Enchanted Love

by Marianne Williamson

  I write books and give lectures, so obviously I appreciate the power of words. But what I appreciate equally, particularly as a woman, is the power of silence. Personally, I don’t know if any man has gone too far out of his way to hear me speak, but I know of more than one who crossed an ocean to be with me when I’m quiet. There’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to contain her power and not let it leak, standing firmly within it in mystery and silence. A woman who talks too much sheds her allure. If a woman wants a man to produce, she should contribute to the dynamic by which he feels naturally compelled to do so. Be still, and know. Know you are beautiful. Know he is good. Know you are gifted. Know he is smart. Know you are a blessing to him, as he is a blessing to you. Know that God is with you both. Knowledge in stillness is itself a mystical power. It attracts harmony and brings perfection to all things. There is more fullness in the apparent emptiness of the cosmic void than in all the material world.

  A quarterback has to receive the ball before he can run with it. The reception itself must be alert and dynamic, and there is a relationship equivalent to this. If you are a woman, you might take a solid, still moment to breathe in the sweetness of a compliment that a man just gave you. He will feel you doing that. It feeds him to know that he just fed you. You are then more likely to say something in response to the compliment that completely knocks his socks off. You might say sweetly, “Well, I might be good, but believe me, you’re better,” and because you came from a dynamic stillness when you said this, the chances are better that there’s a look on your face that makes him want to do whatever he has to do to continue this ride through the hall and into the bedroom, out into the garden, and up into the sky. And all the time that this is happening, you almost can’t believe how easy it is, just taking in the light of the sun and allowing it to warm you. You light up like the sun yourself. Then watch how your beloved receives the light, feels your warmth, kisses your fingers, and makes clear how much he cherishes your heart.

  That’s when you know you’re in the flow of love, on the magic carpet, in the multiple you-know-what’s, and it begins to dawn on you that the universe is built to support this going on forever. If we can practice these baby steps, even one conversation at a time where we are able to allow the force of love to do its thing, where we give so much and receive so much and love so much and allow so much that our circuits are exploded and completely rewired, then we can imagine the possibility that someday all of life will be this way. Love will then simply describe the way things are, not just the way that we dream of them being. We will dream our dreams in an awakened state. We will all know laughter as we have never known it before, and our hunger and tears and frustration and pain will disappear forever. We will have outgrown them. We will have let them go.

  We will have loved our way to the other side.

  Dear God,

  Please help me see

  that only love is real.

  Please help me see

  that my brother is innocent.

  Please take me to heaven

  while on this earth,

  and then, dear Lord,

  please keep me there.

  Amen

  7

  Grace and Forgiveness

  Turn off the lights or keep them on. Either way, I will see you.

  Call me back or do not call back. Either way, I will hear you.

  Tell me yes or tell me no. Either way, I will love you.

  FORGIVENESS BLESSES EVERYTHING. It surrounds us with grace.

  Forgiveness is not what happens when someone has done something wrong, but you in your spiritual superiority have the magnanimity to forgive. That is not forgiveness, but judgment—supercilious and, at its core, self-righteous.

  Real forgiveness, from a metaphysical perspective, means we realize that only love is real. All the love we have ever received is real, and all the love we ever gave is real. Everything else is a hallucination of the mortal mind. This doesn’t mean it’s not happening in physical terms, but only that beyond the physical, there is another world. Through the eyes of forgiveness, we can see that world. Through grace, we can actually go there.

  Forgiveness would have us overlook each other’s errors, not in a naïve way but in a wise way. I might register something you did, and duly note it. But that doesn’t mean I have to hold it against you. The faults of the personality are not sins that God would punish, but rather mistakes that He would correct. Forgiveness is a divine corrective that lifts us above the pain of life and delivers us to higher, sweeter ground. And God would have us love as He loves, in order to achieve His peace.

  Forgiveness does not mean we lack boundaries, standards, or principles. God’s love does not destroy our brain cells; it hardly makes us stupid. Forgiveness doesn’t make us weaker but very much stronger, as it brings our personalities into alignment with the knowledge of the soul.

  The key to forgiveness is not to seek the innocence of the beloved but to assume the innocence of the beloved. The closer we get to someone, the more temptation there will always be to interpret that person’s behavior in a judgmental or defensive way. Making forgiveness a fundamental commitment is key to an enchanted love.

  Within each of us there is an innocent place, unchanged by our mistakes. Knowing this is the antidote to the darkness of the world, as it stands for the possibility of transformation and renewal. It repudiates the insidious ways that the ego mind would always have us attack each other, in large ways and small. International and domestic conflicts emerge from the same point, and will end in the same point. Forgiveness is the salvation of the human race.

  “He has a lot of issues.” “She’s holding you emotionally hostage.” “This is a very co-dependent relationship.” “He clearly takes you for granted.” How often have we said those words, or heard them? And how often, in fact, they’re very true. But psychological relevance can be a double-edged sword; if we’re not careful, it’s just another temptation to surrender to the spiritually barbaric urge to attack a brother, yet pretend we didn’t. We claim then that guilt is not the issue. But it’s always the issue. The thought that someone is guilty is the cornerstone of hell. The thought that someone is innocent is the cornerstone of heaven. And heaven and hell aren’t after we die; heaven and hell are right here, right now.

  Romance can be a holy place, dedicated to the experience of heaven on earth. But that can only occur if the perception of our mutual innocence is a sacred commitment. Ironically, and devastatingly, how often an intimate relationship is anything but that. How often it becomes the most violent of places, where emotional knives come out of many hidden pockets, and gashes to the heart are common. For those of us who have suffered those wounds, or even inflicted them on others, another alternative presents itself: to make our intimate relationship a sanctuary from guilt. Yes, we will fall short of that. Yes, we will forsake this commitment and have to come back to our hearts. But as soon as two people speak their word, saying, “Our commitment is to the experience of our mutual innocence,” then there is a grace and protection around the relationship that would not have been there otherwise.

  It’s so obvious that all of us have suffered, and all of us have made mistakes in life. Yet all of us are trying our best. We can change our perception regarding the nature of human error, knowing that what is not love is but a call for love. Why not—if instead of mistrusting you—I assume you’re wounded, just like me and everyone else? Why not see the healing of our wounds as the reason we were drawn to each other? An intimate relationship will either magnify our guilt or magnify our innocence, depending on which we are committed to. And in our commitment to each other’s innocence lies our commitment to the love of God. In our forgiveness lies our healing, and we can only be healed in ourselves of what we are willing to forgive in others.

  I call up in you what I see in you. That does not mean I will stand for nonsense. It does not mean I will not have healthy boundaries. It does not mean I will play any games. It does not mea
n you can take me for granted, or pull wool over my eyes, or act like a child. But it means I will keep my loving eye on you—the real you—and I will always relate to that person I have seen. That you can trust—that I will always be true to the truth I have seen within you.

  Such a love is calling to us. On the other side of the games we play is the yearning of the soul to play no games at all. As we heal, we drop them. As we love, we drop them faster. After decades of dealing with the anger that lay hidden like a cancer beneath the surface of our emotional skins, turning all of us into psychological sumo wrestlers, our healing crisis is beginning to subside. It is no longer winter but the spring of our emotional cycle, and love, quite literally, is in the air.

  So open your mouth and take this candy. It is very sweet and it will fill you up. Then, if you do not eat dinner, it will be a very good thing. You do not need dinner. What you need is my sweetness, as I need yours.

  We will eat dinner later, when it has become irrelevant.

  Soul and personality breathe life into each other. Personality without soul is dry and heavy, but soul without strength of personality can be leaky and lightweight. The integration of the two is a spiritual art form.

  My falling madly in love with you is a function of my soul. Yet the fact that I trust myself to surrender to the experience—because I know I won’t do anything stupid, that I will not shirk my worldly responsibilities or abdicate my own strength—is because I have confidence in my personality. Often, people avoid psychological work, thinking their soulfulness makes up for any personality “outs.” Or conversely, people avoid tending to their own souls because, hey, they’re so psychologically hip, who needs divine illumination?

  Enchanted intimacy demands mastery in both areas and harmony between them. We are both human and angel, regular guy and mythical king, earth mother and good witch. We are sexual partners having a good time, as well as priests and priestesses opening the doors to sacred realms. Forget one, and you miss the power. Forget the other, and you miss the fun.

  If our personalities are honed, but our souls are unprepared, then there might be all kinds of good coming out of a relationship, but there will not be enchantment. On the other hand, if souls are willing, but psyches are unschooled, then the relationship will be splattered with psychic blood soon enough. We enter a tunnel at the beginning of love, functioning as best we can. But we exit the tunnel having been transformed, or we must one day go back and enter again. We are on this earth with work to do, and relationships are like laboratories where the work gets done. Without that work, there is no growth. Being open to work on ourselves, and being open to relationships, amounts ultimately to the same thing. What situation are we ever in that does not involve a relationship in some way?

  Some of the most important work we do on romantic relationships is when we’re not in them. How we think about love when it is not yet standing in front of us does much to create what it will be when it is. If we’ve got negative thoughts about intimacy when we’re alone, those thoughts are not going to miraculously change when an intimate partner gets here—unless we look at them and let them go. Otherwise, those thoughts will run rampant over a new relationship the way weeds grow rampant over new growth in a garden.

  Our fears take many forms in the face of love. Sometimes we feel we’re damaged goods of sorts, and who would want us anyway? Thoughts like that can keep love from even entering. People can talk to us till they’re blue in the face about how that’s just negative thinking, and we’ve got to change it. Well it is negative thinking, but by ourselves we can’t change it. Let’s be very clear about this: Love is a Miracle. It’s a God Job. There is a mystery here, and forgetting that places us at a distinct disadvantage in both attracting love and maintaining it.

  When love isn’t in our lives, it’s on the way; that is the nature of the universe. If you know that a special guest is coming at five o’clock, do you spend the day messing up the house? Of course not. You prepare. And that is what we should do for love.

  Dear God,

  I want to be lovable,

  and prepared for a beloved.

  Please remove from me the walls

  in front of my heart.

  Please take from me

  the games I play

  to deny myself

  the joy of life.

  Please make me new,

  that I might know

  an enchanted romance.

  Then send to me

  my heart’s delight.

  Please open up the heavenly gates,

  that love might flood my soul.

  Amen

  Partnerships exist, at the highest level, because the celestial staircase stops at a certain point, and we cannot climb farther until we find our beloved. There is just so much work you can do on yourself, sitting alone in your meditation chair. You can say, “Dear God, I hate it when that reactive part of myself comes forward. I can’t believe I do this,” and God will hear you. But His answer will be that man who says to you, “I do not appreciate your reacting this way, and I will leave you if this behavior continues.” Then you learn the lesson on a whole new level, not just abstractly but experientially. You have a chance to actually practice: to play your part in the relationship from a nonreactive place within you, to choose to be your higher self, to build mastery where before you were weak. Your thinking about this mattered; your praying about this mattered; your meditations about this mattered—but stepping up to the plate in the relationship itself will make the ultimate difference between lesson learned and lesson just thought about. Similarly, trying to “fix” that part of yourself through mere psychotherapeutic or self-help approaches probably won’t be enough to truly change you, either. It takes real life experience, and the grace of God, to make a person truly change.

  PART OF forgiving people is releasing them from our own agendas. This is a million times easier to say than to do.

  I was very upset one day because someone hadn’t called me when he said he would. A small thing, a drama like that, but it doesn’t always feel small when you’re in it. My friend hadn’t called for a week, though we were mid-sentence in a very intense emotional conversation the last time we had spoken. A huge anxiety began building up inside of me as the week wore on.

  I went back and forth between blaming him and blaming myself. The ego doesn’t care who you blame, as long as you blame someone. But just because a situation is painful, it doesn’t mean that someone necessarily has to be at fault. Blame doesn’t even have to enter into the calculation. All of us are innocent in God’s eyes.

  I blessed him, I blessed myself, but the pain continued. I witnessed this as objectively as I could, telling myself that obviously I was still judging someone or else I would be at peace. I realized that while I didn’t judge him, or myself, on very superficial levels, I was still thinking that (1) this is simply how men behave (no judgment there, of course!), and (2) I attract these men, which is my dysfunction (not exactly self-esteem). The pain I felt was like the pain of having the flu—you don’t remember it until it happens again, and then you realize that you know this pain quite well. I prayed for peace. I wanted a miracle. I wanted to live my life that day without this anxiety tearing at me.

  I remembered the idea from A Course in Miracles that only what we are not giving can be lacking in any situation. I realized then that the problem wasn’t that this man behaved a certain way; the real problem was that that particular behavior garnered my disapproval. It was not his action, but rather my own closed heart, that was causing me pain. The problem, at the deepest level, was not that he hadn’t called, but that I thought that he should. What my ego had interpreted as “men always acting this way” was really just a wall they always hit, past which I wasn’t willing to let them be who they were without judging them for it. Of course, they were always going to bust me on that, because the purpose of relationships is to expand us, and where our love is conditional, we need expansion.

  Both people carry our wo
unds into a relationship. Obviously, he had his, but his issues are not my business. My own issue in this situation was unforgiveness, the limits to my capacity to accept people as they are. Most of us have places where, for whatever reason, our capacity for true forgiveness stops. The path to God, the path to our healing, is the path to our capacity for unconditional love. My love was a love that said, “I will love you—until you act this way or that way.” My wounds—not just his—were clearly at issue here.

  Some people would say, “But do you have to date someone who says they’re going to call, and then doesn’t?” Absolutely not. The point is, until I can forgive that kind of behavior, I will always be encountering it. Forgiveness doesn’t mean I won’t have the ability to make choices or own my own power; it just means I can make my decisions freely, without blame or anxiety. Such a position is in fact a thousand times more powerful than anger.

  Clearly, I said to myself, I need to get over this man. I remember saying to a girlfriend, “He’s not available for the experience.” But then I heard myself say, “Oh yeah? Who’s not available here?” If I had shared what I thought was love with this man, then from a spiritual perspective, the love is not determined by whether he does or does not call. Love is content and not form. His behavior is not what defines our love. As long as we are setting the agenda for someone else’s behavior, then we are seeking to be their jailer, not their lover, and we will not know peace.

  If our emotional stability is based on what other people do or do not do, then we have no stability. If our emotional stability is based on love that is changeless and unalterable, then we attain the stability of God. “Release him, Marianne,” I said to myself. “All minds are joined, and he can feel, if only subconsciously, this pressure to be who I want him to be. Get off his case.”