Surrender

Surrender is a beautiful quality. It is like the footprint of an elephant because it includes all other good qualities. In the process of surrender we must accept things as they are, even as we also accept we don't really understand them.

We can do nothing with them by ourselves. We must accept that we are powerless to deal effectively with this issue or that person and mostly our ideas about who and what these really are.

Part of surrender is submission. We are giving everything to the Lord, little by little, submission by submission, until we reach a point where there is nothing else to submit but ourselves, whatever that is, to a God we  know we are incapable of understanding. As best we understand, we submit that, too. We submit to the mystery. 

This Surrender requires no system of belief, no faith, no dogma. An Atheist can surrender to that reality which is no thing defined by human words or concepts, no defined notion, beyond constraint.

Surrender happens. And when it happens, when every dogma of religion, atheism, politics, opinion is understood as merely shells of places amidst infinite places, then we surrender that too. Such thinking falls away naturally, like the husk of a seed. Can that even be called surrender if our only participation is to watch it happen? Maybe it is just letting go. But we are letting go now because, mysteriously, it has become easy. And it has become easy because now we are aware we are being loved.

Letting go, which we had thought impossible, now we realize we are being held in the embrace of a higher love. Can it even be called choice, or faith, when we have nothing left to choose, to believe in, because the reality of Christ is all that exists and all that ever existed? 

We are entirely capable of being loved. And being loved, we find we have the power to love. We can't honestly believe in nothing once we realize we are being loved. But any notion about that, limited to our human thinking, just gets in the way and we readily submit it. We have the power to submit, and in submission, surrender. We have the faith to surrender, in love. 

When you enter your password you must then press the button labeled "submit" for anything at all to take place. We are submitting all the time. If we trust the world so completely, so casually, every moment of the day, as a child depends upon her mother without thought, submission has already happened, and what we call submission is just conscious acceptance. But for surrender, you need two things: utter defeat and infinite, boundless love. These are all that ever were. 

If we were so bent on learning how to see beyond duality, to submit our limitations for an infinite understanding, an intimacy with Truth, through the surrender of our limitations, and this the result of  submission of all we hold and know, then how can we be anything but ecstatic when all this is gifted to us through the single event of  our complete defeat? Why fight that when it is the doorway to truth and true love? 

When we actually submit ourselves, or what we thought was ourselves, that is a very high place. It is a practice. We get better at it in time.

We exchange our wants and disappointments for His love. It is the bargain of all time. We are handing over empty airless, spaceless void in exchange for all that is, His Love. 

One cannot do that without being completely detached. But how can we become detached without acceptance and complete forgiveness? But even that is not always so. Sometimes the love makes it easy to let go. And sometimes being forced to let go we finally see the love. 

In the effort to be with Him we then become detached. By comparison, nothing else matters, nothing else holds value. The imaginary life we call this physical reality evaporates as a carcass in a desert while our true soul bathes in the presence of the sea of His Love.

Because we are submitting in faith and adoration to a higher power, our true Master,  Christ, He is now completely responsible for every breath we take, every thought. It happens in awe, in adoration, in worship. We learn through adoration and worship just what those really are. So that becomes our real and true attachment. It is only by attachment to Christ in us that we can become detached.

What we love washes us and creates us. Christ was loving us before we knew about love. We learned about it. We are still learning what love is, often in its apparent absence. But love is all around us. We become aware, the barrier melts away in surrender. Our territory has been conquered by His Love. Surrender was always our fate.

Adoration is the result of submission, or maybe the cause of it. Even time is no longer linear in that place.

So it doesn't always work in that order or any order. Sometimes Surrender happens out of love, and sometimes out of exhaustion. Perhaps more often the latter. But it is all love doing the work. Love, true love, is exhausting! And yet it gives us renewed spirit! And a new identity, our Beloved. How strange this all is. And all of it, surrender.