The People of the Book – Jews, Christians, Muslims – are called by God to step into a journey. This is The Journey of Surrender. God declares for each of the three People of the Book that true religion in the sight of God is self-surrender to God. To surrender to God is to be free from being a slave of/to one’s ego.
Surrender is a life-long discipline. It is a discipline of deep listening followed by grace-full acting – allowing the Divine and not one’s ego to be the Center. Surrender enables the soul to respond to God’s ‘Will.’ A mantra of Surrender is: Thy Will, Not My Will, Be Done! Surrender is not ‘resignation’ – ‘resignation’ is the pathway to hopelessness and despair. Surrender involves a deep honoring of one’s true self. Rumi captures this for me: When you have set in the west, then your light will rise from the east.
There is a trap, a seduction that we can spring upon ourselves. We become trapped when we begin to believe that we can surrender by saying, O God, I surrender to You!’ Surrender involves work. We have work to do on ourselves and without the work surrender becomes meaning-less. What is the work? The work varies for each of us and yet there is work common to all of us. This common work is the work of awareness, integration, and seeking [seeking to see God in each person, for example; this single ‘seeking’ will take most of us a life-time or two].
The work is not about destroying the ego – it is not a martyrdom. Our ego must be transformed [for Christians, think of St. Paul and his transformation] from Darkness to Light – a Light that each of us is called to bring to our world. Each of us is here to bring our Light – no one else can bring our Light.
The Prophet Muhammad said: Die before you die! Die to your ego before you physically die. The first and most important jihad in Islam is the war we are to wage with our own soul/ego – the holy war. Who is winning the war today?
Surrender requires a life-time of self-vigilance, self-discipline, and spiritual-practice. The first step is to recognize the yearning of our soul – this yearning involves a yearning to Surrender our ‘Will’ to God’s ‘Will.’ I experience this as a spiritual ‘ache’ – even a ‘wound’ that needs to be healed. When one embraces the ‘ache’ and the Journey of Surrender then one becomes a seeker.
God says: Between Me and you there are no veils, but between you and Me there are seventy thousand veils. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us that God is searching for us – we are the ones hiding behind our many veils. Do I really want God to find me?
Searcher-Seeker 