Category: Surrender

Jesus once told a story about two men who went to the temple to pray.  One was a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee prayed, “I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like everyone else, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here.  I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.”  The tax collector’s prayer was very different. He simply said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

The Pharisee approached God with full hands.  His hands were ‘heavy’ with his own good works. He was proud of his achievements, achievements he was using to justify himself before God and to make himself better than others.  The tax collector’s attitude was very different. He came to God with empty hands. He realised that he had little or nothing to show for his life.  He knew he depended entirely on the mercy of God.

Jesus leaves us in no doubt about which of the two men’s prayers he prefers.  Jesus loves the attitude of the tax collector because the tax collector comes before God with empty hands.  We need to be reminded that the spiritual life is God’s work in us.  The spiritual life is less about what we do – our efforts, our good works, our achievements.  It is, instead, more about what God does in us and through us.  Concretely, it is about us our willingness to let God work in us and through us.

Therese of Lisieux desired to appear before God in death empty-handed.  Here is how she expressed this desire: “In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works.” Against the background of a theology of merit and a religious practice of requirements and rewards this was a brave and prophetic thing to say. Therese had come to know in a personal way that all is grace, all is gift, all is given.  Like her, we too need to accept that God’s love and mercy are unconditional. We do not need to ‘earn’ love and mercy by our good deeds. They are free. It is God who saves us. We do not save ourselves.

To accept God’s love as gift, not achievement, we must learn to surrender.  Unfortunately surrender does not come easy to us.  We have all kinds of resistance to it.  The spiritual life could be described as a process of breaking down our resistance to surrender.  This process happens in all sorts of ways, not least our experiences of failing and falling.  Whether or not we choose surrender, in the end God will see to it that we come before him with empty hands.

It is obvious from reading all four gospels that Jesus favours the humble over the proud.  The humble accept life as a gift from God.    They have no pretence. They know who they are and where they have come from.  The humble have nothing to prove to themselves and to others. They are secure in their knowledge of God’s love.

The proud on the other hand are full of their own self-importance.  They are preoccupied with their reputation and their status.  They usually do things out of self-interest. They are insecure. While the proud are self-sufficient and self-reliant the humble know their need of God and other people.

In his teaching and his ministry Jesus always sought to get rid of the things that caused division between people.  The Jewish authorities had created a society of distinctions.  It was a hierarchical society and the yardstick for measuring status and prestige was observance of the law. Those like the Pharisees who kept the law considered themselves better and holier than everyone else.  Indeed, they looked down on everyone else.  This was ironic because the law they sought to keep was more about externals than about values; more about ritual purity than about relationships.

In the world of Jesus we are all God’s children; we belong to the family of God and each one of us is loved uniquely by the Father.  This means that we are sisters and brothers to one another, sharing a common humanity and an equal dignity.  To accept that we are equal in the family of God is to accept that we are no better or no worse than anyone else.  It is to accept that we do not need to make ourselves feel important by isolating ourselves or by looking down on other people. Those who know who they are in the eyes of God also know who they are in the human family.  This is the kind of knowing that helps to build inclusive community. 

The word humility comes from the Latin ‘humus’ which means of the earth. When we are tempted by the many forms of pride it is good to remind ourselves that we were created by God from the dust of the earth.  “Remember that we are dust and unto dust we call return” (Ash Wednesday blessing).  No matter who we think we are, we are totally dependent on God.  What’s more, we are dependent on other people. The humble man relies on God and on others.  The proud man relies on himself. Humility leads to communion, pride leads to isolation.  Communion is heaven, isolation is hell.

Slowly she celebrated the sacrament of letting go.
First she surrendered her green,
then the orange, yellow, and red.
Finally she let go of her own brown.
Shedding her last leaf
she stood empty and silent, stripped bare.
Leaning against the winter sky,
she began her vigil of trust.

Shedding her last leaf,
she watched it journey to the ground.
She stood in silence
wearing the colours of emptiness,
her branches wondering,
how do you give shade with so much gone?

And then,
the sacrament of waiting began.
The sunrise and the sunset watched with tenderness.
Clothing her with silhouettes
they kept her hope alive.

They helped her to understand that
her vulnerability,
her dependence and need,
her emptiness, her readiness to receive,
were giving her a new kind of beauty.

Every morning and every evening they stood in silence,
and celebrated together
the sacrament of waiting.

Macrina Wiederkehr

Abba God,
I welcome everything that comes to me today.
I welcome all persons and situations,
thoughts and feelings.

I let go of my need to accumulate.
I let go of my need to be busy.
I let go of my need for approval.
I let go of my need to feel important.
I let go of my need to be in control.
I let go of my need to change others.

Abba God,
I accept your unconditional love.
Help me to recognise your presence in my life.
Amen. 

There is a defining moment in the life of the great Abraham who is often referred to as our Father in Faith.  God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. This was a huge ask for Abraham.  Isaac was the child of his old age, his pride and joy, his only hope of posterity. 

On the face of it, it seems cruel for God to ask Abraham to let go of his beloved son.   But God needed to put Abraham to the test.  It was important that the man God had chosen to be our Father in Faith would have complete trust in God.  We know that Abraham responded to God’s request.  He did what God invited him to do.  He abandoned himself totally to God.  In response God not only spared the life of Isaac.  He also showered blessings in abundance on Abraham and his descendants. “I make a vow by my own name – the Lord is speaking – that I will richly bless you.  Because you did this and did not keep back your only son from me, I promise that I will give you as many descendants as there are stars in the sky or grains of sand along the seashore.  Your descendants will conquer their enemies.  All the nations will ask me to bless them as I have blessed your descendants – all because you obeyed my command” (Genesis 22:16-18).

As we go through life our faith in God is tested.  Difficult and painful experiences like failure, rejection, disappointment and sickness make us wonder if God is really loving and caring. Often in the face of suffering the silence of God can be deafening.  Like Abraham, we have a choice to make.  We can either trust God in the hope that God will eventually bring good out of our pain or we can blame God for the distress we find ourselves in.  Suffering can either draw us closer to God or make us bitter.

It is important for us to realise that God does not cause human suffering.  Free will does.  However, God uses our suffering to strengthen our trust.  God can best work in our lives when we allow ourselves to depend on him.  Self-sufficiency keeps us distant from God; surrender brings us near to God. Growth in our spiritual lives requires deeper levels of surrender and trust.  Abraham was richly rewarded for his great act of surrender and trust.  So will we.

Our fundamental stance before God is one of receptivity.  All that is essential in our spiritual lives comes from God.  Let’s begin with God’s presence. We do not create God’s presence in our lives.  God’s presence in our lives is given.  In God we live and move and have our being.  As Hopkins so aptly put it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Without God’s presence we would cease to exist.  God’s presence is a loving presence, a creative presence, a sustaining presence.  At every moment of every day God is loving us, creating us, sustaining us.

Similarly we do not create a relationship with God.  The relationship God has with us, with each of us, is given.  It is a natural consequence of God’s presence in our lives.  God’s presence creates relationship because God is Relationship.  To be God is to be in relationship.  This is what we mean when we say that God is Trinity.  Whether we are aware of it or not God is in relationship with us.  Spirituality is our discovery of this relationship.  It is our acceptance that we have received the gift of being in relationship with the Love that includes all things.

And then there is this Unconditional Love. We do not make God love us.  God’s love for us is free, unmerited, gratuitous.  It is pure gift.  The spiritual life is not about winning God’s approval and God’s favour.  It is not about making ourselves acceptable to God.  Our efforts, our good deeds do not force God to love us.  God’s love for us is given.  It is a fact.  It is with good reason that the late Henri Nouwen said that life is a short opportunity to say ‘yes’ to the unconditional love of God and death is a full coming home to that love. 

This is why we need a spiritual path that helps us accept the unconditional love of God.  The essential movement or flow of our spiritual lives is from God to us, not from us to God.  The spiritual life is not an ascending movement.  It is a descending movement.  We must learn to pray with open and empty hands. The foundation of the spiritual life is an acceptance that all is grace, all is gift, all is given.

There is a defining moment in the life of the great Abraham who is often referred to as our Father in Faith.  God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. This was a huge ask for Abraham.  Isaac was the child of his old age, his pride and joy, his only hope of posterity. 

On the face of it, it seems cruel for God to ask Abraham to let go of his beloved son.   But God needed to put Abraham to the test.  It was important that the man God had chosen to be our Father in Faith would have complete trust in him.  We know that Abraham responded to God’s request.  He did what God invited him to do.  He abandoned himself totally to God.  In response God not only spared the life of Isaac.  He also showered blessings in abundance on Abraham and his descendants. “I make a vow by my own name – the Lord is speaking – that I will richly bless you.  Because you did this and did not keep back your only son from me, I promise that I will give you as many descendants as there are stars in the sky or grains of sand along the seashore.  Your descendants will conquer their enemies.  All the nations will ask me to bless them as I have blessed your descendants – all because you obeyed my command” (Genesis 22:16-18).

As we go through life our faith in God is tested.  Difficult and painful experiences like failure, rejection, disappointment and sickness make us wonder if God is really loving and caring. Often in the face of suffering the silence of God can be deafening.  Like Abraham, we have a choice to make.  We can either trust God in the hope that God will eventually bring good out of our pain or we can blame God for the distress we find ourselves in.  Suffering can either draw us closer to God or make us bitter.

It is important for us to realise that God does not cause human suffering.  Free will does.  However, God uses our suffering to strengthen our trust.  God can best work in our lives when we allow ourselves to depend on him.  Self-sufficiency keeps us distant from God; surrender brings us near to God. Growth in our spiritual lives requires deeper levels of surrender and trust.  Abraham was richly rewarded for his great act of surrender and trust.  So will we.

There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt.  Whatever about breeding contempt, familiarity can certainly make us blind.  When we grow up with people, when we live with people and become accustomed to them we can find it difficult to believe that there is more to them than meets the eye.  We can make assumptions that may in fact be wrong.

This certainly was the case with Jesus.  His own town’s people, his neighbours, could not accept the fact that a person who went to school with them, who played with them, who attended the synagogue with them, who socialised with them, who worked for them as a tradesman was in fact a prophet, indeed the long awaited prophet promised by God.

Perhaps the issue for the Jesus’ town’s people was ordinariness rather than familiarity.  How can God be present in someone who is so ordinary, who is like the rest of us?  Can God’s Messiah be someone who comes from a remote village, who lives in relatively poor circumstances, who works as a carpenter, whose life is full of simple, mundane chores?  This is the scandal of Christianity; that God has come to us in and through the life of an ordinary human being known as Jesus of Nazareth.  Whether we like it or not, whether we are comfortable with it or not, God is to be found in the humanity of Jesus.  This is the fundamental truth of Christianity and it is called the Incarnation.

The Incarnation has two important implications for us.  The first is that we need to accept that we experience God in and through the humanity of Jesus.  The second is a consequence of the first.  We also need to accept that we experience God in our own humanity and in the humanity of other people.  God is not to be found in some ethereal world outside and beyond our human experience.  God is found in the here and now, in the concreteness and ordinariness of everyday life, in all that is human.  To deny our humanity in all its forms of expression is to hide from God.  To say ‘yes’ to our humanity is to say ‘yes’ to God.

There are two days in every week about which we should not worry, two days which should be kept free from fear and apprehension.

One of these days is Yesterday with all its mistakes and cares, its faults and blunders, its aches and pains.  Yesterday has passed forever beyond our control.  All the money in the world cannot bring back Yesterday.  We cannot undo a single act we performed; we cannot erase a single word we said.  Yesterday is gone forever.

The other day we should not worry about is Tomorrow with all its possible adversities, its burdens, its large promise and its poor performance.  Tomorrow is also beyond our immediate control. Tomorrow’s sun will rise either in splendour or behind a mask of clouds, but it will rise.  Until it does we have no stake in Tomorrow for it is yet to be born.

This leaves only one day, Today.

Any person can fight the battle of just one day.  It is when you and I add the burdens of those two awful eternities, Yesterday and Tomorrow, that we break down.

It is not the experience of Today that drives a person mad. It is the remorse or bitterness of something which happened Yesterday and the dread of what Tomorrow may bring.

Let us, therefore, live but one day at a time.

Author Unknown

“Unless you change and become like little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 18:3).  What an extraordinary statement from Jesus.  To fully participate in the life of God’s Kingdom we must be willing to develop the heart of a child.  So what does it mean for an adult to develop the heart of a child?

We adults have a tendency to be self-sufficient, to rely on our own power and strength, to be independent, to sort out our lives ourselves.  But the truth is self-sufficiency does not work.  A time will come when our own power and strength will fail us.  To develop the heart of a child is to accept that we cannot go it alone, that we are too weak and powerless to save ourselves.  It is to hand the control of our lives over to the Father of Jesus.  The Father of Jesus can be trusted. He is on our side.  He knows and wants what is best for us.  He is the one who saves us. To develop the heart of a child is to let the Father save us.  It is to let ourselves be dependent on him.

Another tendency we adults have is to make ourselves acceptable to God by our own efforts.  We think that we have to win God’s approval and favour by doing good deeds.  We are convinced that we need to prove to God that we are worthy of his love, that in fact we are worth loving.  But this is not the Gospel message.  According to Jesus the Father’s love is gift, not achievement.  As the prodigal son discovered the Father’s love does not have to be earned.  It is free.  The Father is pleased with us because we are and as we are.  To develop the heart of a child is to let the Father love us in the way the Father wants to love us – unconditionally.  This is the only way the Father knows how to love.

Perhaps the difficulty we adults have is we think we need to be perfect to be loved by God.  But God is not interested in our perfection.  Like a good parent he knows we are weak and prone to failure.  He knows that we are likely to make a mess of things.  We see our weaknesses and failures as an obstacle; the Father sees them as a strength and an opportunity.  Our weaknesses and failures allow us to throw ourselves on to the mercy of the Father. This is what a child does knowing that its parents will embrace it.   There is nothing that delights the Father more than to be able to hold us in his compassionate and tender embrace.

Therese of Lisieux, known as Therese of the Child Jesus, once said that when she died she wanted to come before God with empty hands.  Therese obviously came to the realisation that all is gift and grace and that therefore the only thing to do is to surrender and trust.  Surrender and trust come easy to children but not to adults.  For this reason adults may need to have experiences of failure and brokenness and disappointment and loss.  It is these experiences that surrender us and enable us to develop the heart of a child.  It would seem that the Father wants us to come home with empty hands.