Feeling kind of snarky this evening. I’d committed to blogging today and am dragging my feet. Life not going completely the way I’d like it. Sometimes, some days the bumps on an otherwise nice road are all I feel and see.
I know, let go and let god. Just live life as it is. Surrender. Easier said than done.
Much has changed in my life in the last twenty years. I’m way less arrogant. Less self-centered. More open and loving. And I’ve done lots of work and made lots of effort in that direction. But further effort has felt futile for a long time now. What I’ve got left feels pretty embedded and permanent. Trying is not really moving it along any more.
And change still keeps happening, but not so much through effort.
About a year ago I read a book by Sue Monk Kidd called While the Heart Waits. Part of it made a big impression on me. In the book she journals her way through an apparently very spiritually dry winter. In the spring she writes…
“I read the passage several times. Relax? Take hands off? Submit the process to God? And pray tell, what does it mean to “let life be willed through you”? Was there a shift in the process of letting go from the active to the passive?”
The full passage is in an earlier blog i never commented on.
A shift in the process of letting go from the active to the passive…
A shift in the process from trying to let go to allowing letting go to arise in its own time…
And allowing it to happen.
Settling into a place of greater trust.
How much of my daily misery is that I’ve tried and failed?
Tried to get what I want and failed to get it…
Tried to change and failed to do it…
Tried to be nice
Or generous
Or courteous
Or peaceful…
and failed…
Tried to be tolerant of myself and others and failed…
Thomas Merton talks about having let go of our more conscious attachments, how do we let go of our more unconscious/recalcitrant attachment or defects? Our ‘secret attachments’ he calls them.
“To uproot these,
he cautioned,
we need to leave the initiative in the hands of God
working in our souls
either directly in the night of aridity and suffering,
or through events and other men.”
For me, it is in the darkness of this place that prayer and meditation are at their most useful. It is in their practice that I learn to be quiet enough to get comfortable with a loving, allowing place that has always been there and that transforms me. It is where I learn to let life live me, rather than me living it.
Love to you all...
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