Yes, that was a time when I was deeply depressed; but it also was a time when I was spiritually informed. On the other side of that dark night of my soul, I knew, saw, and understood things that I hadn’t known, seen, or understood before. I’ve known other people who have reported similar transformations. Sometimes we have to be shaken out of our attachment to one world before we can recognize another.
WHEN SUFFERING AWAKENS US
Even the deepest darkness can reveal God’s light.
Several years ago, my friend Teresa’s twenty-one-year-old son was murdered. One cannot imagine a greater pain, but Teresa and her family have moved through their suffering with an eye toward life beyond it. Several years since the tragedy, Teresa is now an activist for victims’ rights and a prison advocate who speaks to prisoners about emotional healing between victims and perpetrators. She told me that through this work, she has found her life’s mission.
Although her anger at her son’s unrepentant murderer has been a torment to her soul and remains so, the opportunity to speak to others imprisoned for the same crime has diminished her suffering. In speaking to prisoners serving life sentences for murder, Teresa has found many whose hearts are indeed repentant—and in their apologies, and their offers to be of help to her in her work, she has found solace.
One prisoner shared with her how he now fully grasps the extent of the pain he caused his victim’s parents. “No matter how much time I do in prison,” he told her, “I realize I cannot give them back their daughter.”
The depth of his remorse made Teresa think about the depth of her own anger; she said she realized that in a very real way, this prisoner was now freer than she was—because his atonement delivered him, while her unrelenting anger has kept her bound.
She seeks to forgive because she seeks to be free, but surely none of us would doubt the difficulty of that task. God works in mysterious ways, and Teresa says that the work she does now has helped to heal her heart. Her experience working with prisoners has changed her life, opening her to the possibility that there is light in the midst of the deepest darkness. She describes her work both with prisoners and as a victims’ advocate as a lifesaver, telling me, “Even given the
reality of the most devastating, horrific acts of violence, I now feel that there is hope.”
WHO WE CHOOSE TO BECOME
Some powerful figures in history have been transformed in ultimately positive ways by experiences that were outwardly devastating. One of the most compelling of such stories is the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States.
When he was a young man, Roosevelt was the epitome of someone who had it all. He was tall and handsome, brilliant and wealthy, married with several children. His cousin Theodore had been president of the United States, and his own career seemed guaranteed to go as far as he chose to take it.
One day in 1921, while on vacation at his family lake house in Canada, Roosevelt took a swim. Within hours of returning home he was suffering chills, within days his limbs were numb, and within weeks he was diagnosed with polio.
Yet this tragedy was not the end of his story; in a profound way, it was just the beginning. Roosevelt would never walk again without the help of iron braces and canes, but from the crucible of his suffering he emerged as someone who did as much to ameliorate the suffering of others as has anyone in history.
Three years after his diagnosis, Roosevelt traveled to a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, known for its eighty-eight-degree natural springs. Its hot waters eased his physical pain, but at least as importantly, the kindness of those he met there lifted his spirits. Few others at Warm Springs had ever heard of the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York. They didn’t know of FDR’s wealth or care about his power. To those he met at Warm Springs, many of them poor, he was just another sufferer, a saddened man who needed the waters to soothe his pain. They cared for him simply because he was a human being who shared their affliction. Through that experience, Roosevelt came to know, and to depend upon, the kindness of people he most probably would never have met otherwise.
This is a common theme—a recurrent archetype—on the journey out of suffering. People arrive to help us in our darkest hours, and they often come oddly disguised. Someone we might never have met, or respected—much less looked to for help—ends up giving us pivotal assistance that we could not have gotten elsewhere. People at a ramshackle resort helped heal Roosevelt in ways that all the doctors at the best medical institutions could not do. Not all God’s angels have letters on their doors announcing that they are angels. Nothing humbles us like being helped by people whose help we never thought we would need.
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