Surrender
Here’s a big question: Are we in control of our lives, or is God? I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of completely surrendering to faith. You know, “Let go and let God.” I feel too much of a sense of responsibility for my destiny. I’ve also always believed surrender is more of a Christian idea than a Jewish one. But part of being on a journey is being willing and open to learn. And what I have found is that I am deeply moved by the prospect of God being present and at work even when we are not aware of it.
Opening up to God is less of a struggle for Pastor Ginger Gaines-Cirelli than it is for many of us. After all, she does it every Sunday, spreading her arms wide as she stands before her congregation in her robe. She has a wonderful phrase for this: standing in the flow of grace.
“We choose whether to put ourselves in places and spaces of grace,” Pastor Ginger told me as we sat together in her visiting room at Foundry one autumn day, with the last of the afternoon light slanting in through the windows. “We choose whether to serve, whether to pray. And when we do, we are opening ourselves to God’s love. We try to be so full of God’s love that we overflow, and it spills back out into the world.”
But it has not always been that way, even for Pastor Ginger.
In many ways, it seemed she was born for a religious path. Ginger’s grandmother in Arkansas would tell her that she was “tuned in to the mystical realm.” After college, she got in to Yale Divinity School on a full scholarship. But her spiritual life was actually a mess. She was seriously depressed. Although Ginger had spent her life trying to please others, now that everyone was telling her that she should be ordained, she resisted it. She’d realized that the world was tough and ugly, and she did not want to have to try to make it a better place.
“I know why we use the phrase ‘fall apart,’ because there was a moment when I was sitting in my apartment in New Haven and I saw all these pieces of myself. It was like I was just shattered,” she said. Ginger found herself literally screaming at God. “ ‘I just want You to go away and leave me alone,’ I told Him. ‘Let me crawl in my hole and live this little cynical, protected life, where I don’t have to be compassionate and I don’t have to care. I don’t want to hope anymore.’ ”
But God wouldn’t leave her. Some weeks later, she had a dream in which Jesus appeared to her as she lay at the bottom of a pool of water. His body was “shredded,” she said, and his hands were torn up. He picked her up and they walked out of the water together.
“I was coming back to life,” Ginger said. “And when Jesus came and found me, he was showing me the broken places. That’s what he offered to me. And it was like: Take it or leave it.”
“That life is not without discomfort,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “Vulnerability. Brokenness. This is what the world does. It’s part of the deal. So you can either live in that world, or you can die, whether you stay alive or not. And that was the closest thing I’ve had to a conversion as somebody who has been on the journey my whole life.”
Ginger was already a person of deep faith, but she’d fallen apart. Thanks to a combination of “Jesus and pharmaceuticals,” as she puts it, Pastor Ginger got through that low point. Even though the world is hard, it is also great and full of love. She resolved to live her life trying to stand in the flow of grace. She recited lines by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz:
I am a hole in a flute
that the Christ’s breath moves through
“I try to make myself a hole in the flute,” Pastor Ginger said.
• • •
The classic theological question of whether we are in control of our life or whether God is guiding us brought me to Cardinal Tim Dolan. When I met him at the Archdiocese of New York that fall day, he told me that faith cannot just be a project. It has to be an act of surrender. A leap.
“You’re in the process of making the decision: Is this experience going to go from head to heart? Is it going to go from blood to soul?” Cardinal Dolan said. “If you stop at a gut feeling, then your journey is going to be superficial. So you want it to go to the brain. But if it’s just cerebral, it’s not going to be enough, either. You want it to go to the heart and the soul, where you can absorb it. But that’s not a journey that everybody completes. I place myself in that company, too.”
“Is it a choice for me to make?” I asked. “Or, if my heart is open, will it just happen?”
He told me that Christians believe that Jesus said to them, “Friends, you haven’t chosen me, I have chosen you.” He pointed out that this is what God told the people of Israel, too: “I have chosen you.” But, he added, “This is where there is a paradox. It’s also for us to choose. Ultimately, in the Jewish and Christian disposition, it’s always God’s initiative. But most people will not allow themselves to be chosen and claimed by Him.”
Cardinal Dolan mentioned a painting based on a verse from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”
The image in the painting is of Jesus knocking at the door of a bungalow. If you look at the image closely, the door has no outside handle. Cardinal Dolan interprets it to mean that Jesus is always knocking at the door to our heart. Until we admit that things are beyond our control, Cardinal Dolan told me, we are going to be frustrated, lost, and fatigued. It is our job to recognize that we need a savior, and to beckon God in.
“The knock is always His,” he told me. “Only we can open up.”
• • •
At Pastor Joel Osteen’s mega-church in Houston, I was able to experience surrender to God on a massive human scale. When I arrived at Lakewood Church on a warm fall Sunday morning, the parking lots were already packed. Sundays at Lakewood are such an event that traffic cops are diverted from around the city to help cars negotiate their way to the nine thousand covered parking spaces around the church. Osteen’s church is one of the largest in America. It makes its home in the Compaq Center, the former arena for the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
It seems like an unlikely idea to try to create a sense of intimate surrender to God on such a massive scale. But during the service, I realized that being in a mega-church can actually aid the sense of personal connection with God. I was not prepared for the emotional impact of sitting in an arena filled with many thousands of worshippers all singing and praising together. It is powerful, to be among so many people gathered in one place. No wonder a box of Kleenex waits under every chair.
I noticed a father standing near me with his two children, who were maybe eight and ten years old. Even before the service started, the two kids had their eyes closed, doing the praise dance with arms raised above their heads. This family looked the picture of earnest, trusting belief.
Joel and Victoria delivered their welcome message from a stage, through headset microphones, but they were as down-home and easy as if they were speaking to a Bible study group in someone’s living room. Later in the service, they invited congregants to come to the front of the church for individual prayer. More than a dozen “prayer guides” appeared, Lakewood clergy and volunteers who lay their hands on the shoulders and arms of congregants who come up front to ask for extra help.
Pastor Joel told me that in that moment, he just tries to give the congregants “some words of hope or faith. It feels simple and feels so inadequate, but you tell them, ‘God’s got you in the palm of His hand.’ It’s a moment. They feel touched. They feel encouraged.”
On that September Sunday, Pastor Joel delivered a sermon about what he calls “prepared blessings,” the idea that if we give ourselves to God, we will get the glory that we are due.
“When God laid out the plan for your life, He lined up the right people, the right breaks, and the right opportunities,” Pastor Joel said. “He has blessings that have your name on them. If you will stay in faith and keep honoring God, one day you will come in to what already belongs to you. He is working behind the scenes, arranging things in your favor, getting it all perfectly in place. You couldn’t make it happen on your own. It’s a prepared blessing!” Later, he elaborated, “I don’t believe there’s any accidents or coincidences. I believe it’s all lined up. I look back in my own life, and I think now that this person led me to this or that.”
Unlike some other evangelicals and orthodox Christians, Joel Osteen has a fundamentally optimistic worldview: “that God can heal and help you in everyday life.” The words “victor” and “victory” are repeated frequently during the services at Lakewood. His message follows in a direct line from the “possibility thinking” of the televangelist Robert Schuller, whose TV show The Hour of Power was on the air for forty years. “Turn your scars into stars,” Schuller would say.
But Osteen’s belief that God just wants us to be happy has been criticized by other orthodox Christians. Michael Cromartie, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, compares Osteen’s message to a Twinkie—it goes down easily, he says, but is light on substance and will eventually stunt your growth. In fact, Cromartie says if you consider that part of Jesus’ message is that we are all broken sinners who must repent, then Osteen’s ministry is doctrinally incorrect. Osteen rarely mentions sin, sacrifice, or the need for redemption in his sermons.
“He’s bearing false witness about the nature of God and the nature of man” is how Warren Cole Smith puts it. Smith is an investigative journalist with the evangelical Christian publication World Magazine. He and others worry that Osteen preaches a version of the “prosperity gospel,” saying that God shows us His favor through material wealth.
I asked Pastor Joel about this line of criticism that Sunday after the service at Lakewood. We were sitting on the straight-backed floral sofa in his private suite. Several advisers and publicists crowded into the small room with us, but Joel Osteen seemed to think through my questions earnestly. The political reporter in me expected this mega-church preacher to spin me, but he didn’t. He wanted to engage, and he didn’t pretend to have all the answers.
Pastor Joel answered the “prosperity gospel” charge by saying that he believes it is only natural to bring God into every aspect of your life, including financial choices. “I’m not saying belief in God will make you rich,” he said. “I’m saying, bring God into every part of your life.”
“The question that came up for me during your sermon today,” I said, “is if God has prepared blessings for us and will deliver these things, then why is the opposite not true? Why won’t God prevent bad things from happening?”
“There are forces of evil,” he said. “We’re in a fallen world. My belief is this: that God has you in the palm of His hand. I don’t believe that the enemy or forces can take you away if you’re doing your best to please God. We need to trust God, even when it doesn’t make sense.”
“But is it God’s will?” I pressed him. “Obviously, Jews think about the Holocaust, for instance. What about ISIS, the Islamic State?”
“It doesn’t make sense, because God could have stopped ISIS,” he acknowledged. “God can stop anything. But I think you have to trust that He’s in control. This may sound crazy, but if I died tomorrow, you know what? I fulfilled my plan. That’s the way I look at it.”
“That’s why the primary thing that Christians have to do is believe and be willing to be saved, right?” I asked.
“Right. All we can do is let God in as much as we can,” Pastor Joel told me.
This is hard for me and many people of faith to accept. God just lets evil exist in the world? How are we supposed to understand that? This may be the biggest obstacle for some of us when it comes to accepting God’s level of control.
From what I saw at Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen tries to provide as much room as possible for people to grow into their spiritual selves. He wants to encourage people to believe that God can make their lives better, whether they are depressed, brokenhearted, out of cash, or addicted to drugs.
As it says in Isaiah 42:16: “I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.”
• • •
Joel Osteen may believe that God has more control over our destiny than I do, but I find it challenging to imagine that level of surrender. The Christian message of giving yourself over to an experience of grace runs contrary to much of Jewish teaching. However, I find myself inspired by the Christian language. I have reflected on it and tried to be more open to it.
When I asked the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore how much God is in control of our lives, he told me that he knows Christians who think it is unspiritual to make any decision unless there is a higher consciousness pointing them in a particular direction. He also believes that God is always guiding our actions and choices. But he thinks of it as more of a back-and-forth with God, rather than waiting for an explicit directive.
Dr. Moore told a story from his own life. When he and his wife were trying to conceive, they had several miscarriages and eventually were told they could never have children. They were distraught. “Even though I was a committed Christian, I was growing really bitter toward God,” Moore told me. “I thought, You have all these people who aren’t equipped to be parents who are just having babies immediately, and here we are, asking to be parents, and we can’t. And I look back now, and at one of those points when I was walking down the street grumbling to myself in that way, our sons were born and waiting for us in a Russian orphanage, and we just didn’t even know it. So I see God as sovereign over that.”
Dr. Moore said that when he and his wife had to make the difficult decision about whether they should try to adopt, they would pray about it, saying, “If we’re going in the wrong direction, God, stop us.” They found that people were helping them, and it seemed to them that this was God walking them through that choice. In the end, they adopted two sons, and then three more came along “the more typical way,” as Moore put it. “I think of the doctors who told my wife she was infertile every time I go to a birthday party for one of them,” he said, chuckling.
I asked Tim Keller, the evangelical pastor in New York, to weigh in on the matter of how much God is in control. He told me a story about a Baptist minister friend who went to visit a sick parishioner. The minister asked him, “My brother, are you taking your medicine?” And the parishioner answered, “Well, Pastor, I don’t know whether I am destined to live or to die, so I don’t want to take my medicine, because I don’t know what God’s will is.” And the pastor told him, “My brother, I can help you here. I know what your destiny is. If you take your medicine, you’re destined to live. And if you don’t take your medicine, you’re destined to die.”
The point Keller was making is that it is not our job to guess these things. “You choose your path and you will be responsible for your choices,” he told me. “And yet I don’t believe I can completely screw up God’s goodwill for my life and for the world. I believe that He is working things out.”
That is a comforting thought. It’s not that God is 100 percent in control and we are just puppets in His hands; nor are we 100 percent in control and God is just waiting to see what we do. Keller said it’s more like 100 percent and 100 percent.
Keller cited the story of Pharaoh in the Hebrew Scriptures. “Pharaoh was absolutely responsible for hardening his heart,” he said. “But at the same time it was also God’s will that Pharaoh’s heart would be hardened. I think God is somehow bearing on a situation so that He is not letting history spin out of control.”
• • •
Surrendering to God is an essential part of the Muslim faith. On a cold, sunny November Friday, the day of public worship in Islam, I drove out to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling, Virginia, to take part in the prayers. The ADAMS Center is one of the largest mosques on the East Coast, serving almost twenty thousand people at twenty-three different centers.
We tend to think of mosques as elaborate buildings with minaret towers, but here in the U.S., many mosques are tucked away into residential suburbs amid immigrant Muslim communities. The ADAMS Center is a repurposed building, so it lacks typical Muslim architectural features. In fact, Friday prayers are held in a gymnasium, a big, echoing room with basketball hoops on either side.
Worshippers wandered into the mosque wearing casual clothes; in the back of the mosque, women whispered to their children, and there was an occasional shout. In spite of the informal feeling inside the prayer hall, the prayer service was full of the ritual of giving yourself over to God.
The imam of the mosque, Mohamed Magid, a Sudanese-born American, strode in, wearing long light brown robes and a matching skullcap. Imam Magid is a memorable presence with a quick wit and an infectious grin. In his robes, he has an air of authority and ease. As he stood in front of the congregation, he recited the first verse of the Koran: “All praise is due to God, the Lord of the Universe; the Beneficent, the Merciful; Lord of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help. Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed; not of those who have incurred Your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray.” As he said these words, the congregation prostrated themselves, bowing from a seated position to place their foreheads on the ground.
The word “mosque” in Arabic means “ritual prostration place.” Placing your forehead on the ground displays the deepest humility. In fact, Imam Magid, like many observant Muslims, has a “prayer bump,” a dark callous on his forehead from vigorous or extended prostration. It is called a zebibah, the Arabic word for “raisin.”
“No matter who you are, you can be the king or the president, but you have to surrender yourself to God,” Imam Magid told me later. “You say to God, I am always in need of you. No matter how much clout or prestige I have. Each aspect of movement in the prayer is meant to remind and reorient us toward God.”
He acknowledged that this act of physically submitting yourself to God can be difficult for new believers, especially those who convert to Islam later in life. He compared it to developing a muscle: It feels unnatural at first; only after a few weeks of making it part of your regular activity will you feel it organically. Once you do, though, he said the experience of giving yourself over to God is quite beautiful.
He told me about an elderly man who had been attending Friday prayers his whole life. One Friday, Imam Magid noticed that the man could no longer bow his head all the way to the ground. He sat on a folding chair at the front of the mosque and simply lowered his head to his lap during the prayers.
“After the service, I asked him whether it felt better now that he was sitting on the chair and didn’t have to bend over,” Imam Magid told me. “But he started to cry. He said, ‘I miss that moment of placing my head on the ground before God. I want to give myself to Him completely.’ ”
• • •
Over time, I have found myself becoming more comfortable with surrendering to God. What was hard for me at first has become easier. It feels more natural to me now to let Him in, to see God as someone guiding me. I feel as though God knows my mind and loves me enough to urge me to do better.
I hear His wisdom in the voice that I hear first thing in the morning, the “truth voice” before the other thoughts filter in, before I start to rationalize. At this stage of my faith life, I know that God has a daily spiritual ask of me—whether it is giving of myself, avoiding hurtful speech, or controlling anger. Does that mean that God is in control of my life? It is hard for me to get to the place where I believe that God is directing the world for me. I just feel like I bear too much responsibility for what happens to me. Unfortunately, I may hear but I don’t always listen, which puts me on the path of the stumblers in life who are always trying to find the way back. The important thing, as Pastor Joel reminds his congregation, is to put God in “first place.”
I believe that I am responsible for what I do in the world. If I hurt others, I will suffer for that. But simply believing in God’s presence itself is a surrender of sorts. It requires me to let go. Rather than wondering whether God is controlling me, I try to think of Him as a presence to guide me.
“I turn my eyes to the mountains; from where will my help come?” writes the psalmist. “My help comes from the Lord.” My willingness to surrender more of my life to God is part of a larger desire to develop a more spiritual Jewish identity and practice.
One snowy Sunday morning in early 2015, I took my nine-year-old twins to Jewish Sunday school at Temple Micah in Washington, D.C. One of the rabbis asked parents and kids to break off into small groups and come up with an answer to the question “What role does God play in your life?”
I wrote that God inspires me to be better. The exercise made me realize that now that I have studied Him, God is no longer a question for me. Mysterious, sure. But not a question. I know Him. He is many things in the Bible. He is our creator, He destroys, He redeems, He teaches, and He loves.
Rabbi Larry Hoffman says the question shouldn’t be whether we believe in God. “Does anyone ask you whether you believe in love?” he says. Like many people, I am lucky enough to know love; I don’t have to try to convince myself of its existence. And now I am lucky enough to be able to say the same about God.
Now that the sacred texts have become friends to me, I want to relate to them in a direct, personal way. And I feel as though I am developing a personal relationship with God. This is something Christians talk about a lot. Jews, not so much.
I’ve asked my teacher Erica Brown to explain this more times than I can count: Why is it that spirituality is not an active part of the tradition for most American Jews? Why is it that most Jews don’t think about grace and otherworldliness as Christians do, or about relating in a personal way to God?
Each time I ask these questions, Erica explains that because of the history of exile, modern Judaism has been consumed with the right way to live. Jews see themselves as being agents for justice and decent living. They also have a fundamentally different understanding of the purpose.
“We believe in salvation every day,” she told me. “We believe that salvation comes through good deeds. Not through faith. That’s not to say that God isn’t the fundamental motivation that you do things. But we believe that we have a personal responsibility for our actions and accountability to God.”
“What do you think about the Christian idea that God doesn’t love us because we’re good, He loves us because He’s good?” I asked her.
“That’s pinning a lot on God,” Erica said. “Jews believe that God expects you to do good in the world. That you are His partner.”
“But what about God forgiving me for my sins when I stand before Him in judgment?” I said.
“You can only ask God for forgiveness for the sins that you did to God,” Erica told me. “If you do something mean to your colleague or act badly at home, God says, ‘Don’t say sorry to me. You’ve got to take care of the problem yourself.’ ”
I asked Erica whether she feels that her own deep faith has given her a sense of certitude and truth.
There was no pause before she answered me. “No,” she said. “Not at all. I actually feel that religion has made my life much more nuanced and confusing. I live with ambivalence continuously.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks told me that Jews were once a “God-intoxicated people.” What changed? Too much time in exile, he explained. Anti-Semitism was another factor. Jews have been focused on survival for most of our history, so we have a strong sense of identity and community, but matters of the soul have been less of a priority.
Erica likes to recite an anecdote about her grandmother to explain some of the Jewish history. Her grandmother was raised in a Jewish ghetto in Poland and survived the Holocaust. Erica once asked whether she’d ever been depressed, living in dire poverty and fear, knowing that many of her relatives and friends had been killed. “Who has time to be depressed?” her grandmother replied.
It’s hard to imagine Erica’s grandmother having the time to sit around pondering what might happen to her soul. And perhaps she partly explains why the Jewish community has not been focused on an active spiritual life.
Rachel Cowan, the rabbi in New York, wishes she could change that. She is part of a small movement among Reform Jews to bring more spirituality into Judaism. She goes so far as to say that there is a “crisis of meaning” within the faith. The cultural aspect of Judaism has become so important among American Reform Jews that it has overwhelmed the other aspects of our religion.
Rachel says many Jews today find it frustrating that they cannot find the answers to the big questions inside their tradition. At her Reform synagogue in New York, she hears questions like “How do I find meaning in Jewish life beyond community and Israel?” and “What is the spiritual glue that creates shared experience?”
In her own life, she went through a time of desperately needing to engage with God. In 1988, her husband, Paul, died at the age of forty-eight, after battling leukemia for a year, in and out of the hospital. Paul, who was born Jewish, was one of the inspirations for Rachel to convert to Judaism in her forties and enter rabbinical school.
During the year he was sick, Rachel said that she would get angry with God. “Why? Where’s God in this?” she asked. But Paul said to her, “Enough of the questions. I’m just believing. I have an anchor that keeps me going. I have my faith and my morning prayer.”
When he died, “everything I believed in shattered,” Rachel said. “I didn’t believe God had caused Paul to get sick, so how could I believe God had failed to save him? And yet even though I know about the Holocaust and suffering, nonetheless my husband did not deserve to die. And he died. So it was like a childlike faith that was lying in pieces on the floor.”
Rachel’s faith literally seemed to be falling apart. She found she could no longer read Hebrew—“it was like the letters had all separated and I couldn’t get them back together again,” she said. Whenever she went to synagogue in the months after Paul’s death, she would cry and run out. She was angry and confused—why would God let Paul die? Why would He use Paul as a lesson for her?
“I remember walking in the park one day with a friend on a very cold January day after Paul died,” Rachel told me. “I looked at the world and I was thinking that all the stones and trees are made of cells. I thought, Everything here is structurally built out of inanimate chemicals, and I got very scared. I decided then that I refuse to see it that way. God in the Torah says, ‘I set before you blessings and curses, life and death. Choose life.’ So I said, ‘I’m choosing life. I do believe there is a God who cares.’ ”
This was a transformative moment for Rachel. “I was saying, I do believe in this enterprise,” she said. “Even though bad things happen, good things also happen; and people are better than they are worse. I know there is purpose for me, even though I don’t know what it is right now.”
Rachel began to focus on rebuilding her life through a community of faith. She found that she could feel Paul’s presence with her all the time. “I realized that I don’t feel any less love than I did when he was alive,” she said. “And I realized I could make a life for myself.”
She began to think about spirituality differently than she had in her first years of rabbinical school. “I decided that I need to have a better idea of God than just somebody that you beg to help you when you’re desperate,” Rachel told me. “What about joy, what about love? These things had all been in Judaism, but over the years, Jews have said, ‘That’s what the Christians do. They do love. They do forgiveness. We don’t do that.’ And in fact, of course, we do. It’s there.”
Rabbi Danny Zemel agrees that spirituality exists inside Judaism. The Chasidic movement, within the faith, emphasizes the importance of a healthy spiritual life. But Rabbi Zemel says that for the most part, “Jews have been so brainwashed that as soon as you discuss spirituality, they think you’re talking about Christianity.”
I asked him for his definition of spirituality.
“To me, to be spiritual is to live knowing that God is the witness to every single thing you’re doing. If God is here on my shoulder all the time, I have to know that I’m always in the presence of the one and living God. Guiding me, helping me to do whatever it is I’m doing.”
“I feel a similar way,” I told him. “I seek to operate in His presence. Even though I know I’m constantly failing, I still have a sense of what God expects of me.”
“That’s important,” Rabbi Zemel said. “You can never meet the standard, but the standard is always there aspirationally.”
He told me that the word “grace” is actually a Hebrew word, chen, which means “living in the constant presence of God.” There is a related Hebrew word that Rabbi Zemel especially likes: chesed, which means to live knowing that God is a witness and potentially a partner in every act we undertake.
So I am on a search for a new kind of Judaism and a new Jewish language. I want to adapt the beauty of Judaism’s four-thousand-year-old traditions to fit a pluralistic society and interfaith marriages like mine a little better. My own spiritual practice is focused on the passion and intimacy of prayer. It is more experiential and a little less focused on laws than a lot of Judaism. It is about creating a spiritual language that will capture the enormity and complexity of an intimate relationship with God.
When I met with Pastor Joel in Houston, he urged me to “Have a heart for God. I would just encourage you to continue to seek and believe that God will reveal who He is in the right way.”
Perhaps having “a heart for God” means to be receptive to God’s love and His teachings. When the heart is unlocked, it can always grow fuller.