Letting Go, Surrender, Kenosis

Gregg’s Reflection

For 50 years, I was achievement driven. I spent a decade in sales before moving into sales management, and then general management. I learned to organize to create results, and measured those results daily, weekly, monthly and annually. I had an accountability plan that listed outcomes, and met quarterly with my brother to review the results. This focus on goals and accountability to reach them helped my brother and me move off the plateau that characterized our father‘s last ten years and spark a new era of growth in the company. But, God was calling me in a different direction.

When I left the business world, I became untethered to the regimented, measured life I had led for 25 years. I started my second career of consulting, and that soon morphed into a focus on coaching and mentoring young pastors and professionals to reach their potential. My calling emerged, leading to my 25 year focus on equipping next generation leaders for the Kingdom.

I began to understand that I was called to invest myself in this work, but the true outcomes of a life well lived, integrating spiritual journey, career and family was something I could not measure. Nor was it mine to measure, because this was God’s work using my hands.

Now, I am well into the time of diminishment, as I reach 73 this October. No more climbing 14’ers, no more hiking to back country lakes to fish. I am learning to let go, and surrender to the passage of time, and the reality of diminishment.

Almost a decade ago, I began to wonder what it would look like to go deeper in my relationship with God. I moved from meditation to contemplation, and began reading and journaling wisdom from the saints and mystics. God even confronted me about my aspiration to be wise. “Who is wise,” I heard in one time of contemplation. And further, “What wisdom do you have that I did not give you.” Alright, forget that goal. Then, I hear another whisper from Spirit, “Will you trust me with the outcomes.” Wow, that was a tough one.

I came across the place in 1 Corinthians, where there was a dispute between followers of Paul and followers of Apollos. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but only God brings the fruit.” What does that say about outcomes in God’s Kingdom? I was convicted and began to turn from measuring outcomes.

The more I read, the more I understood that Jesus’ path was the descending way of surrender and letting go. Richard Rohr tells us, ”Grace, like water, finds the lowest place and there it pools.” So, come along on a counter-cultural journey, to find the path of surrender into grace-filled life with God.

Blessings, Gregg

Letting Go Surrender Kenosis

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Journaling Prompts

How tightly do you hold to outcomes? In what ways do you measure your worth by the outcomes you create? How does striving for these things bring you peace or joy? What might God be prompting you to let go of, and what does surrender look like to you?

Scripture

A life that recognizes and confesses vulnerability is a life of well-being and power through God. It is a life that sends people to God for wisdom and security. It has room for such seemingly weak and trusting acts as prayer and prophecy and involves releasing our tight grip on all our arrangements for power so that God may inaugurate hopeful newness.

Rebecca Gaudino, RENOVARE Bible notes on 2 Kings

Trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6

A time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away.

Ecclesiastes 3:6

Lord I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.

Jeremiah 10:23

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Galatians 2:20

I, Paul planted, Apollos watered, but only God brings the fruit.

1 Corinthians 3:6

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:6-8

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s might hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he care for you.

1 Peter 5:6-7

Ancient Writings

“Emptying: The True Spirit of Poverty” by Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard declares that hard-heartedness is the worst sin since it shows no mercy.  Neither does it think that charity is necessary nor does it do any good works.  Hard-heartedness was strong in tyrants, yet no one is able to be satisfied by abundance, you are only bored by it. Does this have something to do with billionaires in our time rushing to buy and sell trips for other billionaires and millionaires into space?

Hildegard pictures hard-hearted ones saying: Why should I do any work [for others]? Why should I wear myself out? Nothing excites me except what benefits me directly. If I am always busy being compassionate, what good will it do me? What kind of life will I have if I pay attention to all the happy and sad people? I will take care of myself. Let others take care of themselves. Hildegard tells us that ...this sin hardens people so much that they do not wish to know the image of God nor recognize it in other people because without kindness they lack any kind of mercy and goodness.

Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox, 7/28/21 

Holy Surrender transcends all ordinary and selfish desires. It quells our lower nature and makes us answer to the spirit and serve each other. This level of submission subject to us and to everyone on earth, and not only human beings, but to all the creatures as well and to the wild animals. So that they can do what they like with us, as far as God allows them.

St. Francis of Assisi, Mirabai Starr, St. Francis of Assisi, Brother of Creation, p. 57

Only the supremely brave ever admit how helpless they are in the hands of God! As for the others, building and decorating their sandcastles. Look how one wild wave shatters them all.

Rumi

God asks only that you get out of God’s way and let God be God in you.

Meister Eckhart, sermon on 1 John 4:9   

It is only as the human creature yields up its assertive will and allows God to be his divine self in undeserved love to the human soul that God can be known.

Martin Luther, Lutheran Spirituality, Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, p. 253

Whenever I have surrendered to obedience, impossible things have become simple.

St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans Mirabai Starr p. 29

We must strip ourselves naked and cultivate detachment from things of the world. Abandon yourselves only under the condition that you harbor no illusions about the beloved being under some obligation to repay you for your sacrifice with divine favors.

St.Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans Mirabai Starr, p. 73

Our safety lies in steadfast surrender to the will of God.

St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans Mirabai Starr, p. 137

Modern Writings

Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude…He finds few hearts who surrender to him without reservation, who understand the real tenderness of his Infinite Love.

St.Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 188-189

Self-emptying has many strata and many dimensions. Its final goal is a holy indifference. When you come face to face with death, your whole life changes in a few minutes. All our plans and projects perish before our eyes. There is a point where the pilgrim has become so empty that he is simply one who carries God. If ever we can come to dimly understand this mystery of God becoming a fetus, a child, a youth, a man, we will begin to understand God’s love for us.

Then, we begin to understand the emptiness which must take place in us, the depth of surrender of our will to God’s. This offering, if and when it comes, must come out of our own freedom. You allow yourself to be weaned from the desire for admiration, adulation, and so on. “If there is anything good in this work, in my person, it is of God. The rest is mine.” This emptiness results in the ability to listen. One will also know when one must speak. And what one says will not so much be our words as the words of Christ.

With the surrender of my words to his Word comes the gift of discernment, the gifts of knowing what to say to each person. A clarity enters into me which enables me to see the heart of the other and the gift of discernment will make our words a ray of light to someone else. So, what we really mean is you allow your intellect and will to be washed by God. By kenosis, they are washed by Christ, through the Spirit’s gift of discernment and wisdom. Now we are able to discern the will of God. Our senses are acute, attuned, because we are listening to God. We make wise decisions because of our discernment.

Because we have surrendered our minds and will to God, they are given back to us; we receive back our own gifts. Kenosis cannot happen without our cooperation. There are moments we wish God hadn’t given us freedom so we wouldn’t have to choose. This surrender, this emptying, must come as a result of our cooperation. The going will be rough, but the joy will be ineffable.

Catherine Dougherty, Poustinia, Encountering God in Silence, Solitude and Prayer, p. 111-121

The most difficult and most necessary of renunciations: to give up resentment.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 108

Only when we are able to let go of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste, and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionizes our entire life.

Thomas Merton,  Contemplative Prayer, p. 89

Progress in the spiritual journey is marked by unconditional acceptance of other people, beginning with those with whom we live.

Thomas Keating, Open Hearts Open Minds, p. 161

Surrender to the unknown marks the great transitions of the spiritual journey. On the brink of each breakthrough there is a crisis of trust and love.

Thomas Keating

Only by dying to ourselves do we encounter our true identity, because our true identity is not in our ego but in the All. We are centered in God as all other things and beings our ego is a solitary place, and he who rejects suffering and defies death and refuses to give himself, but wants to retain hisself, shuts himself out of that unity of all things which is God.

Ernesto Cardenal, To Live is to Love, p. 92

Father, I abandon myself into your hands, do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you; I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.

Charles de Foucauld, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 8/3/20

Willingness implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering-into, an immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is a setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to , direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence.

Gerald May, Will and Spirit, p. 6.

Winnowing God, 
you ask us to release, let go, 
surrender, and yield all that we can
in service of making space for what is most essential. 
The more we set aside 
that which burdens us and takes up too much space
the more room opens within us 
for wonder and gratitude to flourish,
the more we find the freedom 
to see the world as enchanted. 
Sustain us on the path of simplifying our lives
and traveling on this Earth more lightly
so that we no longer live beyond what can be sustained.
As we continue on the pilgrim’s path, 
unencumbered by so many things, 
may you open our hearts 
to delight in the simple beauty of the world.

Christine Valters Paintner, Abbey of the Arts newsletter, 5/11/24

All great spirituality is somehow about letting go. They are two paths that really transform us and make it possible for us to let go: the path of great love and the path of great suffering. Love that does not let go is not really love. Suffering moves us to turn loose out of sheer desperation. They are their own teachers, and they instruct us in their own time and in their own way. All we can do is try to be ready to fall, because both love and suffering feel like falling.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 246

Surrendering opens you up in a peaceful way that allows the conduit of “living water” to flow freely through you (John 7:38-39). Surrender is a willingness to trust that you are indeed a beloved son, which allows God to prove to you that he is indeed your loving father.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 366

Surrender is about a peaceful inner opening that keeps the conduit of living water flowing to love. But do know this: every time we surrender to love, we have also just chosen to die. Every time we let love orient us, we are letting go of ourselves as an autonomous unit and have given a bit of ourselves away to something or someone else.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 4/9/20

Each time we surrender, each time we trust the dying, we are led to a deeper level. We are grounded for a while, like an electric wire, so there is less resistance and more available energy to trust it the next time. Yet it is still invariably a leap of faith, a walk through some degree of darkness.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 4/12/20

Authentic spirituality is always on some level or in some way about letting go. Jesus said, “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Once we truly see what traps us and keeps us from freedom, we should see the need to let it go. As Meister Eckhart said, “the spiritual life is more about subtraction than it is addition.”

The freedom Jesus promises involves letting go of our small self, our cultural biases, and even our fear of loss and death. Freedom is letting go of wanting more and better things; it is letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It is even letting go of our need to know and our need to be right which we only discover with maturity.

We become ever more free as we let go of our three primary motivations: our need for power and control, our need for safety and security, and our need for affection and esteem. Authentic spirituality is about finding true freedom. It offers us freedom from our smaller selves as a reference point for everything or anything.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 6/14/20

The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart invites the soul to listen at a deeper level, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place. Most of us would never go to new places in any other way.

We will normally do anything to keep the old thing from falling apart, yet this is when we need patience and guidance, and the freedom to let go instead of tightening our controls and certitudes. While change can force a transformation, spiritual transformation always includes a disconcerting reorientation. It can either help people to find new meaning or it can force people to close down and slowly turn bitter.

The difference is determined precisely by the quality of our inner life, our practices, and our spirituality. Change happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, living in the confusing, shadowy space for a while.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 7/5/20

The act of love is the surrender of self into life as it is. This is a love larger than our word “love” can contain or express. It embraces all of life and does not judge: tragedy and war, suffering and joy, creativity and destruction. Beauty. Death. The Other. Within this embrace of life as it is, lies acceptance, forgiveness, healing.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 8/8/20

We need forms of prayer that free us from fixating on our own conscious thoughts and feelings and from identifying with them, as if we are our thinking. Who are we before we have our thoughts and feelings? That is our naked being. We have to learn to be spiritually empty. If we are filled with ourselves, there is no room for another, and certainly not for God.

We need contemplative prayer, in which we simply let go of our constantly changing ego needs, so Something Eternal can take over. This may sound simple, but it’s not easy! Because we’ve lost the art of detachment, we’ve become almost fully identified with our stream of consciousness and our feelings. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying we should repress or deny our feelings. I’m challenging us to name them and observe them, but not to directly fight them, identify with them, or attach to them.

Unless we learn to let go of our feelings, we don’t have our feelings; our feelings have us. This seems to be saying prayer is about getting myself out of the way. That is exactly what I am saying. As John the Baptist put it, “I must grow smaller so he can grow greater” (John 3:30). God is already present. God’s Spirit is dwelling within us. We cannot search for what we already have. We cannot talk God into coming “to” us by longer and more urgent prayers.

All we can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with our own self and our constant flurry of ideas and feelings. Then God will be obvious in the very now of things, and in the simplicity of things. To sum it all up, we can never get there, we can only be there.

Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations, p. 230-231

To any of us comfortable people, detachment sounds like losing, but it is actually about accessing a deeper, broader sense of the self, which is already whole, already content, already filled with abundant life. This is the part of us that has always loved God and has always said “yes” to God. It’s the part of us that is Love, and all we have to do is let go and fall into it. It’s already there. Once we move our identity to that level of deep inner contentment and compassion, we realize that we’re drawing upon a Life that is larger than our own and from a deeper Abundance. Once we learn to do that, why would we ever again settle for some scarcity model for life?

Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of St. Francis. Available as CD. 

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died! At some point, they were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They went through a death of their various false selves and came out on the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them.

Today, many people don’t learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. This lack of preparation for the “pass over,” the absence of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, have contributed to our culture’s spiritual crisis. (1)

True spirituality echoes the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security.

Each time I learn to let go of what I thought was necessary for my own happiness, I invariably find myself in a larger place, a larger space, a deeper union, a greater joy. Now, in the last season of my life, I realize that what’s in front of me is still largely darkness but it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s because letting go has taught me that I can look back, not forward, back at the past of my life and I can truthfully say, “What have I ever lost by dying? What have I ever lost by losing?” I have fallen upward again and again. By falling I have found. By letting go I have discovered, and I find myself in these later years of my life still surprised that that is true. [2] 

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger, p. 199. [2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis 

Letting go is different than denying or repressing. To let go of something is to admit it. You have to own it. Letting go means that the denied, repressed, rejected parts of yourself, which are nonetheless true, are seen for what they are.

This is not denial or pretense, but actual transformation. The religious word for this letting go is some form of forgiveness. You see the imperfect moment for what it is and you hand it over to God. This is a very different way of living; it implies that you see your mistakes, your shadow side, but you do not identify with either your superiority or your inferiority. Both are equally a problem. Forgiveness is of one piece. Those who give it can also receive it. Those who receive forgiveness can pass it on. You are a conduit and your only job is not to stop the flow. The art of letting go is really the secret of happiness and freedom.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 253

Do you realize how difficult it is for most men to surrender ourselves? All the great world religions teach surrender, yet most men don’t think surrender is really necessary, until they experience a major hole in the soul-something they cannot fix, change or control. We may have the power to fix the obvious problems, but we cannot understand, fix change, or control the world inside us. These matters teach us the importance of surrender. These are the holes in our soul whereby we break out, and God breaks through.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 98

Human strength admires holding on. Human weakness is about letting go into the Other, handing over the self to another, and receiving yourself from another. Human strength admires personal independence, but God’s Mystery is total mutual interdependence. We like control more than surrender. God likes vulnerability.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 94.

We say, “God helps those who help themselves.” In most spiritual situations, it is not completely true. In Scripture we see that God helps those who trust in God, not those who help themselves.

As Americans, as middle-class people who have practiced climbing, we are accustomed to doing things ourselves. It takes applying the brakes, letting go of our own plans, allowing Another, and experiencing power from a larger source to really move to higher awareness. Otherwise, there is no real transformation, only increased willpower. Willfulness is not the same as willingness. They are two different energies, and yield very different fruit.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 305

Surrendering to the divine Flow is not about giving up, giving in, capitulating, becoming a puppet, being naive, being irresponsible, or stopping all planning and thinking. Surrender is about a peaceful inner opening that keeps the conduit of living water flowing. It is a quiet willingness to trust that you really are a beloved son or a beloved daughter, which allows God to be your Father and Mother. It really is that simple, which for the human ego is very hard.

Richard Rohr

We must not be afraid of falling, failing, or going down, because it is there we find grace. Like water, Grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools.

Richard Rohr

Let me talk about letting go. That is what Lent is about. What is keeping you from realizing deeper communion with God and others. What do you need to let go? Our culture’s worldview is accumulating, hoarding, holding on. We have to unlearn that to take up the cross: the freedom to say no to the false self, the self that is getting in the way, the self that takes offense. Love takes no offense (! Cor). The false self is offended every half hour. So let’s ask for the grace this Ash Wednesday to let go of what we need to let go of. We need to pray until we get to the yes. Yes to the reality presenting, even the dark side. To live that way requires constant attention.

Richard Rohr, Lenten Devotion, From Living School Intensive, 2/21

Mind of Renunciation: wanting to be free

Mind of Compassion: wanting that for others

Kathleen Singh, Grace in Aging, p. 212

Seven acts of submission:

Submission to the Triune God. We wait, yielded and still at the beginning of the day before Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “As you will, what you will, when you will it.” Thomas a Kempis

Submission to scripture. As we submit to the Word (Jesus), so we submit to Scripture. We yield ourselves first to hear the Word, second to receive the Word, and third to obey the Word. We look to the Spirit to interpret and apply. 

Submission to our Family. Freely and graciously we make allowances for each other. 

Submission to our Neighbors and those we meet in daily life. The life of simple goodness is lived before them. If they are in need we help. 

Submission to the Believing Community. There are jobs to be done and tasks to be accomplished. We look at them closely to see if God calls to us to engage. 

Submission to the Broken and Oppressed. In every culture there are widows and orphans, the helpless, the undefended. Our first responsibility is to be among them. 

Submission to the World. We live in an interdependent, international community. Our environmental responsibility affects not only people around the world but generations to come. 

When People begin to move into the spiritual realm, they  see that Jesus is teaching a concept of authority that runs completely counter to the thinking of this world. They come to see that authority does not reside in positions or degrees or titles or any outward symbol. The way of Christ is another direction all together-the way of spiritual authority.

Spiritual authority is God ordained and God sustained. The person with spiritual authority may have an outward position of authority or may not; again, it makes no difference. Spiritual authority is marked by both compassion and power. But, what about people who rent positions of authority but do not possess spiritual authority? Revolutionary subordination commands us to live in submission to human authority until it becomes destructive.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p. 122-124

Sometimes all we want is to get out of our own way and become a conduit for love. Francis of Assisi teaches us to become nobody, so that the Holy One may radiate through us. He is a timeless example that our true power lies not in building up a separate self but in opening to our essential interconnectedness with all beings. Be a hollow reed through which the song of the Divine may flow.

Mirabai Starr, St. Francis of Assisi, Brother of Creation, p. 45

“Wholeness is born out of the acceptance of the conflict of human and divine in the individual psyche”, writes Helen Luke in a passage I have been much taken with. But this acceptance and hence the emergence of the elusive "Real I" is in fact a breaking forth into a new dimensionality of myself through my yielding. This makes the practice of surrender not at all a dreary exercise in acquiescence, but a bold participation in God's ongoing creativity in love. Only in resignation do I become truly fertile unto myself, the good ground of transforming love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, Gnosis Magazine, Fall 1997

As we practice in daily life, in our acts of compassion, kindness, and self emptying, both at the level of are doing an even more at the level of our being, something is catalyzed out of that self emptying which is pure divine substance mirrored in our own true face. Subtle qualities of divine love essential to the well-being of this planet are released through right actions and flow out into the world as miracle, healing, and hope.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Jesus, p. 73

Fascinating confirmation that kenosis is indeed an evolutionary human pathway is emerging from of all places recent discoveries in neuroscience. From MRI data collected primarily by the California-based HeartMath Institute, you can now verify chapter and verse that how you respond to a stimulus in the outer world determines which neural pathways will be activated in your brain, and between your brain and your heart.

If you respond with any form of initial negativity (which translates physiologically as constriction) freezing, bracing, clinging, clenching, and so on the pathway illumined leads to your amygdala (or “reptilian brain,” as it’s familiarly known) . . . which controls a repertory of highly energized fight-or-flight responses.

If you can relax into a stimulus opening, softening, yielding, releasing the neural pathway leads through the more evolutionarily advanced parts of your forebrain and, surprisingly, brings brain and heart rhythms into entrainment. . . .Every time we manage to let go of a thought in Centering Prayer, “consenting to the presence and action of God within,” the gesture is actually physically embodied. It’s not just an attitude; something actually “drops and releases” in the solar plexus region of your body, a subtle but distinct form of interior relaxation. . . .

And in time, this gentle and persistent “inner aerobics,” undertaken under the specific banner of Centering Prayer and in solidarity with Jesus’s own kenotic path, will gradually establish that “mind of Christ” within you as your own authentic self.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, p. 33-36.

Surrender is the awakening of the heart, for the one doesn’t happen without the other.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 111

A life of continuous surrender brings about a profound transformation in the psyche: a deepening and gentling of the human being.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 166

Letting Go of Power

Jesus modeled the path of kenosis. Taken from the Greek word in Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:5), it means to “let go” or “to empty oneself.” Jesus’s life on earth was a purely kenotic, downwardly mobile path. . . .

Jesus could have been a prince on a throne, holding power, riches, and every kind of privilege. Instead, he denied it. He let it go. . . . He consciously chose a path that assured suffering, humiliation, desolation, and finally death on a cross. In response, God lifted him up and gave him glory. None of this was an accident or coincidence.

Jesus entered as he did, where he did, doing what he did, because God needed us to finally comprehend the truth: God is the love that gives itself away for the sake of more love. Jesus could only communicate that point by standing outside the power structures and inviting disciples to join him and discover new life with him on the margins. . . .

In Jesus, God shows us what it looks like to be this vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he could gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, so he and others might flourish as God intends. . . .

God invites us into a covenant, where by the power of the Spirit we can choose to allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces our lives, our goods, our love, and our privileges and share it all like a broken loaf of communion bread.

Granted, this is a very non-American way of being. So much of our American story consists of groups of people protecting themselves and what’s theirs, with a gun or a flag or the cloak of racial, class, or gender privilege. Jesus’s story is exactly the opposite.

In this moment, as we reckon with the limits and consequences of self-centrism, domination systems, and the church’s capitulation to empire, we could lean into the Jesus way. We could reclaim kenosis, or perhaps claim it for the first time. . . . When you take something you possess, your bread and power, your abilities and identities, your comfort and control, your treasured structures and even life itself and release your attachment to it and make it useful to God’s movement, you are practicing kenosis.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind, A New Perspective on Christ and His Message p. 70.

Yearning for complete union with God, desert ascetics sought to remove all obstacles to the deepening of this relationship. Obstacles included unhelpful attitudes and motives, thoughts that stalled their pursuit of God, and emotional ties that complicated their inner journeys.

Concern for reputation was discarded. Feelings were acknowledged and listened to for their wisdom but were subjected to the discipline of the heart’s goal to seek God. The desert ascetics sought to discipline disordered passions that distracted them from their deepening relationship with God and actively to cultivate a burning love for God. 

All that owned them, all that possessed their minds and hearts, their attachments and compulsions, must be healed and reconciled. Desert ascetics called this process of moving toward inner freedom detachment. Detachment allows for greater direct experience of the Divine Presence as the seeker is attached to fewer distractions. 

Desert ascetics understood that the cultivation of inner freedom was vital to the deepening of their experience of God. As they deepened their interior freedom, all aspects of their false self were removed and a clearer understanding of their truest self emerged. It is this true self that dwells deeply with God. In the abundant simplicity of our true self, we experience deepest joy.

Apatheia is a mature mindfulness, a grounded sensitivity, and a keen attention to one’s inner world as well as to the world in which one has journeyed. Strong emotions such as anger, fear, or anxiety did not dominate or control the ascetic’s inner world they were disciplined to serve the inner journey rather than disrupt it. 

Apatheia is purity of heart. The ammas teach us to intentionally let go of all that keeps us from the single-minded pursuit of God: feelings and thoughts that bind us, cravings and addictions that diminish our sense of worth, and attachments to self-imposed perfectionism. Apatheia is nourished by simplicity grounded in abundance of the soul. This simplicity is in balance and harmony with the human community and the created world.

Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, p. 21-22, 25.

Surrender is the strongest, most subversive thing you can do in this world. It takes strength to admit you are weak, bravery to show you are vulnerable, courage to ask for help. It’s also not a one-time gig; you don’t just do it once and move on. It’s a way of existing, a balancing act. Life no longer feels precarious, or about to crumble even when it is, in fact, crumbling.

By surrendering to whatever is unfolding and by accepting what is, by giving up on the outcome and allowing life to flow the way it’s meant to, by stepping out of your own way and letting the natural order take the lead, you not only get a break from the exhaustion of having to control everything, but you also get to experience life, instead of what you think life owes you. (Hint: What life wants to give us is infinitely better than what we think it owes us.)

Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, p. 158-160.

We empty ourselves to let the divine flood us with love. We are empty so we may be full. Defined as the releasing of selfishness and ego attachments, loss of self is a central characteristic of spiritual life. Let us for now refer to emptying of the self in a twofold sense: as a breaking down of our cherished self-identities, wants, demands, and ego struggles; and as an openness of being, where all the doors and windows of the soul are thrown back to allow in the splendor of life.

True emptiness is an ongoing receptivity to the wonder of life. Intimacy with the Divine offers a new quality of heart. Contemplative experience moves us from the intellectual idea of openness that we glimpse in fragments and in starts, to the meditative exercise of openness, and then to the orientation of our whole being toward surrender and receptivity.

Beverly Lanzetta, The Monk Within: Embracing a Sacred Way of Life, p. 149, 151.

Surrender is always “being actively receptive to an intelligence that is greater than that of ourselves.”

Kabir Helminski, Living Presence, p. 111

When the heart sighs and begins its surrender to suffering, hell dissolves before our eyes.

Stephen Levine, Who Dies, p. 68

Fritz quotes Candice Carpenter’s book Chapters, talking about the profound cycles of change a life can take. 

The first stage she calls The Gig is Up. You know that what you have been doing is over. When you try and hold on, change will be thrust upon you with greater and greater force until you let go. The more you try to hold on, the more the intensity of the tornado that is pulling you out of the present unworkable situation

The next stage is Falling: disengaged, disidentified and disenchanted, we fall into disorientation.

Then comes A Walk in the Desert in which you reflect on the most existential issues of your life.

Next comes Stirrings: all the threads of your past ultimately will be woven together as you become an accomplished creator.

This stage is followed by A Stake in the Ground: you begin to focus and then commit yourself to your new way of life.

Change is often a death followed by ressurrection. To create something new, something old must end. Die to it well, my friend. Fritz describes three factors in creating: Mechanics of the creative process, your orientation as a creator, and the guiding spirit that sparks the direction you take. Through the creative process, your true spirit and essence is expressed throughout your life. When you are in touch with this spirit, you are transformed in many ways. 

Notes from Your Life as Art by Robert Fritz