Surrender

Henri Nouwen wrote:

We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say, "Whatever I do in my private life is nobody else's business." But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.

For me, this is at the heart of all I seem to be being called to do. My prayer is absolutely inextricably linked with the community in which I live, local and global; the fact that the prayer God has called me to is contemplative in nature only intensifies this identification. In this sense, the contemplative life couldn't be farther from a programme of self-improvement, or a shortcut to a blissed-out life. This identification is in fact frequently extraordinarily painful, for me at any rate, since it is before anything else an identification with the broken-hearted, the oppressed, the prisoners, and all those kinds of people Jesus realised he was being sent to, when he was passed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, in Luke 4.

Thinking about the surrender implicit in all I wrote yesterday about faithfulness, and on which Jan picked up in her comment, I've come to realise that much of my problem over the years has been that God asks one to surrender to him, not to any particular action he might take, or direction he might wish me to take. Once surrendered, God knows what might happen!

Julian of Norwich has this to say (I'm using Sheila Upjohn's translation, Chapter 68):

...these words "you shall not be overcome" were said clearly and strongly to make us certain, and to give us comfort against all troubles that may come. [Jesus] did not say:

"You shall not be tempest-tossed
you shall not be work-weary
you shall not be discomforted."

But he said: "You shall not be overcome."

In her blog Consecrated to Mary, Gabrielle quotes these words attributed to our Lady: "...the world shall succumb to dark times of great tribulations. I plead to you all to become intertwined with my Immaculate Heart so I may protect and guide you through such bleakness."

St. Paul wrote: "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." (1 Corinthians 10.13)

The last five years especially, and the ten years preceding them too, only in a more diffuse way, have been God's "severe mercy" (to appropriate Sheldon Vanauken's phrase) in teaching me that not only must my surrender be to him, unconditionally, but that ultimately, he is all I have to rely on. We cannot expect to be preserved from bleakness, kept from being tempest-tossed and acutely discomforted, if we are to follow our Saviour, for he faced all these things, and yet was obedient, surrendered, even to the point of death (Philippians 2.8). Ultimately, he was not overcome, but his overcoming was only by way of the Cross, and it is only by the way of the Cross that it is possible for us not to be overcome. In Revelation 12.11 we read, "...they have conquered [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death."

The way of following Jesus is not the way of success and acclaim, of wealth or security; it is the way of the Cross, and will take us, ultimately, like our Lord, through the gate of death. On the far side of that gate, though, we shall find eternal life, since he has gone that way before us.

This imitatio Christi bit is quite hard to cope with. I don't want to write all this stuff, actually. But if I am even remotely honest in thinking it through, this is where it gets me. I can't claim to be even remotely comfortable with it, humanly speaking, and I'm most certainly not preaching it to anyone else, and yet for me it is impossible to escape.