Beyond the Darkness

by Angie Fenimore

  This place, this Purgatory, this Hell-like state, had a different kind of suffering—pointless, redundant, and stifling. This was the agony—useless, never-ending torment—that awaited me for taking my own life. But still I did not see how I could have saved myself from the driving current of events that shaped me, leading me to the point of despair where suicide was the only answer.

  The Father interrupted my thoughts. "I told you how to get through this." And I flashed back to my minister's office and to the advice he had made me promise in advance to obey: "If you read the Scriptures and pray . . ."

  Like a fool who unknowingly stashes a priceless Renoir in the attic with basic garage-sale fare, I had ignored the key to life that was gathering dust on my bookshelf. Powerful truths are contained in Scripture, and because I didn't understand or believe them in their entirety, I had dismissed them. I regarded the Scriptures as cryptic messages intended for the spiritually elect who are given the special privilege of understanding them. And many times I limited my own understanding because I felt that the messages in the Bible were contradictory or outdated. I couldn't see how they had any bearing on the problems of my life.

  Feeling deserted by God and undeserving of guidance, I turned inward, tearing at myself, looking for the way out. I cut myself off from the world. My conversations with people never reflected my true feelings. I was self-contained and didn't allow anyone into my inner world. All of my emotional energy went to surviving, to staying afloat, until I found that as each day passed, I had less and less of that energy, less and less of the will to live.

  I could now see that prayer is the key to unlocking the truths that are contained in God's written Word. The Scriptures are the textbooks, but God is the teacher. Without His guidance much of His written truth is lost because it is subject to our interpretation. Of course, we are all students, and until the author of the work explains His symbolism, sometimes we just don't get it.

  Having been stuck in a sensible, finite world where tangible proof outweighs the importance of "feeling" or "sensing," I had tried to mold everything into concrete images to fit into my comfort zone. But now I realized that I was capable of drawing strength from the Scriptures if I would just accept the power of their simplicity.

  FIFTEEN

  As God the Father and Jesus were teaching me, their words picked up speed and power and then merged, so that they were saying the exact same things in the very same moment. They shared one voice, one mind, and one purpose, and I was deluged with pure knowledge. I learned that just as there are laws of nature, of physics and probability, there are laws of spirit. One of these spiritual laws is that a price of suffering must be paid for every act of harm. I was painfully aware of the suffering I had caused my family and other people because of my own weaknesses. But now I saw that by ending my life, I was destroying the web of connections of people on earth, possibly drastically altering the lives of millions, for all of us are inseparably linked, and the negative impact of one decision has the capacity to be felt throughout the world.

  My children, certainly, would be gravely harmed by my suicide. I was given a glimpse of their future, not the events of their lives but rather energy, and the character that their lives would have. By abandoning my earthly responsibilities, I would influence my children, my oldest son in particular, to make choices that would lead him away from his divine purpose. Before Alex was born, I was told, he had agreed to perform specific tasks during his life on earth. His duty was not revealed to me, but I felt the energy that his life would have up until his young adult years. He was clearly to be given a role of pivotal consequence in the lives of many. I knew that most of the pain of my death would eat at him and pull him down, destroying all hope and good in him. Without me, he might well be rendered incapable of completing his assignments on earth.

  My son Jacob's life was different because he was already performing a sacred errand for God. I was shown that I knew and loved him before I was ever born, and that he had chosen to come to earth as my son. He had taken a tremendous risk in coming to me. When I was pregnant with him, the security of my marriage had hung by a thread. Divorce seemed imminent, and I had been weighed down by guilt over how I had been living my life. I was an emotional wreck, and I felt that I was a horrible mother. One night, my despair was so great that I had carried a loaded shotgun out to the back yard and pressed it against my tonsils. I couldn't pull the trigger because of the life, Jacob, that was growing inside of me.

  My mother-in-law's love and kindness were a great support to me during that time. She arrived on my due date on a special ticket that allowed her to stay for only one week. She was coming to help with the new baby and, unwittingly, to heal the rift between me and Richard. But since Richard was stuck working a rotating schedule, they had very little time to talk.

  All week long I kept having contractions, but didn't go into true labor. Then while Richard was driving his mother to the airport, I got a wave of contractions so quick and hard that I could barely dial the telephone. Jacob was born thirty minutes later, while Richard and his mother were sitting in the airport terminal having their first meaningful conversation in ages. She was lovingly counseling him to stay with his family, to be patient with me. Had Jacob arrived any sooner, Richard—and I— would almost certainly not have had the benefit of her wisdom.

  So Jacob came to me as a messenger of love. He came to give me a reason to stay balanced, however precariously, on the thin wire of life. He'd had the option to wait for me to mature or to choose another mother, but he had sacrificed security in order to help me. This is all that I was given about his life. I am not sure whether his life here is going to be short or if his later missions would have been jeopardized by my death, but I was allowed to glimpse only his childhood.

  I was told that my children were great and powerful spirits and that up to this point in my life, I had not deserved them. I caught a glimpse of how deeply God loves my boys, and how with my callous disregard for their welfare, I was tampering with the sacred will of God.

  Then I was shown how I would harm other people close to me, such as my husband and my sister, Toni, by taking my life; and by extension, countless others. There were people on the earth whom I would never meet who would be affected by my suicide. Because of the anger and pain I would cause them, my loved ones would be unable to store up the goodness that they were meant to pass on to others. I would be held responsible for the damages—or the lack of good—they would do while immersed in the pain of my selfish death. And I would pay dearly for it, since spiritual law dictates that all of the harm, including lack of good, stemming from my death be punished by a measure of suffering. Even though I couldn't foresee the ripple effect my death would cause, I would be held accountable. God Himself is bound by spiritual law, and so there could be no escape for me.

  And I was shown that for me, the plane of darkness was quite literally spiritual "time-out," a place where I was supposed to grasp the gravity of my offenses and to pay the price. But I had to ask, why me? Why was it that I could see God while the vacant husk of a man next to me could not? Why was I absorbing light and being taught, while he was hunkering down in misery and darkness?

  I was told that the reason is willingness. When I first looked at that man and wondered if he had been alive during the earthly ministry of Jesus, the question showed that I was willingto believe in God, willing to believe that Christ had once walked the earth. And once I was willing to believe, I was able to see. Willingness and ability are the same thing. All around me on the dark plane were people of varying degrees of willingness, of understanding, of ability to see that Jesus Christ was there with us the whole time. I don't know if the others were talking to God as I was or if they were talking to other messengers of light that I was not yet capable of seeing, but I'm sure that not all of them were just mumbling to themselves. And I could see that my spiritual "time-out" could have lasted a moment, or it could have taken me thousands of years to progress out of that dark priso
n, depending on when I reached the point of willingness to see the light.

  And what about the spiritual law that required me to suffer for the damage I had already done in life, up until and including my suicide? I was told that the debt had already been paid, that the sacrifice had already been made. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus Christ had experienced all the suffering that has or ever will take place in the life of any human born on this earth. He experienced my life, He bore my sins, He accepted my grief. But in order for the agony that Jesus endured on my behalf to count, in order for Him to take my place in fulfilling that spiritual law, I had to accept His gift.

  My heart broke as I realized that I had been not only hurting my family, who are beloved children of God, but also causing my Savior, who had such all-encompassing love and compassion for me, to suffer—all because I had allowed myself to be molded by other people's weaknesses.

  The way that others mold us was revealed to me in this way: Everything has procreative power, even the dandelions in my back yard. A single dandelion is hardly a threat, but if it's left too long, the tiny seeds will scatter. New weeds will sprout, which will scatter their seeds, and the cycle will continue. Contagious disease spreads in the same way; and this is the pattern that all things spiritual follow. Expressions of love that are nurtured will take root in the soul. They will grow and mature, producing new seeds that will scatter across the lives of those with whom we come in contact. And the cycle will continue.

  Some seeds will die when they reach ground that is infertile. We are the groundskeepers, and we create soil that will be most suitable for whatever crop it is that we want to grow. Some of us are careful gardeners who pull out annoying and potentially dangerous weeds, leaving plenty of room for good things to grow, things that are intentionally planted and nurtured. Others of us are somewhat careless, not systematic enough about removing the bad and harvesting the good. Still others are poor cultivators, who create the perfect breeding ground for destructive weeds that crowd out all the desirable vegetation. I belonged to the last group.

  I had wandered through life in a haze, picking up a little here and there. The philosophies that are preached on daytime talk shows, differing doctrines and differing opinions, were fertilizers that did me little good. I hadn't learned how to sort the good from the harmful, and so the reality that I had accepted as truth was so muddled that the good was unrecognizable. The soil of my garden was inhospitable for healthy plants. Worse yet, I had methodically pulled any sprouts that were good, and I had fed the weeds.

  One weed I tended, for example, had grown from the seed of my stepmother's unhappiness. She was cursed with migraine headaches as well as a multitude of emotional problems that were the result of a painful childhood. She expected us children to be on our very best behavior at all times. One day when I was home sick from school, I tried to turn on the television, which had been rolled into my room to keep me occupied in bed. Nothing happened. I went to my stepmother, who insisted that I had broken it, and while her words have worn with time, I still can feel her negative energy. When she was through chastising me, I went into the kitchen to make some toast, and as my stepsister passed me the loaf of bread, I dropped it. What with my illness, the stress of the scolding, and my fear of being in trouble for wasting a loaf of bread, I just blacked out, crashing into the wall and smashing a ceramic planter with my head.

  Was my stepmother's anger unjust? Yes. But when I gradually embraced that dark energy I was nurturing a noxious weed.

  The soil that my weeds loved was tainted by the untruth that I had accepted about myself—that I had somehow asked to be hurt. I had protected abusers all my life and felt that I was a co-conspirator because of it. In this soil all my negative thoughts about myself were free to bloom and to overrun my garden. I had allowed them to crowd out most of the light within me.

  Before I took my life, I had come to an emotional crisis that forced me to look at myself honestly. After intense scrutiny I came to the conclusion that others, not me, were responsible for their hurtful actions; that I had not brought them upon myself. So I had corrected one deficiency in my soil, but I didn't complete the process to see that by this logic, I am responsible for all of the pain I have caused others. And so anger toward the faded enemies of my past germinated and created a whole new crop of lies. All the negative feelings I had embraced—hatred, self-pity, selfishness, all the rest—had grown up around me, their vines twisting, strangling me and encroaching on everyone around me, especially the people that I spent the most time with, my children.

  I saw clear evidence of this encroachment during the time I was separated from Richard. I was living in Southern California, working nights as a waitress. I would swap baby-sitting with a friend who worked days and who was also separated from her husband. I would pick up her boys when I got off work in the morning, watch them along with Alex all day, then deliver all four boys to her in the evening. It was a great arrangement. One afternoon, I took all the kids to a drive-in restaurant, and my son was throwing one of his usual fits. Alex was nearly two then, and I attributed his constant outbursts to his age. But one of my friend's sons asked, "Why is he acting like that?" I replied, "Oh, it's just the stage he's in. He always acts like this." The boy said, "Oh no, not at our house."

  Clearly, my son had been reacting to his surroundings. He had been picking up anxiety from me and from the irresponsible life I had been leading. He had become entangled in my vines.

  Sorrow fell upon me as I reflected on the time and opportunities I had wasted and the lives I had affected. I could now see that we create the soil, the state of mind that will allow us to tap into the nurturing power of the Spirit of God, the light, or we cultivate a personal atmosphere that stifles good and encourages darkness. I was now coming to understand the properties of darkness and of light.

  SIXTEEN

  Science, of course, recognizes that all color is contained in light, including colors at each end of the spectrum that are not visible to the naked eye. Just as the rainbow is only a narrow segment of visible light, so too the light we see with our physical eyes is merely a thin band of the broad spectrum of light that exists. There are colors unimaginable and depth unmeasured within the full breadth of light, God's light. Light is multidimensional, and so is darkness. Light is the essence of all that is good—beauty, pure love, truth, knowledge, sacrifice, concern for others, and so on. Wickedness, perversions, depravity, hatred, and apathy, impulses that strike us to hurt one another, the lies we tell, the hurtful words we throw like daggers—all are aspects of darkness. Darkness is not merely the absence of light. It is the energy of which evil is made.

  With my spiritual eyes I could readily see that darkness and light are literally tangible elements and that everything in creation has a spirit side that is filled with either darkness or light. As I stood there in the darkness before God and His Son, I could see clearly how these two beings had their own bodies, their own spirits, how they were separate and how at the same time they were so completely one. It was the light that united them. Their individuality came from having separate bodies and separate spirits, but the light that was their most extraordinary attribute was the same. The light has fluidity and can be transmitted by using thought energy; and so can darkness.

  We too have three facets. The fact that we all have bodies is obvious, and from the moment at my Uncle Sam's funeral when I saw a dead body for the first time, I knew without question that we have a spirit that occupies our bodies for a time and then leaves. But body and spirit are only two of the elements that make up a whole being. The third is an essence of darkness or of light. Most of us have a combination of the two, and the proportions of each shift with each thought that is conceived in our minds, with every television show that we watch, with the words that we say, and with each of our interactions with other people. Even a smile can alter the balance. We have incredible power to create for good or for evil by the substance—light or darkness—that we use to form our words and
deeds and even our thoughts. A thought, whether it is composed of darkness or of light, is literally a deed in embryo. While many thoughts are aborted, all actions were first thoughts. A thought given voice is empowered and has a staggering ability to hurt or heal. Through words of light, through thoughts and crushing acts of darkness, we forge our own and others' destinies.

  Being mortals, we see the world through mortal eyes that cannot detect the light or darkness in each other and in ourselves. Through our physical senses we can perceive certain elements of darkness and of light, but those elements are only a small portion of the whole. It is through our spirit that we can increase our ability to recognize broader bands of light and of darkness. Love, for example, is an element of light that we perceive through feeling. We don't see it with our physical eyes or handle it with our physical hands, but we know that it exists. Love is an energy that we can read through our spirits. All of our emotions have an essence made up of some level of light or darkness.

  Just as physical darkness inhibits our ability to see, if we are filled with darkness, we become spiritually blind. When enough darkness gathers, it is so invading, so thick, that it is nearly impossible to see or to feel light. It is so much easier to absorb light when there is already light in us. And like the bands of light that we perceive with our physical eyes that can illuminate our physical surroundings, there are invisible wavelengths of light that can reveal things to us that we do not see in such obvious ways. If we don't have a certain amount of light in us, we cannot recognize darkness. This is why, for example, I could feel the negative energy behind JoAnne's actions, but not recognize the impact of my own.