by Marianne Williamson:  To accept that God has given each of us a magnificent role to play on Earth merely because we’re human;

that we were born with a perfect script etched on our hearts; that it’s not to our personal credit, but to His greater glory, that each of us is brilliant—such are the truths that free us from the ego’s lies. Mystical understanding is a ray of light, God’s kiss that transforms us back into who we truly are. Each of us can put down the burden of our false self and allow our truth to reemerge.

The world in which we live today—reflecting in so many ways the opposite of our sweetness and love—reminds us how desperately important it is to break the spell that’s been cast on the human race and retrieve our shining self. Our inner sweetness—whether we call it “the Christ,” “the soul,” or whatever word describes the spiritual essence so not at home in our worldly zones of combat—is the only place where we will ever, ever, be safe. The outer kingdom is not our real home. The inner kingdom is our everything. And until we retrieve it, our outer kingdom will be a land of suffering for everyone.

My dreamlike and mystical nature as a child could rarely find acceptance within my family system or support at school, a conundrum to which I responded—as most people do to the stress of finding themselves at home where they are not at home—by psychically splitting off from myself. I separated from my authentic spirit, my psyche splitting in two like a broken tooth. My spirit wandered high above me, as though on a shelf where it would remain accessible to me personally but hopefully invulnerable to derision by others. Which means that to the best of my young ability, I put my spirit into the hands of God for safekeeping.

I remember when I was a little girl, one of my close girlfriends lived in a house where there was a mural painted on the wallpaper in the powder room. It showed two little angels lying on clouds holding hand mirrors. And that powder room at Beth Klein’s house became like a chapel to me. I would come up with any excuse to enter that room and just stare up at the mural. I felt like that prepainted wallpaper was speaking to me of somewhere I had been and longed to go again. I wondered if others could see what I could see on that wall of my Sistine Chapel on Tartan Lane. How young we were, so many of us, when we felt psychologically cast out of our homes. Feeling cast out, we collectively manifested a world from which, if we don’t change things, we will be cast out. The only way we can fundamentally heal a situation in which the human race teeters on the brink of all manner of catastrophe is to repair the original separation between who we truly are and who we have become.

In the words of poet T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Every life is a microcosm of the greater global drama. As each of us returns to the truth in our hearts, we will be released to our highest creativity and intelligence. This will open up avenues of repair the mortal mind can’t even imagine, leading us to co-create with God a transformed experience of life on earth. Realigned within ourselves, we will realign the world. And heaven and earth shall be as one.

Dear God,
Please deliver me to my own true self.
Please make of my body a perfect container for who You created me to be.
And teach me how to live within it in happiness and peace.
Amen