“When we forgive, when we atone, when we apologize, when we own our mistakes, when we extend compassion, we are not just being “nice.” We’re following immutable laws of the universe. Spiritual principles are based on internal laws of consciousness as fixed and unalterable as any laws of science. We know that holding a grievance toward another will block a miracle as surely as letting go of a book from our hands will make it fall onto the ground.

This is particularly important when we’re depressed, because at no time are we more tempted to thoughts of hopelessness and negativity. Thoughts like “Nothing will ever be good again” and “All hope is lost”—not to mention, “I hate those people for how they treated me”—are mental meanderings that disrupt the flow of miracles.

Week after week, for more than thirty years, I’ve spoken to audiences about how love works miracles. As often as not, someone in the audience is crying, trying to lift themselves up from the regions of despair—heartbreak over a broken love affair, the pain of a bitter divorce, the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, financial ruin, the acceptance of a loved one’s, or their own, addiction, and so forth.

My message to them is never that they shouldn’t cry. Having been where they are, that’s the last thing I would say to them. But I would say, as others have said to me during the times of my own suffering, that God works miracles. And that He never runs out of them.

Some periods of life are not easy. They call for deep inner work and emotional heavy lifting. This might mean you have to accept what feels unacceptable, or forgive what feels like the unforgivable. It might mean taking a painful look at yourself, or being open to change in areas where you can’t imagine yourself changing. Spiritual comfort doesn’t derive from simply throwing a little white light around an issue. It’s not like you grasp a spiritual principle or two and voilà, your pain is gone. Rather, you start learning and applying the principles and voilà, you’re on your way.

Spiritual work is not an easy way to cope, like something we grab on to as a substitute for serious psychological remedy. It is a walk through what can be a very deep, dark psychic jungle, knowing that monsters lurk among the trees but with the hero’s dedication to conquering them. Spirituality isn’t the purview of the weak; it’s the purview of the brave.”

Excerpt From
Tears to Triumph
Marianne Williamson