“For in God’s hands we rest untroubled…”
1. FAITH
“There is no problem in any situation that faith will not solve.”
What if we truly believed there is a God—a beneficent order to things, a force that’s holding things together without our conscious control? What if we could see, in our daily lives, the working of that force? What if we believed it loved us somehow, and cared for us, and protected us? What if we believed we could afford to relax?
The physical body is at work every moment, an array of mechanisms with a brilliance of design and efficiency our human efforts have never begun to match. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our ears hear, our hair grows. And we don’t have to make them work—they just do. Planets revolve around the sun, seeds become flowers, embryos become babies, and with no help from us. Their movement is built into a natural system. You and I are integral parts of that system, too. We can let our lives be directed by the same force that makes flowers grow—or we can do it ourselves.
To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing. Faith is a psychological awareness of an unfolding force for good, constantly at work in all dimensions. Our attempts to direct this force only interferes with it. Our willingness to relax into it allows it to work on our behalf. Without faith, we’re frantically trying to control what it is not our business to control, and fix what it is not in our power to fix. What we’re trying to control is much better off without us, and what we’re trying to fix can’t be fixed by us anyway. Without faith, we’re wasting time.
There are objective, discernible laws of physical phenomena. Take gravity, for instance, or the law of thermodynamics. You don’t exactly have faith in the law of gravity, so much as you just know that it is.
There are objective, discernible laws of non-physical phenomena, as well. These two sets of laws—those which rule both the external and internal worlds—are parallel.
Externally, the universe supports our physical survival. Photosynthesis in plants and plankton in the ocean produce the oxygen that we need in order to breathe. It is important to respect the laws that rule the physical universe because violation of these laws threatens our survival. When we pollute the oceans or destroy plant life, we are destroying our support system and so are destroying ourselves.
Internally, the universe supports our survival as well—emotionally and psychologically. The internal equivalent to oxygen, what we need in order to survive, is love. Human relationships exist to produce love. When we pollute our relationships with unloving thoughts, or destroy or abort them with unloving attitudes, we are threatening our emotional survival.
So the laws of the universe merely describe the way things are. These laws aren’t invented; they’re discovered. They are not dependent on our faith. Faith in them merely shows we understand what they are. Violation of these laws doesn’t bespeak a lack of goodness; just a lack of intelligence. We respect the laws of nature in order to survive. And what is the highest internal law? That we love one another. Because if we don’t, we will all die. As surely as a lack of oxygen will kill us, so will a lack of love.
2. RESISTANCE
“Faithlessness is not lack of faith but faith in nothing.”
A Course in Miracles tells us that ‘there is no such thing as a faithless person.’ Faith is an aspect of consciousness. We either have faith in fear or we have faith in love, faith in the power of the world or faith in the power of God.
We’ve basically been taught that it’s our job as responsible adults to be active, to be masculine in nature—to go out and get the job, to take control of our lives, to take the bull by the horns. We’ve been taught that that’s our power. We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are. So we’re caught in a Catch-22: we feel powerless to achieve until we already have.
If somebody comes along and suggests that we go with the flow, maybe lighten up a little, we really feel hysterical. After all, we’re total underachievers as is, as far as we can see. The last thing we can imagine doing is becoming any more passive than we already are.
Passive energy has its own kind of strength. Personal power results from a balance of masculine and feminine forces. Passive energy without active energy becomes lazy, but active energy without passive energy becomes tyrannous. An overdose of male, aggressive energy is macho, controlling, unbalanced, and unnatural. The problem is that aggressive energy is what we’ve all been taught to respect. We’ve been taught that life was made for quarterbacks so we exalt our masculine consciousness, which, when untempered by the feminine, is hard. Therefore, so are we—all of us, men and women. We’ve created a fight mentality. We’re always fighting for something: for the job, the money, the relationship, to get out of the relationship, to lose weight, to get sober, to get them to understand, to get them to stay, to get them to leave, and on and on. We never put away our swords.
The feminine, surrendered place in us is passive. It doesn’t do anything. The spiritualization process—in men as well as women—is a feminization process, a quieting of the mind. It is the cultivation of personal magnetism.
If you have a pile of iron shavings and you want to arrange them in beautiful patterns, you can do one of two things. You can use your fingers and try to arrange the tiny pieces of iron into beautiful, gossamer lines—or you can buy a magnet. The magnet will attract the iron shavings. It symbolizes our feminine consciounessness, which exerts its power through attraction rather than activity.
This attractive, receptive, feminine aspect of our consciousness is the space of mental surrender. In Taoist philosophy, “yin” is the feminine principle, representing the forces of the earth, while “yang” is the masculine principle, representing spirit. When God is referred to as “He,” then all mankind becomes “She.” This isn’t a man-woman issue. Reference to God as masculine principle in no way impinges on feminist conviction. Our feminine self is just as important as our masculine.
The right relationship between male and female principle is one in which the feminine surrenders to the masculine. Surrender is not weakness or loss. It is a powerful nonresistance. Through openness and receptivity on the part of human consciousness, spirit is allowed to infuse our lives, to give them meaning and direction. In Christic philosophical terms, Mary symbolizes the feminine within us, which is impregnated by God. The female allows this process and is fulfilled by surrendering into it. This is not weakness on her part; it is strength. The Christ on earth is fathered by God, and mothered by our humanness. Through a mystical connection between the human and divine, we give birth to our higher Self.
3. GIVING UP RESULTS
“You will never lose your way for God leads you.”
When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves—to a universe that knows what it’s doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works. We’re at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives.
Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.
The experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation. Until we make that choice, we keep striving for results that we think would make us happy. But we’ve all gotten things that we thought would make us happy, only to find that they didn’t. This external searching—looking to anything other than love to complete us and to be the source of our happiness—is the meaning of idolatry. Money, sex, power, or any other worldly satisfaction offers just temporary relief for minor existential pain.
“God” means love, and “will” means thought. God’s will, then, is loving thought. If God is the source of all good, then the love within us is the source of all good. When we love, we are automatically placing ourselves within an attitudinal and behavioral context that leads to an unfoldment of events at the highest level of good for everyone involved. We don’t always know what that unfoldment would look like, but we don’t need to. God will do His part if we do ours. Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love. What happens then is up to Him. We’ve surrendered control. We’re letting Him lead. We have faith He knows how.
There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others. We surrender to God first, of course, the things we don’t really care that much about anyway. Some of us don’t mind giving up our attachment to career goals, but there’s no way we’re going to surrender our romantic relationships, or vice versa. Everything we don’t care that much about—fine—God can have it. But if it’s really, really important, we think we better handle it ourselves. The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate. We keep opening the oven to see if the bread is baking, which only ensures that it never gets a chance to.
Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control. But how can we know what result to try to achieve in a situation when we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow? What do we ask for? Instead of, “Dear God, please let us fall in love, or please give me this job,” we say, “Dear God, my desire, my priority is inner peace. I want the experience of love. I don’t know what would bring that to me. I leave the results of this situation in your hands. I trust your will. May your will be done. Amen.”
I used to feel I couldn’t afford to relax because God had more important things to think about than my life. I finally realized that God is not capricious, but is rather an impersonal love for all life. My life is no more or less precious to Him than is anyone else’s. To surrender to God is to accept the fact that He loves us and provides for us, because he loves and provides for all life. Surrender doesn’t obstruct our power; it enhances it. God is merely the love within us, so returning to Him is a return to ourselves.
4. THE SURRENDERED LIFE
“Holy Child of God, when will you learn that only holiness can content you and give you peace?”
To relax, to feel the love in your heart and keep to that as your focus in every situation—that’s the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people.
In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept called “zen mind,” or “beginner’s mind.” They say that the mind should be like an empty rice bowl. If it’s already full, then the universe can’t fill it. If it’s empty, it has room to receive. This means that when we think we have things already figured out, we’re not teachable. Genuine insight can’t dawn on a mind that’s not open to receive it. Surrender is a process of emptying the mind.
In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of “becoming as a little child.” Little children don’t think they know what things mean. In fact, they know they don’t know. They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them. We’re like children who don’t know, but think we do.
The wise person doesn’t pretend to know what it’s impossible to know. “I don’t know” can be an empowering statement. When we go into a situation not knowing, there is something inside us which does. With our conscious mind, ‘we step back in order that a higher power within us can step forward and lead the way.’
We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning “of the spirit,” or “inspired.” It’s about letting God’s light shine through us. It’s about a sparkle in people that money can’t buy. It’s an invisible energy with visible effects. To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it’s when we truly become bright. We’re letting our own light shine.
We are meant to be this way. We are meant to shine. Look at small children. They’re all so unique before they start trying to be, because they demonstrate the power of genuine humility. This is also the explanation of “beginner’s luck.” When we go into a situation not knowing the rules, we don’t pretend to know how to figure anything out, and we don’t know yet what there is to be afraid of. This releases the mind to create from its own higher power. Situations shift gear and lights go on simply because our minds have opened up to receive love. We have gotten out of our own way.
Love is a win-mode, a successful and attractive vibration. We think that success is difficult, and so, for us, it is. Success in life doesn’t have to involve negative tension. We don’t have to be struggling all the time. If you think about it, “taking the bull by the horns” would be a very dangerous thing to do. In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction, emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy but doesn’t really, like the white sugar of mental health; there’s a short high, followed by a crash. The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, is like eating healthy food. It doesn’t give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.
This doesn’t require sitting in a lotus position all day. We still get excited, but more gently. Many people associate a spiritual life with a grade B movie, but God doesn’t get rid of all the drama in our lives. He just gets rid of the cheap drama. There is no higher drama than true personal growth. Nothing could be more genuinely dramatic than boys becoming real men and girls becoming real women.
Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.
Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world, and to start loving it instead. It is a gentle liberation from pain. But liberation isn’t about breaking out of anything; ‘it’s a gentle melting into who we really are.’ We let down our armor, and discover the strength of our Christ self. A Course in Miracles tells us that although ‘we think that without the ego, all would be chaos, the opposite is true. Without the ego, all would be love.’
We are simply asked to shift focus and to take on a more gentle perception. That’s all God needs. Just one sincere surrendered moment, when love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else really matters at all. What He gives us in return for our openness to Him, is an outpouring of His power from deep within us. We are given His power to share with the world, to heal all wounds, to awaken all hearts.