Heavy rain last night just before dark, a five-minute deluge, but the storm past on, leaving gray clouds for me to greet this morning at around 5:30 AM when I began my usual, one-hour walk. I had turned off my bed lamp early last night, about 8:30 PM, after re-reading a section on Father Rohr’s book “Falling Upward”. I woke up at 1:30 AM to continue with my reading, so much of it confirming where I am now, well into the second half, the spiritual half, of my lengthening life.
You may not have noticed but I made no journal entry yesterday. I imposed a “gag-order” on myself because there was no way I could write without invading the privacy of others – the issue too much on my mind to overlook – so I did not write at all. Today, though, I am able to extrapolate (is that the correct word?) so that I can get at the issue, the conflict, without divulging any personal information. I have never seen more clearly the mistake my young friend is making, precisely because she is young, in the first-half of her journey (to apply Rohr’s thesis), and therefore is unable to see that her strategy, that her fight against injustice, is backfiring and only making a bad situation worse, with every step becoming more the victim. She has no way of appreciating, let alone understanding, the mystifying wisdom of victory through surrender or ‘letting go”.
The very act of” letting go” is much tougher to do because it appears to be letting others get away with murder but it’s really not. The act of “letting go” rather is a way for the enemy to see and be confronted by your full magnificence and power. I tried to get at this notion in a poem I wrote some time ago entitled Surrender : In the old world, weary and war-torn, faced/ with overwhelming odds,/ and too weak to fight another day, the white flag is raised/ in surrender and quiet ensues./ In the new world, still weary and war torn/ and with odds to bear,/ the enemy’s unseen and there’s no flag to raise./ The action has shifted inward./ Surrender has moved from “giving-up” to “letting go”/, the ‘victim” becoming “victor” in an act of ultimate trust,/ as intuition, love-driven, finds fulfillment in the nature/ of who we are, evolved beings,/ composed of stardust/, with capacities to love, heal and create/ like any god./ In the end, surrender the only weapon in a world at war.
