Thursday, April 9, 2015

Surender Unto God

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD:
 
5 - SURRENDER UNTO GOD

“Surrender Unto God.”  Giving ourselves over to God, and God’s Will for us, is an oft-repeated call in the Jewish and Christian heritages.  It is a core tenet of Islam (“surrender unto God” being the literal translation of “Islam”).  A central concept of Buddhism is to extinguish our sense of being a “separate, independent self” and to instead devolve into “no-self” – an interconnected and interdependent being with all things in the Universe.  And the Taoists remind us that there is a larger life force (the Tao) that drives through all of Life and Nature.  Our job is to surrender to, and align ourselves with, the direction and pacing of this force.

Our Spiritual Self is attracted to the beauty of this idea, the giving over of our Self to the unifying Oneness of God and the Universal Reality.  The Human Self – especially in its Western orientation – recoils at this prospect.  We protest, “What about my individuality, my uniqueness, my separate Being?  What about living my own life as I choose?  Isn’t that what my Free Will is all about?”

All things start with Creation.  And all Creation comes with Purpose.  We see this truth every time we focus on any object, and see that object in its fullest meaning.  Every thing is formed, evolves and changes, and then expires.  Within that cycle, every thing has a function, a role to play, a point to accomplish, interconnected with other things.  The food chain; the workings of animal and human societies; the village that feeds, clothes, and raises a child.  This Purpose, these functions, are inherently in the very being of our existence.  Our Purpose from God from the act of our Creation.

It is to this Purpose of God that we are called to surrender.  It is not an option; we committed to it when we agreed to our birth.  Our ability to choose, our Free Will, is in the HOW through which we fulfill our Purpose, not the Whether.  God works at the Purpose and Outcomes level; we work at the detail, mechanics level.  Our Free Will is in how we realize (or not) our agreement with our Creation.  We have the human ability to go pretty far afield, to wander down paths that take us far away from Purpose.  Take us deeply into Self and into temporary gratifications and the pursuit of human success, forgetting the Spiritual Person that we also are.  Forgetting that our Free Will bumps up against the Free Will of others, all of whom also work within God’s Universal Truths.  And so when we finally discover that our human Victories won for our Self are in fact fleeting and hollow, and ultimately un-nourishing, then we finally turn to Surrender.  Surrender of Human Self to our greater Spiritual Self.  Surrender of our blinding ego to the clear vision of our Spirit.  Surrender of our lonely separated Self into the awaiting fullness and connection of all of Life.  In surrendering the small things of our ego, we realize the truer large victory of our Soul.

We surrender our singularity to the Universal plurality.  We surrender our fear into love.  We surrender our lost-ness to the compass of our Spirit.  Surrendering in this way does not diminish us, it expands us.  It does not lessen us, it fulfills us.  This is the true basis of the Free Will we have – to choose a life of fear and aloneness, or a life of confidence and connection.  We have the choice of going our own way in a false sense of our “independence.”  Or we can freely choose to assert our will to live connected with that greater whole that is God and the Universe.  To surrender into spiritual victory.

©  2015   Randy Bell                www.OurSpiritualWay.blogspot.com