April Theme Surrender

4-6-08


Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty,my memory, my understanding and my whole will.All that I am and all that I possess You have given me.I surrender it all to You to be disposed of according to Your will.Give me only Your love and Your grace;with these I will be rich enough,and will desire nothing more.
Jesuit - St.. Ignatius Loyola - 16th century







I live in the world afraid to lose anything,
Take me to your world where I can lose
everything.
Tagore

Surrender is a dirty word in our militaristic culture – along with vulnerable –

MLK quote – “ Remember that non-violence is to seek justice and reconciliation, not victory.”

Life is not a battle to gain victory over

New World Dictionary includes and places first these meanings:
1. To give up possession of:
What do we really own anyway? What is really ours?
I have nothing to offer Thee,
For all things are Thine.
I grieve not that I cannot give;
For nothing is mine, for nothing is mine.
Here I lay at Thy feet
My life, my limbs, my thoughts and speech;
For they are Thine, for they are Thine.
Paramahansa Yogananda

To give up possession of the moment. To try to hold on to the moment is like trying to grasp water with your hands. It flows in and then it flows out.

Live loyally today-- grow --and tomorrow will attend to itself.The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frogis to live loyally each momentas a tadpole.
Urantia book - 1094:06


Definitions continued…
2. To give up power over
I think this could be seen as giving up the illusion we have of control. We really have no power over anything. We can have power with, but not over another human being. The power of community, creation, and communication. As Thomas Merton says:

The deepest level of communication is not communication but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. My dear brothers [and sisters] we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.




3. To give up claim to; give over or yield esp. voluntarily, as in favor of another
To understand this is to surrender to love. Love has no claim on anything and to feel love one must yield to love, voluntarily as in favor of another.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13







I heard the sea and asked,
“what language is that?”
the sea replied,
“The language of questions.”

I saw the sky and asked,
“What is the answer?”
the sky replied,
“The language of eternal silence.”
Tagore





Please attend to the ailing finances of the Center and meditate on the healing.

Even as a mother at the risk of her life would
watch over her only child, so let us with boundless
mind and goodwill survey the whole world.
The Buddha



Lord, may we love all your creation, all the Earth and every grain of sand in it. May we love every leaf, every ray of your light. For we acknowledge to you that all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending, and that to withhold any measure of love from anything in your universe is to withhold that same measure from you.
Fyodor Dostoyesky