Saturday, March 10, 2018

In the Garden of Spirituality – Marianne Williamson


The Wild Reed’s series of reflections on religion and spirituality continues with an excerpt from Marianne Williamson's book Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage (1994).

In this excerpt, Williamson explores the meaning of spiritual work, the purpose of meditation and prayer, the transforming power of Divine love, and how all of these can be connected to potentially change in both our individual selves and all of humanity.

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Spiritual work is not easy. It means the willingness to surrender feelings that seem, while we’re in them, like our defense against a greater pain. It means we surrender to God our perceptions of all things.

Spiritual values present a radical alternative to the world’s prevailing thought system.

We are renewed and cleansed as we receive the pure and vibrant energy transmissions being sent by God to heal us. This is the purpose of meditation and prayer, that we might open to receive God’s programs of redemption and resurrection. Divine love can penetrate the veils of worldly error. It changes our coding as planetary beings, imprinting us with God’s plans for our salvation and rebirth. We are graduating to a new level of awareness, and with it shall come a new sense of oneness with each other and with God. We can, through continued and sincere devotional practice, transmute the world of material form. We shall bring it into harmony with the structures of the living light. We shall live from that light and become that light. What lies before us will one day be known as the Great Transformation of the human race.

If we choose to remain with meaningless thoughts, preoccupied with meaningless things, then we will continue to experience meaningless patterns of existence. This will not change our coding or our potential, however. We have the choice, at every moment, to leave the world of death behind us and enter, through prayerfulness, the gates of heaven. There is a gate. It is not illusion or metaphor, but rather an energetic force field in which the thoughts of fear are transformed to love, the darkest nights illumined by dawn.

– Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from Illuminata: Thoughts, Prayers, Rites of Passage
pp. 59-60


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
In the Garden of Spirituality – Judy Cannato
In the Garden of Spirituality – Richard Rohr
In the Garden of Spirituality – Beatrice Bruteau
In the Garden of Spirituality – Ilia Delio
Andrew Harvey on Radical, Divine Passion in Action
Divine Connection
Michael Morwood on the Divine Connection (Part I)
Michael Morwood on the Divine Connection (Part II)
Michael Morwood on the Divine Connection (Part III)
Prayer and the Experience of God in an Ever-Unfolding Universe
Called to the Field of Compassion
A Return to the Spirit
Beltane and the Reclaiming of Spirit
Remembering and Honoring Dorothy Olinger

Opening image: Michael J. Bayly (Sydney, Australia, September 2017).
Image of Marianne Williamson: Elisabeth Granli.


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