Enchanted Love

by Marianne Williamson

  My father always seemed uncomfortable with the intensity of my feeling nature, and I grew up constantly trying too hard to get from him what I would never get, no matter what. That intensity became like a black mark on my personality. Like many people who grew up in emotional circumstances similar to mine, I developed a river of anger in the background of my psyche—anger at my father, though I didn’t know that for years. I set men up to withhold from me—or at least I interpreted their behavior as such—and then projected onto them the anger I really felt toward my father, for never having given me the emotional sustenance I craved. Some poor guy wouldn’t even know what had hit him, when all of a sudden he was being demanded psychological payment for something that Daddy did or didn’t do, twenty years before.

  Ultimately, when I began to look into the conditions of my father’s own childhood—the kind of parents he had, the poverty and hardships that his family endured—I began to see his personality in a different way. And having your own children helps, of course, because you start considering that the parent you’ve been blaming probably did better at this job than you’re doing! I let go my anger at my father for what I felt he had not given me, taking responsibility for my own unconsciousness in projecting so much blame onto him. I let myself experience the true respect and love I feel for my father, for his having created the amazing life he did out of the emotionally damaging circumstances of his own life. Then I could appreciate all the ways he was there for me, that he did try to be available to me as a father and did provide me with incredible gifts on many, many levels. And as the years went by, he himself went through many changes and became a more emotionally present man. But I had to realize the dark before I could truly embrace the light. Then I could begin to feel compassion for his pain as well as mine, and I began to recognize the work I had to do, to clean up my emotional responses toward him and toward other men, as well.

  So many of us carry around the dead bodies of former aspects of ourselves, dimensions of joy that got shut down years ago and never breathed again. I actually remember my birth, I think. I remember coming out and seeing the light above the operating table, shining so bright in the new world where I’d just arrived. Like every newborn baby, I came carrying an awesome love for the world, ready to give this gift I had carried straight from the heart of God. But then, something happened. A man—the doctor, of course—hit me! And although my mother’s doctor honestly thought that that was the way to make me breathe, of course, my total shock and horror that someone would hurt me blasted me into a dimension of darkness from which I don’t think I have ever fully escaped.

  But what I know now about that doctor is what I know about my father: He didn’t know any better. He didn’t mean to hurt me. He didn’t mean to violate anyone. He, like you and I today, was doing the best he knew how to do. These men were certainly not bad. Like us, they were trying. Like us, they stumbled. And like us, they tried their best to get up, whenever they could see that there was an error in their ways.

  When my father died, I felt he came to me. I felt his soul say to mine, “Oh, that’s who you are. Littlest Sister, I’m so sorry. I will be there for you now. I promise.” And I feel in my heart that he has been, and he is.

  If anyone is a victim, my father was, more than I am. He lived in a world, and in a family, where genuine emotion was practically outlawed. It was stuffed before it had a chance to emerge. No wonder he fathered an emotional volcano; I was doomed to carry the emotional baggage that neither of my parents was owning. How else is the world going to right itself, except through children who have no choice but to unconsciously rebel against painful patterns in a family’s past?

  And my daughter will do the same with me. I hope she will heal any wounds inflicted on her by my unconsciousness, but I also know that the greatest gift I can give her is to heal my own wounds as best I can, now. I don’t want my daughter to spend years in therapy trying to heal from her relationship with me. I want her to see her mother get it right. And that is what forgiveness has helped me do.

  Until I could see my father’s pain, I was narcissistically wrapped up in my own. And as long as that was true, I was too immature to have any sense of the pain of a man who was in my arms. While my father’s pain was invisible to me, all men’s pain was invisible to me. My own took up the entire screen.

  No one knows how to love who has no tenderness or mercy toward the wounded heart of another. As the love of God began to free me from my past, and heal the wounds of my violent heart, I began to see men through vastly different eyes. Forgiving the men in my past became fairly easy to do, once I recognized my own neurotic behavior and how it had contributed to theirs. What had formerly made me cry began to make me laugh.

  I learned years ago that only what we are not giving can be lacking in any situation. I withheld respect from men, at the deepest, most insidious levels. But respect was not so hard to give to men, once I realized that they have their own pain, and my seeing my father’s was the key to that. I saw how deeply men are violated in this civilization, every bit as much as women. They deserve respect for the fact that they continue to try to find strength and courage in a world that allows them so little permission to express their feelings. Women’s emotions are often made to appear foolish, but men’s emotions are hardly allowed at all. Holding a little boy, it’s so clear they’re no different when they cry than little girls are. They’re no less sensitive and no less needing of love. Some people will read this, of course, and say, “Duh.” But, I admit to you, for me that was a revelation.

  If you are not sensitive to your own suffering, you lack the capacity to be sensitive to the pain in someone else. It is not to our discredit that we have suffered; it is to our credit that we have suffered and then risen back up. And whether our consciousness of arousal is Isis lifting up Osiris from the dead, or Jesus resurrecting, or tears in our eyes at the first sign of spring, or falling in love when it seemed it would never happen again, or forgiving when it had seemed we were too damaged to forgive, God has a way of shining a light on all the darkness of the past and releasing us to a light-filled present. Once we have started to forgive the past, we can begin to forgive the present. And in forgiving the present, we reprogram the future. Forgiveness can become a mental habit, a disciplined and continuous effort to see the innocence in other people. Then we have the power to exorcise the emotional ghosts that will otherwise haunt us forever.

  We are often so hurt by what happened in the past that we are afraid to allow the present to just be. We project onto someone now standing in front of us the mistakes of someone we haven’t seen for years. We falsely believe that judging someone now will somehow give us more power or control over our destiny. The opposite of course is true, because judgment is the death of enchantment. And if we’re living in judgment, then we are bound to be judged.

  Judgment remains our most prevalent disease, and it’s often doled out disguised as medicine. Girlfriends, even so-called healers, sit around and talk. “Don’t let him do this,” we say. “This is a bad sign. I’ve seen him do that before. He’s not treating you right.” It’s all an unconscious game of “Let me reject you before you have a chance to reject me.” In fact, running the present through the filter of the past just dooms us to repeat it. If we’re trying to compensate for a former lack, then our core belief is lack, not plenty. And that is what we will recreate.

  It takes conscious effort to focus on what people do right. “Yes, but that’s not reality,” some people say—as though guilt is some major reality and innocence is just mere fiction.

  Finally we wake up and realize, “What the hell am I doing? Am I without sin? Am I without faults? Am I without mistakes? Do I prefer that people focus on what I do wrong, or on my efforts to do right?” People who choose not to condemn us are not our enablers but our healers. What do we choose to be to others? Attacking people hardly increases their capacity to learn from us.

  And since we’re not perfect, why would anyone else be? It’s
going to be a long, long wait if we’re waiting for that perfect person, because perfect people don’t exist.

  One of my girlfriends used to say to me, “I can only be with a man so long before I start to think that everything he does is wrong.” How familiar. For a week and a half, the beloved is so delightful. And then the darkness sets in, not in them but in us. We start to judge whatever they do—when they call, when they don’t, what they say, what they don’t. The ego has been alerted: Two souls have made contact here, and might actually join their hearts. Next thing you know, they’ll be seeing each other as sinless, experiencing the love of God. And that would mean the death of the ego. All heaven would break loose. Can’t have that, the ego says. Send out the scavenger dogs, and bring home the guilt, the guilt, the guilt, the guilt, the guilt.

  I am not suggesting that we not have principles, or standards, or feelings in our guts that we listen to and heed. In fact, those are all important. But I have noticed—in myself and others—an automatic projection of shame and guilt onto those we had previously thought so wonderful, which is less about the other person and more about our own investment in guilt, sucked to the surface in the presence of love. We’ve heard the line, “Love brings up everything unlike itself.” Fear is detoxed, subconsciously brought to the fore whenever love arrives. Once aroused, it will either trigger us or depart from us, depending on whether it is punished or forgiven. Forgiveness is the hottest topic in love right now, because without it there is no love.

  We all have romantic projections that fill our minds, fed by movies and media and stories of other people’s lives that seem more important than our own. It seems as though those stories are enchanted, while the actual lover in front of us is not. This is such a hideous distortion, because the opposite is the truth. These projections can be deadly. They do not honor real life. The person we love, on the other hand, has all the makings of a mythical character, if we would learn to mythologize rather than pathologize love.

  As with illness and death, there are all these voices of pseudo-wisdom in our society today, screeching “Denial!” whenever anyone has the audacity to proclaim a higher ground to live on. “No, I do not choose to accept that this disease is necessarily terminal. There are always cases of remission.” “Denial!” they yell. “No, I do not choose to focus on what he did wrong here. I want to focus on the things he did right.” “Denial!” they yell. I say, denial, schmenial. To deny the power of error to hurt the child of God is not negative denial but spiritual power.

  There are goddesses and queens within every woman; we’re not crazy to think that. There are gods and kings within every man; we’re not crazy to think that. What this world calls realism is a distorted picture of God’s reality. Rose-colored glasses are not the worst things we can put on, because at times they can actually help us see.

  Enchantment, like holiness, dwells beyond the veil. It is a world that arises when we extend our perceptions beyond what the body’s eyes reveal. We choose to look past personality to a sweeter, more peaceful reality on the other side. There we find a deeper, more creative love. It is a choice, a decision, that takes us there. It is an adult rite of passage to reach out for this dimension, and claim it for our own. We consciously prepare ourselves for enchantment; even then, it isn’t brought to us but merely offered to us, and it is absolutely our choice whether or not to enter its sacred realms.

  Whether the beloved is a person or still yet just a thought, we should bless his or her path to our door.

  Dear God,

  I pray today for the one I love.

  I pray to see her tenderness,

  I pray to see her innocence,

  and I pray that she’ll see mine.

  I pray that she be surrounded by light,

  that Your angels come and bless her.

  I pray that she’ll be happy,

  and her heart be filled with love.

  I pray that I might be to her

  a man who honors and adores her.

  Her gladdened heart is joy to me.

  Thank you, God.

  Amen

  The ego sees people as they were and not as they are. It is invested in the past and blind to the present. In the ego’s eyes, we are doomed to the past—to who we were in the past and to our mistakes in the past. That perception is the death of innocence.

  Forgiveness gives us new eyes, and with that, the capacity to give new life. That is not a metaphor, but a heightened reality. What we choose to see, we give psychic permission to appear. To say “No, I do not see you as your past, but as who you are now,” is to emotionally and spiritually give someone wings. That is why, without forgiveness, the realm of enchantment is invisible. It releases us to be who we are capable of being, rather than who we showed up as before. If we’re with someone who limits us to who we used to be, then the only way we can grow is to find someone who didn’t know us before. And that, of course, can be the death knell of longstanding relationships.

  From the perspective of miracles, it is our job to tell a brother he is right, even when he is wrong. That doesn’t mean I’m supposed to tell you you sang a beautiful solo, when in fact your tone was flat and your notes were all over the place. It means that it’s my job to make you believe in your singing ability, even when you didn’t make the grade during one particular performance. Or to let you know that your worth is incalculable, even if singing isn’t your forte.

  In order to be romantic mystics, we must be vigilant on behalf of the beauty in all of us. That is the greatest gift that we can give one another: permission to just get better and better. In a world that seeks constantly to tear us down, isn’t it wonderful to have a partner who lifts you up?

  People always used to say to me, “What do you need in this relationship? What do you need in this relationship?” It became our generation’s mantra. But it became clear to me that what I needed was to think about someone else’s needs every once in a while! What all of us need, at bottom, is the same: to be free of the past, free to start over, free to feel that we’re good and decent people, and free to feel there’s something good and true and beautiful we can contribute to this world. Our learning how to see others that way is the greatest contribution we can make to their lives. And the person who makes us feel this way is a gift beyond rubies or gold.

  NONE OF US are who we were yesterday; we’re certainly not who we were ten years ago. In fact, we’re not even who we were five minutes ago. In every instant, we are blessed by God with the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to transform our entire lives through grace and commitment and action and love. May we become, in our romances, as gracious to each other as God is gracious to both of us. An enchanted love is a context where we can be constantly reborn, partly because the person in front of us has no attachment to our remaining who we used to be.

  I’ve known people who viewed changes I went through with encouragement and faith in my capacity to grow. But I have also known the types of personalities who are threatened by change. Part of an enchanted commitment is to join with another person in the thought that he or she is capable of being today someone different from the person he or she was yesterday; that we are not bound by our mistakes, as long as we try to clean them up; that God has plans for all of us, and none of those plans are less than mighty; that miracles are not only possible but also probable in our beloved’s life, in part because of the holiness of our bond and the power of our agreement to love each other now. Enchantment results from two people recognizing the extraordinary opportunities of love: You will not fall down today because my love is here for you. You will not be emotionally homeless today because my love is here for you. You will not be lonely today because my love is here for you. I see you in the arms of God, and I know that we are there together.

  I have performed many marriage ceremonies and I know it is easy enough for people to embrace such thinking on their wedding day. But as with anything else, the tenor of our lives is not determined by our thinking on any one given day, so
much as by the habitual thought patterns that dominate our daily lives. Commitment is only true if it is made again each day. Otherwise it deteriorates into little less than, “I commit to bring my body home.” If you don’t bring your soul home, your emotions home, your heart home, then why bother?

  An enchanted love is holy ground where the meanness and the assaults of the world are not escaped so much as transformed by the power of love and forgiveness. First, I commit to forgive you, to try my best to focus on your innocence and not your errors, to bless instead of condemn you, to support instead of invalidate your efforts. I pray that God will show me who you are today, and save me from my temptation to always focus on your personality and your mistakes and your yesterdays. I wish to see you through ever new eyes. I wish to be your spiritual partner, first and foremost seeing the light in you. I wish to be my best today, that I might be worthy of this higher ground we have chosen for our love.

  MANY COUPLES demystify their intimacy, destroying the filaments of enchantment that would otherwise run like spiritual currents through it. They remove all magic in the name of mental health. It is not mental health, but spiritual laziness, to remove the mystery of love.

  I was once visiting a girlfriend at her apartment in Paris. She was listening to a radio interview with great interest, and I was frustrated because I do not speak French. She seemed so intrigued by what she was hearing. When the interview was over, I asked her to tell me what she’d heard that had obviously been so interesting. She told me of a very famous French couple who have been married many, many years. The interview was with the wife. Having been asked by the radio host to reveal the secret to her long and successful marriage, the woman had responded, “I never, ever lost my mystery!”

  Mystery is not a lie, but in fact a deeper level of truth. A woman’s mystery is the power of Isis and Mary, a goddess field from whence flows the spiritual ability to make all things new. And men, of course, are magic too. Their love derives from the same cosmic mystery, the same divine sea as ours. To stand before each other in profound not-knowing, consciously willing to leave behind the assumptions we have carried from former, now dead moments of our lives, is to enter the mystery together. We can live our relationships from within the mystery that brought us to each other; then and only then can the mystery continue to unfold between us.