Author bell hooks (1952–2021) considers the biblical call to surrender, so we might be healed by love:
It is difficult to wait. No doubt that is why biblical scriptures urge the seeker to learn how to wait, for waiting renews our strength. When we surrender to the “wait” we allow changes to emerge within us without anticipation or struggle. When we do this we are stepping out, on faith. In Buddhist terms this practice of surrender, of letting go, makes it possible for us to enter a space of compassion where we can feel sympathy for ourselves and others….
Redemptive love lures us and calls us toward the possibility of healing. We cannot account for the presence of the heart’s knowledge. Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope…. Renewing our faith in love’s promise, hope is our covenant.…
To return to love, to know perfect love, we surrender the will to power. It is this revelation that makes the scriptures on perfect love so prophetic and revolutionary for our times. We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.
As our cultural awareness of the ways we are seduced away from love, away from the knowledge that love heals gains recognition, our anguish intensifies. But so does our yearning. The space of our lack is also the space of possibility. As we yearn, we make ourselves ready to receive the love that is coming to us, as gift, as promise, as earthly paradise.[1]
Brian McLaren describes how healing occurs when we release our need for supremacy, certainty, and control.
The more we hear the sound of the genuine, the more the deepest habits of our hearts are renovated and remodeled in the way of love, and the more supremacy loses its appeal.… We surrender the supremacy of our ego, our self-centered demands for power, pleasure, prestige, prominence. We surrender the supremacy of our group, whether that group is defined by religion, race, politics, nationality, economic class, social status, or whatever. We even surrender the supremacy of our species, realizing that humans can’t survive and thrive unless the plankton and trees, the soil and bees, and the climate and seas thrive too. We gladly shed supremacy to make room for solidarity. That gain, we discover, is worth every cost….
As the desire to dominate slips through our fingers, something in us dies…. But in the letting go, something new comes, is born, begins, grows: a sense of connection, of not-aloneness, of communion and union and belonging. We descend from the ladders and pedestals we have erected, and we rejoin the community of creation, the network of shalom…. The loss is no small thing, ah, but the gain is incomparably greater. [2]
References:
[1] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (Harper Perennial, 2001), 216, 219, 221.
[2] Brian D. McLaren, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), 215, 216, 217.
Image credit and inspiration: Unknown, Neom (detail), 2023, photo, Saudi Arabia, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like this cave explorer, loving surrender can sometimes mean walking bravely into a dark unknown.
Story from Our Community:
Recently, I was feeling overwhelmed by the news in the U.S. I am frightened for our immigrant brothers and sisters, worried for Black and brown siblings, and the LGBTQ+ community. The recent Daily Meditation quoting Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes was excellent. I really resonated with the discovery of the Welcoming Prayer in the Story from Our Community section from Junia C. from Brazil. Daily practice is not a cure-all to ease my worries, but the prayer was an act of surrendering that I needed at that moment. I am grateful for the prayer and this community.
—Katie W.
