The Age of Miracles (5 page)
Read The Age of Miracles Online
Authors: Marianne Williamson
As mature people, we carry a unique spiritual elixir. Having seen the darkness in ourselves and others, we’ve become more humble before the light. Having been brought out of darkness, we’ve developed a devotion to the God Who delivered us. Having made real mistakes, we know how much it means to feel forgiven. Having suffered, we feel more compassion for human suffering. Those things aren’t just abstractions to us anymore; they are principles that have infused our flesh. We are strong now in ways we could not have been before. And our strength is needed. We are entering a time when our internal strengths, more than our external ones, will be humanity’s most important sources of renewal and repair.
Whatever powers we might lose with age are small compared to the powers we stand to gain. There’s a profound satisfaction in finally giving up something meaningless, for no other reason than that we did it to the max and now we’re ready to move on. Midlife is about surrendering things that no longer matter, not because our lives are in decline but because they’re on an
incline
. Traveling upward, we simply let go of some baggage. Maybe there’s more natural wisdom in what’s happening to us now than we think. Of all those things we can’t remember, is it possible that any of them are completely unimportant? Could it be that nature is
demanding
rather than just requesting that we simplify? The only way we can peacefully age is if we have respect for the demands of the experience.
It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but sometimes it’s a relief to get to finally slow down. You realize “slower” is not necessarily
“worse than.” The speed of our former years was not as constructive as it appeared to be. Moving too fast, we often missed a lot. Many of us made big mistakes we might not have made if we hadn’t been moving through life so quickly.
I remember when I was young hearing Otis Redding sing, “Sitting here resting my bones … ,” and thinking,
Who needs to rest their bones?
Now of course I know. And when I first had the thought one day that I was just sitting there resting my bones, I panicked. I thought it was all over if my
bones
were tired! But then I realized something else, like a guilty secret: I was
enjoying
just sitting there. I wasn’t attending a Buddhist retreat
trying
to enjoy just sitting; I really
was
enjoying it! I was enjoying the kinetic experience of a rocking chair in a way I had never thought possible. (“Oh, these things are actually
helpful!
Who knew?”) I didn’t feel the need to get up, to go somewhere else, or to do anything at all. With less adrenaline came less distraction. I felt no need to justify my existence by achieving or performing a thing. And that’s when I realized,
This is very different, but it isn’t bad.
Sometimes what we appear to have lost is simply something it was time to leave behind. Perhaps our system just lets something go, our having moved through the experience and now needing it no more. A friend of mine was sitting once with two of his best friends, a couple he’d partied long and hard with during the l960s. At about ten in the evening the couple’s twentysomething daughter came home, saw them on the couch, and admonished them, “You guys are so boring! You never go out!” To which all three responded in unison, “We were out, and now we’re in.”
The mind is its own kind of dance floor. What this generation could do from our rocking chairs could literally rock the world. If in fact the highest, most creative work is the work of consciousness, then in slowing down we’re not doing less; we’re doing
more
. Having slowed down physically, we’re in a better space to rev up psychically. We are becoming contemplative. We are shifting from the outer to the inner not in order to begin our demise, but to reseed and regreen the consciousness of the planet. And that’s what is happening now: We’re going slower in order to go deeper, in order to go faster in the direction of urgently needed change.
Dear God,
When I rest
may I rest in You.
I surrender my spirit
that it might be renewed.
At last, I am ready
to change.
Amen
T
O THE EGO, SIMPLIFICATION MEANS HAVING LESS;
to the spirit, simplification means having more. Wherever there is an overabundance of material substance, the experience of spirit is limited. Whether it’s decluttering your house or dropping dysfunctional relationships, anything you do to prune away excess material involvement leaves the soul more free to fly up to its natural state. That is why so often as we approach the mountaintop of spiritual progress, we begin the process of letting go.
Age involves a lot of letting go—some of our physical prowess, perhaps, or certain worldly opportunities, or our children to live their own lives. Yet such letting go isn’t meant to constitute a depressing sacrifice of happiness. Anytime we’re called to let go of something, there’s a hidden treasure to be found in the experience. No birthing of anything new can occur without a dying of the old.
You’re carefree before becoming a parent, in a way you will never be again. But you’re
satisfied,
having become one, in a way you never could have been before. And that’s where our generation is now. We’re no longer carefree. But we’re something else instead. We are grown-ups in the deepest sense, and that is new psychological territory.
You can’t remember the day when you crossed over the border from who you were to who you are, but you definitely did. The lightness of your youth is gone, perhaps, but so is your youthful suffering. Mature angst is preferable to youthful angst; it seems less tortured somehow. You know too much now to either laugh
or
cry the way you used to. You see things from a different perspective, and with that new perspective has come a new sense of self. On some essential level, you have birthed a new you.
There’s little in life more satisfying than the feeling that at last you’ve taken ownership of yourself. You don’t have to be afraid anymore that some part of you—some fractal not yet integrated into your personality—is going to trip you up. You feel at last like you
inhabit
yourself. You finally went into all the rooms, turned the lights on, and settled in.
How interesting it is that the spirit should begin to open up as the body begins to shut down. It’s very humbling to watch the body age. The arc of human history is coded into our cells: our bones, muscles, organs, and reproductive systems are all moving into a different mode at midlife, in an unmistakable drive toward hopefully distant but eventual death. Yet there is much we can do to enliven the body—including enlivening the mind. We can in many ways transform the forces of death into renewed and sanctified life.
We can treat our bodies not as things that are slowly failing us, but as our partners in rebirth. If we identify only with the material world, then age creeps into us like an unwanted guest who’s come to stay. But if we identify also with our spiritual existence, then our attitude toward the body becomes one of deep appreciation and gratitude. It’s the house our spirit lives in, after all. When we walk, bike, do yoga, lift weights, eat correctly, take herbs and vitamins, or do whatever we can in order to treat the body well, we’re not just staving off death; we’re affirming life. With every stretch of the body, we help stretch the mind. With every stretch of the mind, we help stretch the body. And one stretch at a time, we’re renewing them both.
According to spiritual literature, the body will be with us for as long as it serves the function of the soul for us to remain here. When I was a younger woman, I took my body so for granted. In midlife, I feel so grateful to it for working, and to God for giving it to me.
There’s something about having less of something—less energy, less time, less whatever—that creates a poignant shift in our sense of its value. The body
is
a miracle, after all. It seems to me that with age should come a greater willingness to treat it lovingly, and with care. Your body deserves some kindness after all it’s been through. And probably you do, too.
Dear God,
Resanctify my body,
that it might be blessed.
Pour forth Your spirt
into my flesh.
May every cell receive new life,
and my physical self be healed and whole.
Amen
Y
ou arrive at midlife having collected some important clues about yourself. The mission now is to discover what they mean.
Many, if not most, of our personal issues begin in childhood, most specifically within our family of origin. Young adulthood is often the time of a big escape, as we seek to evade our issues by evading our families. Ultimately, we come to realize that only by facing those issues head-on can we escape their consequences throughout our lives.
My own family has been a complicated puzzle with some oddly shaped psychological pieces. For years, my primary response to whatever discomfort I experienced there was to go live elsewhere and not return except for a quick hello every few months. I don’t think I could have done otherwise, given who I was when I was younger. But having reached another stage in my life, I now realize that everything I went out into the world to find, everything I thought my family didn’t have or couldn’t show me, was pretty much right there in front of me all the time.
Our family is usually a microcosm of the world we’ll encounter, whether we travel great distances or barely stray from home. The lessons to be learned in life have to do the fragility of the human heart and the nobility of the human spirit; the suffering involved in simply being human and the struggles to survive the experience; the joy and laughter when our children are well; and the tears and sadness when love and lives are over. I never had to leave home at all to learn this. But if you’d told me that 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Whether your childhood was good or not so good, it lives in your cells. It laid down tracks of thought, and thus behavior, that have run your life for decades. If you were appreciated, you’ve attracted people who appreciate you. If you were unappreciated, you’ve attracted people who don’t appreciate you. You’ve subconsciously been drawn to individuals and situations that mirror pretty perfectly the drama of your childhood.
In the words of novelist William Faulkner, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Until we address the deeper drama of our past, we are bound to reenact it. The more we ignore our childhood wounds, the more they fester and grow. Until we heal the child we used to be, the adult we want to be doesn’t stand a chance.
We can help release the drama of our childhood by redefining whose child we are. We are products of our family of origin, to be sure. But who is that, exactly—our mortal parentage, or our immortal one? It’s an important issue because we inherit the riches of whomever we think sourced us. We might have inherited limitation and fear from our mortal parents, but we inherited miracles and love from God. Our worldly parents might have been wonderful people or they might have been scoundrels, but the larger point is that they’re not who created us. Superman was only
raised
by those nice people in Kansas.
As long as we think our biological parents fundamentally sourced us, we’ll feel the need to distance ourselves from them because on some level, we know it’s not true. When we see that in fact they’re simply fellow souls who gave us a tremendous gift by bringing us into this world, then (hopefully) did their best to take care of us and raise us right, we realize the significance of the debt we owe them. Understanding that God is our true Father/Mother, and all humanity our brothers and sisters, counterintuitively delivers us to a more, not less, respectful attitude toward our biological family. Knowing more deeply who they are in our lives—and who they aren’t—frees us to love them more.
Many people today never experienced an appropriate break from their parents, remaining in the psychic grip of childhood long past the time when adulthood arrived. In the absence of a healthy rite of passage, perhaps you subconsciously created for yourself whatever drama, however painful, would force you into a more mature mode of living.
Today, we’re all being forced to grow up. Both individually and collectively, we’re being challenged by the universe to match our talents with compassion, our intelligence with humility, and our intellect with wisdom. The grace period of youth is over for all of us. We are children no longer. We’re at the front of the line.
A
COMMON RITE OF PASSAGE AT MIDLIFE IS THE DECLINING HEALTH,
or death, of our parents. Those who brought us into the world are usually the ones to leave it first. They welcomed us when we got here; now we’ll wish them farewell as they move on to the next phase of their souls’ journey.
When I was younger, I couldn’t bear the thought of my father dying. And that was a persistent terror throughout my earlier years. How would I continue to exist if he were not here? Yet the anticipation of someone’s death is often far worse than the feelings we experience once it’s happened; I found that Daddy’s having died was far less excruciating than the
fear
that he would. With my father’s passing, and then with my sister’s, I never felt that my immediate family dwindled from five members to three. Rather, it’s as if there’s a photograph of five people in my head, and two of them are negatives. But the picture is the same. They’re still my family.
My father was a profoundly charismatic person. Yet with that came shadows, as is often the case. With him taking such a starring role in the family drama, who else had a chance to play as large a part as we might have otherwise? I’ve noticed something similar with my daughter, how she herself has handled a situation where the parent is, shall we say, less than a shrinking violet. I’ve always felt that she made a preverbal decision: She could either let Mom be the star here and simply accept the role of background player; or she could come out blazing in the first act, making it very clear to everyone that this would be an ensemble drama, thank you. Lord knows she chose the latter. And I say,
Good for her.
What that means, I hope, is that she will have plenty of experience starring in her own life long before I leave. I’m thrilled to applaud her. Yet in my case, and in the case of many people, we don’t really have an experience of starring in our own lives until at least one parent has left the stage. That, perhaps, is why nature, in its obviously impeccable wisdom, follows a common pattern by which the parent usually dies first.
It’s not until you’re in the generation that will be leaving next that you feel the full weight and power of being the star in your own life. So it is that while we feel the sadness of our parents’ aging and grieve for them when they pass away, we also know—as my father used to tell me—that death is part of a greater mystery. When I think of him now, I smile at the thought that he’s no longer an old man. Someone told me once that when you die, the spirit goes back to being 35. Of course it’s preposterous to think that anyone really knows these things. It’s sort of like the question “If someone I love reincarnates, does that mean they won’t be there to meet me on the other side when I arrive?” Who the hell knows. I think there’s some sort of multidimensional reality that lets my father reincarnate as one of his great-grandchildren this year and at the same time head the welcoming committee for my mother years from now. It’s that “same time” thing that makes it all possible. There
is
no time!
Either way, this I know: After he died, I
felt
my father. I could have sworn he said to me, very slowly, “Oh,
that’s
who you are!” Clearly, he had not fully seen me when he was here. But once he was gone, I felt that he could. And I can feel he does. As much as he did for me as a father, there were limits to what he could do because there were limits to what he could see. But his dying didn’t end our relationship; we’ve simply entered the next phase of it. And what he gives to me now, in the purity of spirit, more than makes up for what he withheld from me when he was living on Earth. My father didn’t simply get old and then die. In the end, after his death, he became even more of who he is.
And so did I.
Dear God,
Please heal my relationship with my parents.
Whether they’re on Earth
or have passed beyond the veil of death.
May only love remain between us.
May I not be broken by their weaknesses,
but may I be strengthened by their strengths.
May they be at peace,
and so may I.
Help me to forgive them,
and please forgive me.
Amen
I
N YOUTH, WE ENCOUNTER OUR PSYCHIC DRAGONS;
by midlife (if they’re still around), it’s time to slay them. It’s the time for a major commitment to heal whatever childhood wounds remain. There can be no spiritual victory without this.
It’s not as hard to heal from these patterns as we sometimes think, once we’re honest with ourselves about (l) what they are, and (2) who’s 100 percent responsible for them. A wound that might have been inflicted on you years ago by someone else has turned into a character defect that is all yours now. To the extent that we project responsibility for a dysfunction outside ourselves, we cannot change it. Wherever the wound came from, however many years ago, its healing lies not in the past but in the present. Your subconscious will continue to trigger the wound for as long as it takes—a fifty-year-old experiencing a five-year-old’s pain—until you allow it to be healed.
When the Bible tells us to pray like a little child, it’s not just because of the faith of a child. It’s also because of the pain of a child. The most powerful way to bring healing to a wound is to pray that God take it away.
God’s healing is not just something He does
for
us; it’s something He does
through
and
with
us. Only when we are willing to reach for higher thought-forms do we have the power to nullify lower ones. This process is larger and more powerful than psychological insight. “I’m needy because my parents abandoned me; the right partner will understand that!” is a sentiment that starts with an insight but then uses it to imprison rather than to release. In fact, your perfect partner in such a case would not be someone who “understands” and acquiesces to your needy behavior. It would be someone who tells you lovingly but firmly, “Get over it.”
What is the spiritual solution to such an issue? To pray for a miracle. “Dear God, I act so needy that it’s destroying my relationships. Please heal me and show me another way to be.” The change we are looking for is always a change within ourselves.
And the change will come. I’ve noticed that as long as I’m willing to
be
different, something or someone arrives to show me how. The healthy behavioral pattern you never developed as a child, having been too hurt or traumatized to do so, will be modeled by someone who was
not
hurt in that particular area as a child. Seemingly out of nowhere, he or she will appear in front of you. And slowly but surely, you will learn to behave as you would have wished to behave but were too wounded to know how.
At midlife, the name of the game is change. We’re living at a moment of quantum possibility now, not just in terms of our physical age but in terms of the history of the world. It’s as though the universe is splitting in two—which perhaps it is. Those who want to continue on the downward course of dysfunction, irresponsibility, entitlement, narcissism, domination, and fear, go here; those who wish to break through to the highest possibility for life on Earth, go there. We can choose to die to who we’ve been until now, and stand in the light of a new sense of self.
Neither we, nor the world we live in, will go much farther down the road in our current state. We can either let go gracefully of the people we’ve been, becoming ever more transcendent; or we can let go angrily, our lives becoming bitter and chaotic. Every moment is an opportunity to exhale old energies and breathe in new life; to exhale fear and inhale love; to exhale littleness and inhale magnitude; to exhale grandiosity and inhale grandeur. Rebirth is a gradual process of giving embrace and welcome to the person we really wish to be.
Take a good look at your life right now. If you don’t like something about it, close your eyes and imagine the life you want. Now allow yourself to focus your inner eye on the person you would be if you were living this preferred life. Notice the differences in how you behave and present yourself; allow yourself to spend several seconds breathing in the new image, expanding your energy into this new mold. Hold the image for several seconds and ask God to imprint it on your subconscious mind. Do that every day for ten minutes or so.
If you share this technique with certain people, the chances are good they’ll tell you that it’s way too simple. It’s up to you what you believe.
Dear God,
Please impress upon me
the vision of whom I am meant to be.
Reveal to me the bigger life
that You would have me live.
Undo the forces that keep me bound
that I might serve You more.
Amen
I
THINK MOST OF US HAVE A DREAM
, a secret aspiration we never admit to anyone else for fear of being laughed at. Yet the dream remains an image in our heads that never really goes away.
At midlife, you start to wonder why that picture has never completely left your mind. It occurs to you that perhaps it’s your destiny, planted in your brain like a little yet powerful seedling. You begin to wonder if the dream is still there because you’re supposed to live it. Perhaps your subconscious is trying to send you a message about something very important indeed.
At my talks, people often ask, “When am I going to know what I’m supposed to do with my life?” For me personally, the question has transformed: The only way I can know what I should be doing is if I focus on who I should
be.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t magnificent things we’re supposed to do, but God can only work
for
us to the extent that He can work through us. Putting our focus on being who He would have us be is the only sure way we’ll ever come close to doing what He would have us do.
Once we’ve reached a certain age, we tend to recalibrate our expectations. We expect less from the world once we’ve seen it up close; we know that no one is perfect, including ourselves. And that’s when we gain an even greater appreciation for the place where perfection does lie. The grandiosity of the ego diminishes, and the grandeur of the spirit is revealed at last. Having truly seen the world, we can see that it is tarnished; having finally glimpsed God, we can see that He is not. Having seen the juxtaposition between the two is a prerequisite if we’re to say to Him, “Please use me; I am yours.”