Return to Love

by Marianne Williamson

“I am only here to be truly helpful. I am here to represent Him who sent me. I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me. I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me. I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.”

The Atonement means putting love first. In everything. In business as well as everything else. You’re in business to spread love. Your screenplay should spread love. Your hair salon should spread love. Your agency should spread love. Your life should spread love.

The question to ask is, “When I do anything, how should I do it?” And the answer is, “Kindly.”

That shift is a miracle. As always, we consciously ask for it. “Dear God, please give my life some sense of purpose. Use me as an instrument of your peace. Use my talents and abilities to spread love. I surrender my job to you. Help me to remember that my real job is to love the world back to health. Thank you very much. Amen.”

God does not demand sacrifice.

I thought that if other people suffered a fraction as much as I had, then my heart burst for them and I wanted to be of help. God seemed to say to me then, “People suffer deeply, and there have been people suffering around you all your life. You just didn’t notice. You were shopping.”

My heart started racing as I awaited God’s message, which I was sure would be extremely important. Slowly the letters on the scroll began to form words: “Marianne, you’re a spoiled brat.”

Both money and sex can be used for holy as well as unholy purposes. Like nuclear energy, the problem isn’t the energy, but how it is applied.

My judgmental attitude, masquerading as political consciousness, was actually my ego’s way of trying to make sure that I would never have any money.

We are not poor because the rich are rich. We are poor because we do not work with love.

I used to think I was lazy. I was always tired. Actually, I was just blocked until I discovered the purpose of my life.

“How can you do that?” a friend asked. “Won’t that keep you up all night?” As of that night, coffee kept me up all night. I had never before, ever, made the conscious connection between coffee and caffeine and sleeplessness, and so, in my experience, there had never been one.

I said, “You can write those affirmations fifty times before you go to bed at night, and chances are good you’ll pull in a part on Hill Street Blues because the mind is very powerful.

We don’t realize that, as we spread love, we climb naturally.

I told my friend that the key to a successful campaign would be to surrender the campaign to the Holy Spirit and ask that it be used as an instrument of His peace.

We think we’re separate because we have bodies, when in truth, we have bodies because we think we’re separate.

Disease is loveless thinking materialized. This doesn’t mean that people who have contracted a disease thought lovelessly, while the rest of us didn’t.

Let’s say an innocent child dies of environmentally-based cancer. How was lovelessness the problem here? The loveless thinking was not necessarily in the child, but in many of us who, over the years, lived without reverence for the environment, allowing it to be polluted by toxic chemicals.

Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist. It is part of our worldly dream, our self-created nightmare.

Does that mean that it is a mistake to take medicine?

Absolutely not.

But once the Course has gotten into your system, you never again have guilt-free bitchy thoughts.

Of course people hate their cancer, or hate their AIDS, but the last thing a sick person needs is something else to hate about themselves.

Energy cannot be destroyed. Our job is not to kill disease, but to turn its energy back in the direction it came from—to turn fear back into love.

Underneath Darth Vader’s ugly mask lay a real man with a real heart. AIDS, for instance, can be thought of as “Angels-In-Darth Vader-Suits.” Here are some enlightened visualizations: Imagine the AIDS virus as Darth Vader, and then unzip his suit to allow an angel to emerge.

And then we wrote a letter back, to Ed from AIDS. Dear Ed, These are my honest feelings. ….. ….. Signed, AIDS

Isn’t it about time we stop this bullshit and become friends? Let’s put the past behind us and grow forward together. I have tried to love you as best I can, but sometimes I really have difficulty doing so. Please, let’s be friends and make up. Love always, Paul Dear Paul, Okay. Love, HIV

When I opened the door and saw a handsome man in a suit and a beautiful overcoat, my first thought was that maybe he was in the mafia! I went on the date and struggled for the entire evening with my conflicts about his wardrobe. I couldn’t tell this man, of course, that I was turned off by his gorgeous clothes! He was an Italian, and my first exposure to a European man’s sensibilities towards women. Years later I would remember what this man taught me.

“Michael, you will never be the same, we all know that. You have two choices: You will become harder or you will become softer. You will conclude from this that no one, including God, is ever to be trusted again, or you will allow your heartbreak to so soften you—you will allow your tears to so melt the walls that surround your heart—that you will become a man of rare depth and sensitivity.”

I once read of an ancient Japanese religion that celebrated when people died, and mourned when they were born. It was understood that birth meant the forcing of an infinite spirit into a finite focus, while death meant the release of all limits and the freedom to live the full range of possibilities that God in His mercy offers us.

The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

I remember when I was in college, walking around with books of Russian poetry under my arm, cultivating what I felt was a sophisticated, cynical frown worthy of my intellectual prowess. I felt it indicated that I understood the human condition. Ultimately I realized that my cynicism revealed very little understanding of the human condition, because the most important facet of that condition is that we are always at choice.

It is not only our right, but in a way, our responsibility to be happy.

Several years ago I was living in a house with a teenage girl. One day I came home and she was sitting on her bed with five or six girlfriends, surrounding a poster of Christie Brinkley. As hard as it is to believe this, these girls were struggling to make a case for the fact that Christie Brinkley wasn’t really all that beautiful, or if she was, she probably wasn’t all that smart. I gently pointed out to them that what was really going on was that each of them wanted very much to look just like her, but were defending against it because they thought it was impossible.

So it is that couples will come to see the value in a constant and consistent, formal evaluation of their thoughts and feelings as they walk two by two into the arms of God.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful—Abraham Lincoln paved the way—if we could just make one huge, simple apology to all black Americans?