A Vortex of the Miraculous

– “Universal Lord, I Hold the Key” (detail)
by Thomas Blackshear II

The Wild Reed’s 2023 Holy Week series continues with a second excerpt from Marianne Williamson’s 2004 book The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life. (To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)

Crucifixion takes many forms: material, mental, emotional, and spiritual. . . . All forms of ego* have ultimate destruction as their goal.

. . . The resurrection is God’s answer to the crucifixion; it is His uplifting of our consciousness to the point where the effects of fear are canceled. Our holiness – God’s love within us – is the only way humankind has ever transcended darkness, and it is the only way we ever will.

“Jesus wept,” as we all do, challenged in our various ways by the lies and projections of the ego. Jesus’s crucifixion – the torture and murder of an innocent man – is a radical teaching example, a demonstration of the strength of fear and then the power of love to overcome it. Jesus died, then lay in his tomb for three days. And for that period of time, of course, it seemed to those who loved him as if all hope were lost. Yet hope is of God, and what is of God is never lost.

Jesus transcended the crucifixion by taking it on, as it were. Confronted with the murderous projections of others, he continued to love with an open heart. And by allowing his heart to be as big as the universe, he became a vortex of the miraculous. . . . [I]n the presence of Jesus, the laws of death were suspended.

What did Jesus have that we don’t have? Nothing. The issue is not that he had something we don’t have, but that he didn’t have anything else. His love of God had cast out all else, leaving only the eternally true.

– Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from The Gift of Change:
Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
HarperCollins, 2004
pp. 187-188

NEXT: Tomb Time


* In The Gift of Change, Marianne Williamson writes the following about the ego.

The word ego here means what it meant to the ancient Greeks: a small and separated self. When we identify with the ego it’s like looking at a hangnail and thinking, “That’s who I am.” The ego is an imposter self, masquerading as who we really are yet in reality the embodiment of our self-hatred. It is the power of our own minds turned against us, pretending to be our champion yet in reality undermning all our hopes and dreams. The ego is a delusional splinter that has cut itself off from our larger spiritual reality. It sets up a parallel mental kingdom in which it sees itself as different and special, always justified in keeping the rest of the world at bay. Seeing ourselves as separate, we subconsciously attract and interpret circumstances that seem to bear out that belief. That delusional kingdom is hell on earth.

When we remember who we are, when we stand firm in the light of our own true being as children of God, then the ego begins, however gradually, to recede. Darkness cannot stand when we truly embrace the light [i.e., right/divine understanding] – when we consciously foster it and devote ourselves to it. That is why recognizing who we are – that we are love, that we are as God created us – is the most important thing we can do in any instant. Love is our spiritual reality, untarnished by anything that has happened in the material world. . . . [O]nly when we reject the ego’s account of who we are, can we begin to discover who we really are.

And who we really are, is holy.

Our holiness is both the opposite of and the antidote to the ego. It is a state of being in which we have reconnected with our Source, remembering that in fact we never left. We were created by God in a state of holiness, we were born onto the earth in a state of holiness, and we will return to this state upon our death. All of us, however, in between our infancy and death, fell asleep to our true nature and experience the hell of our self-imposed separation from God. Remembering our connection to our Source awakens us and frees us from the nightmares we create. In any Holy Instant, the ego is made null and void.(Pp. 17-19)

See also the previous The Wild Reedposts:
• Good Friday Reflections
• The Final Say
• “To Die and So to Grow”
• Jesus and the Art of Letting Go
• The Passion: “A Sacred Path of Liberation”
• No Deeper Darkness
• An Expression of Human Solidarity
• Jesus: Path-Blazer of Radical Transformation
• One Overwhelming Fire of Love
• The Passion of Christ – Jesus Goes to His Execution
• The Passion of Christ – Jesus is Nailed the Cross
• The Passion of Christ – Jesus Dies