Silver Linings
Spiritual encounters, and the backwards blessings of Providence
“After all, we are one with spirits and angels. In fact we ourselves are spirits clothed in flesh.” Emanuel Swedenborg from Secrets of Heaven* #69
I never knew my maternal grandparents. They died together on a snowy highway near Pittsburgh, heading home from a Thanksgiving holiday in Philadelphia, ten days before my mother turned six. The hole they left in this world was beyond measure for her and her nine year old sister, its repercussions felt by me and my sisters growing up a generation later in its lingering wake. And yet . . . I’ve met my grandmother. Wonderfully, I’ve encountered her a couple of times in my adult life. It’s one of the reasons I know for a fact that life does—literally—go on.
My first experience was during a private counseling session with a therapist who was also a clergyman in my faith. Early in my therapy he intuited that regardless of my grandmother Anne’s absence from my life, she was actually quite close to me, her spirit near at hand. He suggested an exercise in which I sat facing an empty chair, envisioning her seated in front of me. He encouraged me to speak to her, share what was on my heart, ask the questions about her loss to us that had followed me through my life. Then I would switch places, sit in “her” chair to listen to her responses, then switch back to my chair to follow up. Back and forth, until we were done.
I don’t remember all these years later whether I spoke to her aloud or in my head, but what I remember vividly is that I felt her responses in my mind rather than thought them. By that I mean, for every question I asked her I didn’t “think” or construct her reply. I felt it . . . appear . . . instantly, whole and complete, in my consciousness when I sat down in her chair. The communication was really an experience of immediate perception, not an intellectual process.
I also remember at the very start how her presence was suddenly palpable in the room. I remember weeping throughout, first with relief, then grief, then gratitude for being given the gift of our conversation. And when it was over, I clearly remember the sense of absolute freedom I felt—in such contradiction to the deep power of the experience—to reject it as real. It was a weightless sense of liberation to hold the wonder of our encounter in my heart, or to shift into the familiarity of my head, to rationalize it away as “not Anne.” I chose my heart.
The second experience was as powerful. In fact, it was tangible. And shared.
It happened a few years later when my parents and older sister were in town for a family visit. My mother surprised my sister and me each with a gift which we unwrapped together, standing side by side at the dining room table. Inside both our boxes were two beautifully framed photos of her parents that we had never seen. They were copies of prints recently discovered in an old collection of a church acquaintance, passed along to my mother. The photo on top was a cropped snapshot of my grandparents as they left church, Anne holding her hymnal to her chest.
It was the sight of this image that sparked an immediate, spiritual experience for both of us granddaughters.
When I looked into my box and caught sight of Anne’s face, the words “There you are!” sounded instantly in my head with earnest surprise, like I’d been reunited out of the blue with a lost, dear friend. In that same split second three things occurred: I felt Anne standing just behind us, I felt her hand on my left shoulder, and I felt my spirit start to pull out of my body. It was a sensation of being sucked suddenly upwards, out through my head—but painlessly because my body was still standing there. The closest common analog might be vertigo, in that my sense of spatial awareness felt severed from my body, but without any dizziness or spinning. Or a bit like a feeling of faintness in that I lost connection with my body, except I was fully conscious and aware during the separation. But neither comparison is really apt. The experience was beyond language. And it stopped just short of me untethering completely, as all at once I dropped back into myself with a gentle but emphatic thud—and Anne was gone. I am guessing it all happened in a mere instant but it felt perceptually longer, like multiple seconds . . . time out of time.
I don’t remember my feelings in the aftermath. I think I was stunned. Trying to absorb what had just happened. So I said nothing in the moment. But a short while later my sister and I were in the kitchen and she asked me: “Did you feel Anne there when we opened our gifts?” We started talking and it turned out that she, too, perceived her standing behind us. In fact, my sister had been standing to my left, and she felt Anne behind, to the right, which placed her exactly where I had sensed her (behind me to my left). Though my sister’s encounter did not include a feeling of Anne’s touch or an out-of-body experience, we rejoiced over our shared visit by our long-missed, but seemingly not-so-absent, grandmother.
You may be wondering why I’ve told these stories under the title “Silver Linings.” It’s partly because I was watching this one minute video about Divine Providence the other day (it has subtitles if you want to read without volume):
It got me thinking about the blessings that emerge from tragedy. I know many people believe that bad things happening to good people proves God doesn’t exist, because a good and loving God (by their definition) wouldn’t allow sorrows and hardship. Pain, in this schema, is viewed as a punishment, a cosmic curse. And we do all tend to live our lives doing our best to avoid it. But the truth is, all the events of our lives—the joys and successes AND the trauma and losses—random though they may seem as we live or struggle through them, contain a purpose: to bring us towards heaven—connect us with God. Suffering may seem a backwards way to accrue any blessing, but a universal truth of our existence is that
Nothing is…allowed to happen except to the end that something good may come out of it. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg from Arcana Coelestia #6489
Silver linings, then, aren’t just a happy accident or a Pollyanna construct. They are divinely designed—the workings of Providence. They are the rule, not an exception. Of course this doesn’t lessen the real-time pain or upheaval of any trauma. But knowing that hurt and hardship will not happen unless they carry with them the possibility that something spiritually helpful and healing can emerge from them seems like a game-changer. I think embedding that awareness into our outlook can build a spiritual superpower, because when we orient ourselves to notice silver linings we connect with positive energy—Divine energy; we pull it forward to ourselves and those around us. In seeking blessings, even out of tragedy, we attune ourselves to receive them.
In fact, another way people talk about silver linings is by saying count your blessings. When people are struggling with the weight of their worlds, focusing attention on the good things, the smallest joys, the silver linings, can bring relief. Even a reboot. This has been known for centuries, taught in many spiritual traditions throughout history, but now even neuroscience has demonstrated its truth from a bio-chemical standpoint because we can re-wire our brains by working with our attention. By noticing our thought patterns and choosing how to think and where to focus. It’s a gift of Providence that our Creator put this power into our hands . . . or minds, more to the point. Clearly, fostering the reflex towards positivity and gratitude—seeking the silver linings, counting our blessing—is actually a path of connection to heaven and its peace.
Which brings me again to Louise Hay and her convictions, mentioned in my last blog post. She was all about working with our minds, evaluating and revising our mental stories about ourselves and our lives to improve our health and happiness. Two basic points of her beliefs were:
Every thought we think is creating our future. The point of power is always in the present moment.
She’s not wrong. In fact, though I doubt she was familiar with Swedenborg’s Divinely inspired work, in her claim about our thoughts creating our future she was echoing something he had written two centuries earlier:
The reality is that the Lord’s foresight and providence concerns itself with the smallest possible aspects in human affairs—so small that we cannot in any way comprehend one out of millions. Every split second of our life carries with it a series of consequences that continues forever. Each moment is like a new starting point for another series, and this is true for each and every moment of life in both our intellect and our will. ~ Secrets of Heaven* #3854
This might feel like an intimidating concept if read too narrowly—like for every negative thought or feeling a series of negative consequence will cascade into the future. But I don’t read it that way. Put most simply, I think it’s telling us that every moment offers a new beginning, just like every day brings a new dawn. It’s a promise of hope for the future for everyone seeking to grow towards goodness. And in each moment we are being led in even the smallest details of our existence by an invisible Hand towards our highest possible happiness, our deepest possible peace. Both of which will be wholly realized in the world to come.
In the meanwhile, our work here is to use the present moment to become our best selves, to let go and let God while using our minds—and the awesome power of our attention—to help our hearts grow in love, learn what matters, focus on our blessings and find the silver linings that manifest our connection to Him.
When I contemplate those two little girls orphaned in a blizzard, my heart grieves with the magnitude of their trauma and its reverberations into so many other lives, my own included. But the truth is, countless blessings emerged. Caring souls wove into their story, faces upon faces upon faces upon faces—from the matriarch of a large family that enfolded them into her lively, extended clan, to the many friends they grew up with, to the men they eventually met and married and the children they raised . . . who married and raised children . . . who are marrying and raising children (or might). The blessings for just a single face in that throng—myself—are too abundant to name. But among the most profound for me are the occasions that arose to meet my grandmother and to know beyond doubt the reality of life beyond death.
The wonder, and the comfort, in that alone is about the brightest lining I can fathom.
[ * The title Secrets of Heaven refers to the New Century Edition translation of Swedenborg’s original Latin title Arcana Coelestia; where I use the NCE translation of the Arcana, I will reference it by that publisher’s title.]
I have had similar experiences where the answer to a question simply appears, never with a particular deceased relative as in your story, but more as though I’m asking something and someone or something is answering, and I didn’t produce that thought, if that makes any sense. Maybe a guardian angel? Maybe a deceased relative? Maybe it’s just me after all. Regardless, I could relate to your story in that sense.
Your interpretation of the excerpt from Secrets of Heaven was quite beautiful, i.e. that each moment is a new beginning and in that sense we can be filled with hope as we work toward goodness. Thank you for sharing.