Letting Go, Surrender, Kenosis-Intro
Surrender is the awakening of the heart, for the one doesn’t happen without the other. Cynthia Bourgeault
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.
Find the rest of the post here.
Blessings, Gregg
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
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
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
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, from Catholic.org, 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
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
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
Modern Writings
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
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)
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 8/3/20
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
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
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.
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
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