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April 25, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 8Oakland,
CA
COMMENTARY:
Letting Go and Letting God: The Prayer of Surrender
Letting Go and Letting God: The Prayer of Surrender
By Julie McCarty
Ever resist doing something you know is good? It’s
time for your annual physical but you manage to put off making the appointment.
Someone in your neighborhood is going through a crisis, but you avoid
her because you claim you “just don’t know what to say.”
Perhaps you’ve been meaning to set aside time each day to pray,
but never seem to get around to it.
It is part of the human condition to want things our own way all the time.
Among the first words children speak are an emphatic “No!”
when asked to do something good for them and “Mine!” when
asked to hand over something. A big part of early childhood is about learning
to cooperate and to share.
As conscientious Christian adults who work hard, care for our families,
go to church, and maybe even volunteer in our communities, it is tempting
to think we have somehow “arrived.” But the Holy Spirit, who
dwells within us, gently nudges us to ever greater cooperation with God.
Traditional spiritual teachers spoke of “abandonment to the will
of God.” Bit by bit, we “let go and let God,” so that
the Spirit can transform our self-centeredness to God-centeredness.
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta called this process “surrender
to God.” Not only do we turn away from sin, we gradually let go
of our unhealthy attachments and let down our defenses, allowing God to
completely lead us.
“Total surrender,” teaches Mother Teresa, “consists
in giving ourselves completely to God.
Why must we give ourselves fully to God? Because God has given himself
to us. If God, who owes nothing to us, is ready to impart to us no less
than himself, shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves? To give
ourselves fully to God is a means of receiving God himself.”
St. Jane de Chantal (1572-1641), wife, mother, and founder of the Visitation
Sisters, recognized the lifelong struggle involved in dying to self so
we can rise anew, completely filled with Christ:
“We should indeed like to lose ourselves, but we should also like
it to cost us next to nothing. We tell Our Lord that we abandon ourselves
to His divine arms; but we do not do it thoroughly. We still want to keep
some little care of ourselves, not so much in temporal things as in spiritual.
“Self-love is always persuading us with its subtle ingenuity that
if we do not give in to it somewhat, things will not go well.”
But, never lose heart, St. Jane counsels.
Persevere; tell God often you trust him. We should cast ourselves again
and again, she says, “into God like a drop of water into the sea,
and lose ourselves well in that ocean of divine goodness. . . ”
Brother Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), a hermit priest whose spirituality
gave rise to the founding of the Little Brothers (and Sisters) of Jesus,
found inspiration in the prayer that Jesus uttered with his last breath:
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” The fruit of
Brother Charles’ meditation was this prayer of abandonment:
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.
As we pray this way, we gradually lose our self-centeredness and discover
our true selves as children of God. Clearing away our grasping, egotistic
ways, we make space within our hearts for God to dwell more fully.
This is the personal mystery of dying to self and rising anew in Christ.
This is what Jesus meant when he said that those who want to be his disciples
must “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their
life for my sake will find it.”
(Julie McCarty, M.A.T., is a freelance writer from Eagan, Minn.,
whose syndicated column on prayer appears in diocesan newspapers around
the country. Contact her at soulwriting@yahoo.com.)
NBC ‘Revelations’ miniseries
is ‘religious-tinged hokum
By Eugene Cullen Kennedy
Religion News Service
NBC-TV has combined two sure-fire concepts in popular
culture — the miniseries and the end of the world — in a drama
entitled “Revelations” from the Bible book of Revelation.
We are told that it is “about a nun and a scientist’s search
for signs that Armageddon is at hand.”
The ads for this show even use a Latin phrase—Finis omnium imminet,
roughly translated as “the end of everything is at hand”—to
add a touch of solemnity to a drama that is further described as a “breakthrough
faith-based thriller.”
You can’t make this stuff up except that somebody did make this
stuff up. This kind of religious-tinged hokum suggests that, artistically
speaking, the miniseries as a form is the end of the world.
Poet Robert Frost once famously posed the question—How will the
world end, in fire or ice? — that still fascinates Americans who
relish apocalyptic judgment in everything from the wildly popular Left
Behind books to the scenarios—take your pick—of being found
out and fried or frozen as a wrathful God lowers the curtain of the long
running Earthbound Follies.
The end of the world is, of course, too important a subject to be treated
in such a superficial manner. The spiritual meaning of this Scriptural
metaphor is not intended to set off our fears about losing everything
but to awaken our wonder at all that we possess.
Despite high-level prophecies and low-grade entertainments, the end of
the world is not even a future event. In fact, the world comes to an end
for all of us every day in one way or another.
The world comes to an end whenever we see past its surfaces into its true
depth. We read of seers and of those who claim to have visions and messages
from another world. But seers are simply those who are able to see and
visions are simply what they see in this world spread out about them.
These are not experiences reserved for the supposedly saintly who preach
“Flee, the end is near.” They are commonplace experiences
for ordinary people who are not preoccupied with the last things but with
the next things. They don’t look at life as a farewell appearance
as much as a new creation that they want to hand on to their children
and grandchildren.
The world came to an end on that hazy July night in 1969 when men first
landed on the moon and we, in their company thanks to television, were
able to see earthrise for the first time.
An old world came to an end as we could see for ourselves that the Earth
is not separate from but is in the heavens. Seeing the unity in the universe
we rediscovered the unity of human personality.
What ended that night was an outdated world in which all creation—Earth
and heaven, body and soul—was divided and humans became whole again.
The old world comes to an end whenever we look into the eyes of the very
old who have seen so much of love and loss or into the eyes of the very
young who set out not knowing how much they will taste of both of these
as they take their first steps into the profound mystery of life itself.
The old world ends whenever people fall in love. While it is said that
love is blind, it actually allows us to see more of each other, transforming
us and our sense of time and place.
An old world ends when a great pope dies and a whole configuration of
power, influence and purpose dissolves to make way for another.
The mystical poet William Blake urges us to cleanse the doors of perception
and see the world as it is — infinite. We are not standing at Armageddon
but at the entrance to the mystery of our existence. The “breakthrough
faith-based” Revelations can’t teach ordinary people anything
about the end of the world. They experience it with love rather than terror
every day.
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola
University in Chicago.)
