Tears to Triumph

by Marianne Williamson

  THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

  The crossing of the Red Sea was near the beginning of the Exodus, which lasted another forty years. In the third month after the people of Israel left Egypt, they came to the Sinai Desert. There, God called Moses up to the mountain, an event accompanied by smoke, earthquakes, and the blasting of a trumpet. For forty days and forty nights he neither ate nor drank as he received the Terms of the Covenant, known as the Ten Commandments, to be given to the nation of Israel on “two tablets of stone written with the finger of God.” Living according to these tenets, the Jews were to adhere to God’s law and become deliverers of His law. God told Moses to say to the people of Israel: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. Now then, if you will obey My voice and keep My agreement, you will belong to Me from among all nations. For all the earth is Mine. You will be to Me a nation of religious leaders, a holy nation.”

  Just as Moses had been drawn up from the reeds at the side of the Nile and the Israelites had been drawn out of Egypt, the Ten Commandments drew from the Mind of God the prescription, the law, for right living as free men and women. Once they were no longer slaves, the Israelites were free to live as they chose. Then, even while we are living in freedom, our adherence to internal laws keeps us on the path of righteousness, the path of holiness, and the path of love.

  The Terms of the Covenant reveal the principles that align us with our higher selves by aligning us with God. “Thou shalt not” in the Ten Commandments is a description of how we will behave when we are aligned with our true selves. Ultimately, “following God’s laws” and “truly being ourselves” are the same thing. When Moses came down from the mountain after having received the Ten Commandments, his face shone, for he had seen God.

  Although the Ten Commandments were originally handed down thousands of years ago, they have as much contemporary significance today as they ever did. For they speak to the deeper, timeless reality of what is true within us all. God’s voice is ancient, and God’s voice is now.

  1. I am the Lord your God. You shall have no others gods before me.

  Whenever you think it’s the money that’s going to save you, or the new job, or the prestige, or the relationship, remember that it was God who brought everything good into your life—“who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”—not the money or the job or the fame or the sex. Those things weren’t there to rearrange the universe for you when you were on your knees and unable to even function; God was.

  2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image . . . ; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.

  All those worldly things that you think are going to save you, that you bow down to, that you think you need to suck up to in order to have the life you want? You might want to rethink that. It’s called idolatry, and it will not work. Idols will fall. Why? Because they’re not God; you just sometimes get confused and think they are.

  3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

  You may think language doesn’t matter, but it does. Words have power. Being careless with your words is as destructive as being careful with them is creative. This world is not a joke, and neither is the divine within you. Talking about God in a trashy way is talking about yourself in a trashy way. Don’t expect anything good to come from that.

  4. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

  Your nervous system can only take so much. You’re not a human doing; you’re a human being. All this rush rush rush, work work work, gotta go gotta go is destroying your adrenal glands, leaching the juice out of your life force, and making you make dumb decisions that affect your life and the lives of others. One day a week. Just one day. Make your “Sabbath” about important things, deep things, loving things. Regroup, turn within, and recalibrate your energies to align with God. The other six days, a bit of time each day is good. But on the Sabbath, give God the whole thing. You’ll live longer, be healthier, and be happier if you do.

  5. Honor your father and your mother.

  There’s no way to be happy without figuring out your childhood drama and getting straight with your parents. If they were good, they probably deserve more kindness and respect than you’re giving them now. And if they weren’t so good, you’re still going to have to forgive them, or else your relationships will be messed up throughout your life.

  6. You shall not murder.

  Hard to believe you still need to hear this one, but you’re still killing, spending huge material resources on building more killing machines, and basically ignoring this commandment. The ego is big on “strong defense” and the Second Amendment. But, then, the ego is a killer . . .

  7. You shall not commit adultery.

  It’s time to admit that over-casualizing sex is harmful to yourself and to others. Sex is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, one that can heal and one that can harm. You go messing around with that energy, someone somewhere is bound to get hurt. And it might be you. If sex doesn’t stem from a sacred commitment, then it doesn’t stem from God. Whether the commitment was yours or someone else’s, it is yours to honor.

  8. You shall not steal.

  Once again, it’s amazing that you still need to be reminded about this. But corporations are still stealing seeds, nations and corporations are still stealing territory, and the rich are still stealing from the poor. And you put up with this!

  9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

  Once again, words have power. Negative gossip, slander, hate speech—these things can destroy people’s careers, even their lives. It doesn’t matter whether someone was in the room when you made unkind or unfair remarks; think of the universe as having ears. Words are energy, and energy takes form. Whatever you say will boomerang back in your direction.

  10. You shall not covet.

  God made an infinitely abundant universe. Your neighbor having something great doesn’t diminish your ability to have it, too. But if you withhold your blessing from their success, it will only limit your ability to attract the same. You only get to have in life what you’re willing to bless in the lives of others.

  RESPONDING TO THE CALL

  As they wandered through the desert, the journey of the Israelites continued to be difficult and continued to involve miracles. God rained mana from heaven, and covered their camp with quail for the hungry wanderers to eat. God gave Moses the power in his hands to hold back an army who was trying to defeat them. The bond between God and the Israelites grew deeper during this time of their suffering. At one point, God commanded Moses to strike a rock with his staff when the Israelites needed water to drink. Not seeing water immediately, Moses struck the rock a second time. For this, God punished Moses by denying him entrance into the Promised Land. What this means, metaphysically, is that lack of faith diminishes our power and denies us inner peace. The problem for many of us, much of the time, is not that we don’t hear what God is saying; it’s that we don’t believe what God is saying, or we don’t like what God is saying. Then, putting our faithlessness into action, we do or say something that actually interrupts His plan and deflects our miracle. But life will continue to “draw us” to our destiny of deeper relationship with God and more powerful performance of the tasks to which he assigns us.

  All of us make an Exodus in our lives; all of us are delivered from slavery to the Promised Land by a mysterious hand. The Exodus is our journey through suffering, as we suffer from bondage at the hands of the ego to freedom in the hands of God.

  Moses reminds us that God is God; He led the Israelites out of slavery and beyond their suffering, and He shall do the same for us. Sometimes during the slavery years, sometimes during the desert years, and sometimes during the promised years, we are sustained by the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Amen.”

  The great religious traditions provide the tales of enlightened beings to inspire us to continue on
our own hero’s journey, knowing that although we too fight illusions, although we too wander, and although we too suffer, we are bound for the inevitable glory that the journey ultimately leads us to.

  The suffering of the Jews at the hands of Pharaoh is a foundational myth in human history, imprinting upon our consciousness the relationship between the children of God and the ego that taunts us. The ego is indeed a mental slave driver. It is the unconscious part of us that leads us time and time again to self-sabotage—to undermine our relationships, resist recovery, make stupid decisions, and so forth. It is the part of us that interprets everything that happens in the most negative way possible. It is the part of us that insists that there is no hope. It represents, as well, any outer forces that would hold us down.

  The ego has only one goal: your suffering; while God has another: your deliverance. Whether it’s the suffering of age, disease, and death to which the Buddha bore witness; or the suffering of the Jews as slaves or as they wandered in the desert; or the suffering of Jesus on the cross—all three stories bear witness to the viciousness of the ego mind.

  However much evil appears in the world, in time it is replaced by the reemergence of love. The Creator of the universe overrules the force that would obstruct His plan. The arc of the universe moves, however slowly, in the direction of good.

  One of the most amazing things about great religious stories is how psychologically astute they are. Serving God—that is, extending love—is not just something we “should” do. It is the only way to be happy. But getting to that point, genuinely burning through all the shadows within ourselves so the light of our true beings can shine through, is a journey. It is a process; it is not a fact. And that process can be hard.

  The forty years during which the Israelites suffered on their way to the Promised Land were not easy. Becoming genuinely self-aware, burning through the layers of the false self, can be deeply painful. Our current culture responds to this pain with promises of short-term relief. But some of the times we spend in the desert turn out to be groundwork for our own re-greening. There, in the desert, many of us see our first miracles.

  The great religious stories are not simply stories but coded messages from God to all of us. God dwells in the quantum field of no-time, no-space, and what he conveyed to anyone He is conveying to everyone. He will lead us out of slavery, and He will lead us to enlightenment’s door. What greater blessing could we receive than God telling us that He will deliver us “to Myself”?

  In being delivered to God, we’re delivered from the illusion of who we are to the reality of who we truly are. We go from being addicted to being sober; from being needy to being independent; from being afraid to being brave. We’re dying to the parts of ourselves that need to die in order to give birth to what is trying to be born. We’re burning through a lot of ego on our way to the life that lies beyond it, having to face whatever we need to face before we can face God. And this is painful, perhaps even torturous. It is humiliating. It is terrifying. But that journey through the spiritual wilderness is not a waste, for it leads to the Promised Land at last.

  THE DEATH OF MOSES

  When Moses was 120 years old, he climbed Mount Nebo, and God showed him the land all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, saying: “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” Moses himself was not allowed to enter the Promised Land.

  In this, Moses was like Susan B. Anthony, who devoted her life to women’s suffrage but herself did not live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote; or Martin Luther King Jr., who said he’d seen the Promised Land but added “I might not get there with you.” The generation that still retains the memory of slavery is not always the one to be completely delivered from it. The story of the Jews is the story of a people, a story of generations that come and go, of efforts made by one generation then followed by efforts of the next.

  Joshua, who had been born in the desert, would enter the Promised Land as leader of the Israelites. God told him: “Be strong and brave. Do not be terrified. Do not lose hope. I am the Lord your God. I will be with you everywhere you go.”

  Extreme suffering has marked the history of the Jewish people in modern as well as ancient times. A continuous thread of anti-Semitism and its attendant evils dates back many centuries, from pogroms in Europe and Russia to anti-Semitic incidents on the rise in many places even now. During the Holocaust—the almost unspeakable mass murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis roughly between 1941 and 1945—some were reported to have uttered God’s words to Joshua as they entered the gas chambers, “Do not be terrified. I am with you wherever you go.”

  The Promised Land is above all else a state of consciousness. Seeing it only in geographical terms has not worked, is not working, and will not work. It is a state of mind, an inner peace that alone will guarantee outer peace for our children and our children’s children. The Covenant is not only a promise God made, but the terms of the relationship we are to have with Him. It is the light of understanding of both who we are in God and who He would have us be in the world. Having suffered, surely we are called to be exquisitely sensitive to the suffering of others; having been as oppressed as we have been, to be the most resistant to any temptation to oppress. God’s call to be a holy nation, like the call to be a holy individual, is not without its pain. In the words of my father, “The lessons God throws the Jews are never, ever easy.” The journey of the Israelites began thousands of years ago and continues to this day—as fraught as ever, as dramatic as ever, and as powerful as ever. God is with us still, and will be with us wherever we go.

  ELEVEN

  The Light of Jesus

  The life of Jesus was a historical fact, to be sure; but it is also a mystical one. He is a timeless conduit of spiritual force—not just one man who lived two thousand years ago, but also a psychic reality that all of us are experiencing all the time. His birth represents our own rebirth; his ministry represents our own path to follow; and his death and resurrection represent our own capacity to transcend pain, sorrow, and death.

  Buddha’s observation of suffering led to his search for enlightenment; Moses’s compassion for the suffering of his people enabled him to hear the voice of God directing him to lead them out of slavery; and Jesus’s suffering on the cross condenses the sorrows and tears and pain of humanity into a single incident. Most importantly, his resurrection reflects God’s response to our suffering: that in Him, all suffering ends.

  The suffering of Jesus on the cross was an embodiment of the full viciousness of the ego. His crucifixion is the ultimate symbol of the ego having gotten its wish, causing us to suffer and ultimately to die. The ego is the belief that we are our bodies, and thus the death of the body seems to be the ego’s ultimate triumph. The resurrection is God’s response to the crucifixion, the reemergence of truth after illusion has had its way with us. It is the ultimate reemergence of the light after darkness. It is the fact that death does not exist, for what God created cannot die. It is the expression of God’s will, which has never not been done, not only in Jesus’s life, but also in ours. No matter what happens, no matter what evil might occur, God always has and always will get the ultimate final word; in time, all will be well. In fact, it will be glorious.

  Because spiritual reality applies to a state of awareness beyond time and space, the acceptance of the resurrection takes us beyond mere hope. We do not just hope that everything will work out in time. We know it will work out in time because in the Mind of God it already has. In the Mind of God—the quantum field of infinite love—everything is already perfect. We can therefore proclaim our resurrection while in the midst of our crucifixion; as it says in A Course in Miracles, “miracles collapse time.” We don’t wait for circumstances to change to know that things are perfect. We accept that things are perfect, and our conviction causes circumstances to c
hange. The power as always lies in our thinking, as we affirm that God is. And so it is that we make it so.

  CHRISTMAS

  Christmas and Easter are two existential bookends that underlie every situation. The first represents a choice, always available to us, to give birth to our better selves. The second represents the fact that no matter what tricks the ego may play, the Spirit of God will return our lives to divine perfection.

  The story of Jesus began, of course, with the story of his mother. She was “awakened from her slumber”—that is, aroused from the stupor of the ego mind—and told, as all of us are, that we can be more than we think we are. God has chosen us to impregnate with his seed—His Spirit penetrates our consciousness—and as we hold it within us and allow it to grow, it will then produce new life within us. Mothered by our humanness and fathered by the Spirit of God, the Christ is then born onto the earth.

  Free will determines whether the Mary inside us says, “Yes God, please use me; allow my mind, my body, my self to be the container for your Spirit and the womb through which you incarnate.” Mary represents the feminine consciousness through which, should we choose, we make ourselves available to be used by God. Christ is a name for the being who then emerges when we do.

  Beyond the body, beyond the material plane, on the level of spirit, we are not separate. For God created all of us as one. This is the metaphysical meaning of the statement “There is only one begotten Son.” Jesus is a name for the oneness we all share. To join on the level of Christ is to simply realize that we are already one.

  The Christ Mind is the mind we all share, beyond the body. In fact, we are like the spokes of a wheel. If you identify the spokes with their position on the rim, then they are many and separate. But if you identify the spokes with the point at which they originate, you see that all spokes emerge from the same point. That point of oneness, that shared source point, is called by many names—one of which is the Christ.