Early on in my Spiritual Direction Formation program we had a contemplative circle on the theme of surrender. This was memorable for what it brought up for me. (A contemplative circle, by the way, is a group meditation and sharing, also known as group spiritual direction. This was an entirely new concept for me, and I always found it strikingly fruitful.)
I realized during this session that I had worked the concept of surrender so hard that it broke within me, and no longer served to connect me with grace, but instead triggered things that needed to be healed. Somehow it spoke to me of extreme effort, extreme cost, extreme tiredness, and some fear and wariness. I realized I wanted to surrender my experience of surrender. And now as I reflect on it, it seems that this was the turning of a doorknob -- or at least the grasping of it -- that opened the door to the room I spent two years exploring. And that room held how I had conflated spiritual growth with the psychological concept of self-abandonment. (Not, like, the good kind that St. Therese and Jean-Pierre de Caussade speak of, but self-abandonment as the term is used in modern mental health circles.)
And yesterday at Mass, the words finally clicked into simplicity for me. I surrender, not as one being held up at gunpoint, but as a manager of a property for an owner who has designs and a certain partnership in mind.
And this told me that my subconscious image of surrendering to God had been that God was a thug. An evil, selfish, uncaring, brutish thief. He clearly was more powerful that I am, and fighting Him was not only futile, but able to leave me worse off than simply collapsing, complying, and handing over that which I actually needed in order to survive, because His demand was more important than my life, and resisting was dangerous. So, surrendering to God -- this action so lauded by everyone around me whose spirituality and morality I respected -- meant agreeing with Thug Power against my own dignity.
And I feel the patient tears of Jesus as I write that out.
No. Lies woven into wounds. Not true. Surrender is not about giving in to threat.
The paradigm is completely different. The paradigm is that God has given me life, and made me a steward of His creation. He gives me this life to discover what it is made of, and to prosper it according to what I find there. And He remains greatly interested in partnering with me, not to micromanage my stewardship with criticism, but to prosper it and share in it. And unto that end, He does amazing things. And I come to learn that God's power is good, giving, caring, and generous -- and exponentially pro- my good. My authentic response, once I realize that, is gratitude, humility, and love -- and becoming good, giving, caring and generous, because that's what I have imprinted on.
I want to grieve that it has taken me this long to see the lies my broken soul has believed exposed. But even more, I want to soak deeply in the truth of the real paradigm.
May God restore all the years the locusts have devoured. Amen.
