A Surrendering Love: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Trust the down, and God will take care of the up. This leaves humanity in solidarity with the life cycle, but also with one another, with no need to create success stories for itself, or to create failure stories for others. —Richard Rohr

Monday
The only way I know how to teach anyone to love God, and how I myself seek to love God, is to love what God loves, which is everything and everyone, including you and including me! —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
We belong to a mutually beneficial web of connection, well-being, and love. At the root of this connection is empathy; the result is kindness, compassion, respect, and understanding. When religion doesn’t center on this mutuality, it can become one of the toxic narratives that, in the end, dismantles self-love. —Jacqui Lewis

Wednesday
Little by little, or vast area by vast area, my life must be transmuted in the life of God. As this happens, I come into the meaning of true freedom and the burdens that I seemed unable to bear are floated in the current of the life and love of God.
—Howard Thurman

Thursday
God does not hold back and wait until we get things right; rather, God loves us where we are and as we are. In the Incarnation, divine love has found us and has surrendered to us. —Ilia Delio

Friday
If we, who would be his disciples, recall the night before Jesus died, we are led to a table, from a table to a garden, from a garden to a courtyard, from a courtyard to a hill, from a hill to a grave, from a grave to life. The table holds the self-gift of his very flesh and blood; the garden is watered by his tears and blood; and the cross holds him, even as the One whom he knows and loves lifts him up from the grave to release him into the surprise of hope and life. —M. Shawn Copeland

Welcoming Prayer

Father Richard recommends the Welcoming Prayer as a practice to help us surrender to God, Reality, and Love with each moment:

Spiritual teacher Mary Mrozowski (1926–1993) composed and first taught what is now called the Welcoming Prayer, which many have found to be life-changing. The Welcoming Prayer helps us find serenity through surrender in the midst of messy, ordinary moments. When feeling triggered or caught by something unpleasant, begin by simply being present to your feeling, experiencing it not just mentally, but also emotionally and physically. Don’t try to rationalize or explain the feeling, but witness and give attention to this sensation. Welcome the feeling, speaking aloud, if you can: “Welcome, [anger, fear, hunger, longing, etc.].” [1] Repeat this as many times as you need to truly sense yourself embracing and receiving the feeling. Some people pray the Welcoming Prayer regularly—even daily is probably not too much! Popularized by my dear friend and mentor, the late Thomas Keating (1923–2018), it is this simple and this hard:

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I welcome everything that comes to me today

because I know it’s for my healing.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons,

situations, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for power and control.

I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval, and pleasure.

I let go of my desire for survival and security.

I let go of my desire to change any situation,

condition, person, or myself.

I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within. Amen. [2]

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:
[1] Cynthia Bourgeault has a chapter on the Welcoming Prayer in her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (2004). On this point, she clarifies that “what you are welcoming is the physical or psychological content of the moment only, not a general blanket condoning of a situation. . . . What you are welcoming in this moment is not [the painful event itself], but the feelings the experience triggers for you: the fear or rage or shame on your plate right now” (p. 146).

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2017), 117–118.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on sin and original blessing.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Jenna Keiper, Leaves (detail), 2021, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Jenna Keiper, Christ Figure from the Office of Richard Rohr (detail), 2021, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Jenna Keiper, Web (detail), 2021, photograph, Washington, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: Fallen leaves in water surrender to the cycles of seasons. A spider’s web catches and kills a passing fly. Can we surrender to these moments too? Death is an invitation to slip beyond the web of knowing. What might we find if we allowed the cycle of death and resurrection in our own lives?

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Following Christ Crucified

Good Friday

Surrendering his life on the cross out of love for all creation, Jesus somehow places himself (and therefore God) in solidarity with all suffering. Black Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland challenges those who would follow Jesus to likewise grieve in solidarity with humanity’s suffering through the centuries:

To know and to follow Christ crucified is to know and love those children, women, and men who are poor, excluded, and despised, made different and unwelcome, lynched and crucified in our world. . . .

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would hear the echoes of ululation and bitter weeping in Gaza and in Rafah, in Baghdad and in Beirut, in Cairo and in Kigali. . . .

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would press to our hearts the tears that flowed from the eyes of Cherokee, Seminole, and Choctaw children and women and men who limped through the cold and hunger from Oklahoma to Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi. . . .

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would recover the tears that fell on the floors of the camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór. . . .

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would retrieve the tears that flowed from the eyes of children and women and men who crowded into flimsy boats and old trucks and shipping containers to suffocate and die in front of fences strung across the desert, at abandoned check points on the outer edge of rural towns, and at heavily guarded borders near rivers and waterways. . . .

If we would follow Christ crucified with attention, reverence, and devotion, we would recognize that the tears and blood and moans of the innocent have been absorbed into the air we breathe, have seeped into our streams and . . . oceans, into the earth in which we plant and from which we harvest and eat.

If we follow with attention, reverence, and devotion the moans and tears of the brutalized and burned, raped and mutilated, enslaved and captive across the centuries, we are led to the ground beneath the cross of the crucified Jewish Jesus of Nazareth. . . .

If we, who would be his disciples, recall the night before he died, we are led to a table, from a table to a garden, from a garden to a courtyard, from a courtyard to a hill, from a hill to a grave, from a grave to life. The table holds the self-gift of his very flesh and blood; the garden is watered by his tears and blood; and the cross holds him, even as the One whom he knows and loves lifts him up from the grave to release him into the surprise of hope and life.

[Richard here: The Paschal Mystery we honor this Holy Week cannot be made clear for Christians without Christ’s surrendering love to God. It begins with the Incarnation and culminates in the Resurrection—for him and for each of us!]

Reference:
M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 133, 134–135, 137.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s Franciscan perspective on the cross.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

My father died July 3, 2021. I was with him as his body became cold, when he cried out his last words, and his breath left his body. I have been a Christian all my life yet this loss has really caused a crisis in my faith. I no longer feel his presence. All my life I have believed in heaven, believed in the resurrection of Jesus, but what about me? What about my Dad? Is this all there is? Is he really gone?
—Kim Q.

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Prayer for our community:

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God Surrenders to Us in Love

Holy Thursday

Franciscan teacher Ilia Delio sees the Incarnation as God surrendering to us in humble, human form:

Surrender [to God] expresses one’s belief that God is love and love never fails. We would be remiss to think, however, that surrender is a movement in trust and love only on our part, as if God might be waiting for us to hand over the reins of control. Such an idea misses out on the tremendous mystery of God as love, for our surrender to God is based on God’s surrender to us. . . .

The surrender of God in the person of Jesus Christ is the great mystery of God. God does not hold back and wait until we get things right; rather, God loves us where we are and as we are. In the Incarnation, divine love has found us and has surrendered to us. It has handed itself over to us to do as we please.

What do we do with this tremendous gift of divine love so freely given to us? Some of us are blind to this love, so we ignore it. Others do not believe that God surrenders—completely in love with us—and therefore reject it. Still others fear that a God of self-giving love could be weak, and so they question the divine love. But for those who breathe in the Spirit of God, the surrender of God in love is the greatest act of humility, and one can only receive this love in poverty and humility. Receptivity marks the person of surrender. [1]

For Father Richard, Saints Francis (1182–1226) and Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) are powerful examples of people who surrendered their lives to God, and discovered who they really were in God:

God is the only one we can surrender to without losing ourselves. It’s a paradox. I can’t prove it to you, and it sure doesn’t always feel like that, but I promise it’s true. Francis and Clare lost and let go of all fear of suffering; all need for power, prestige, and possessions; and all need for their small self to be important—and they came out on the other side knowing something essential: who they really were in God and thus who they really were. Their house was then built on “bedrock,” as Jesus says (Matthew 7:24). Such an ability to really change is often the fruit of suffering, and various forms of poverty, since the false self does not surrender without a fight to its death. If suffering is “whenever we are not in control” (my definition), then we can understand why some form of suffering is absolutely necessary to teach us how to live beyond the illusion of control and to give that control back to God.

Francis and Clare voluntarily leapt into the very fire from which most of us are trying to escape, with total trust that Jesus’ way of the cross could not, and would not, be wrong.

References:
[1] Ilia Delio, Ten Evenings with God (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 2008), 79–80.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2014), 20–21.

Explore Further. . .

Read Mirabai Starr’s introduction to a breathing practice and reading from John of the Cross.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

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Love Poured Out

For Cynthia Bourgeault, the heart of Jesus’ ministry is summed up in the way he radically surrenders himself for the sake of love:

[Jesus’] idea of “dying to self” was not through inner renunciation and guarding the purity of his being, but through radically squandering everything he had and was. In life he horrified the prim and proper by dining with tax collectors and prostitutes, by telling parables about extravagant generosity, by giving his approval to acts of costly and apparently pointless sacrifice such as the woman who broke open the alabaster jar to anoint him with precious oil; by teaching always and everywhere, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.” John’s disciples disapproved of him for drinking and banqueting; the Pharisees disapproved of him for healing on the sabbath. But he went his way, giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering himself, “gambling away every gift God bestows.” It is . . . love utterly poured out, “consum’d with that which it was noursh’d by,” in the words of Shakespeare’s sonnet—that opens the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what Jesus taught and this is what he walked.

And he left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart. [1]

Howard Thurman (1900–1981) likewise understood the heart of Christian spirituality as surrender to God, which paradoxically opens our lives up to a greater freedom that we could not otherwise have imagined:

I surrender myself to God without any conditions or reservations. I shall not bargain with [God]. I shall not make my surrender piecemeal but I shall lay bare the very center of me, that all of my very being shall be charged with the creative energy of God. Little by little, or vast area by vast area, my life must be transmuted in the life of God. As this happens, I come into the meaning of true freedom and the burdens that I seemed unable to bear are floated in the current of the life and love of God.

The central element in communion with God is the act of self-surrender. [2]

References:
[1] Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Lanham, MD: Cowley Publications, 2004), 86–87.

[2] Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 175.

Explore Further. . .

Read Episcopal priest and author Stephanie Spellers on kenosis and letting go.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Yesterday, I read the devotion on God as a Mother Hen just before I had an emergency breast biopsy following a mammogram with suspicious results. The women in the room that morning were God incarnate, holding my heart steady with their gaze and comforting me as they led me through each awkward and painful step. I wept quietly, knowing God spoke to me directly that morning through that Mother Hen analogy that was moments later brought to life by my compassionate nurses.
—Andrea G.

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Love of Others Begins with Love of Self

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The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis reflects on the universal wisdom that proclaims the mutuality of love:

No matter who we are or where we come from, no matter who we love and how we earn a living, the admonition to love your neighbor as you love yourself, when lived out, expresses the interdependence humans need in order to survive and thrive. And the first step, the starting place, is self-love. In the Greek language, the phrases “love neighbor” and “love yourself” are connected by the word os, which is like an equal sign. This suggests we are called to love the self and the neighbor in exactly the same way. When we don’t love ourselves, it is impossible to love our neighbor. . . .

The connection between self-love and the love of others is as old as time. From the moment we stood up and walked out of lonely caves and into the light of tribal togetherness, humans understood the inextricable connection, that our lives are woven together in love. Almost all the world’s great religions encourage us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes called the Golden Rule, this beautiful teaching invites humans to treat one another—and in some traditions all creatures—the way we want to be treated. . . . The story embedded in these teachings across faiths and religions is: We belong to a mutually beneficial web of connection, well-being, and love. At the root of this connection is empathy; the result is kindness, compassion, respect, and understanding. When religion doesn’t center on this mutuality, it can become one of the toxic narratives that, in the end, dismantles self-love.

Lewis honors what she has learned about love from others:

I learned more about this connection among humans while visiting Robben Island, the South African prison where Nelson Mandela [1918–2013] was confined in a tiny cell for eighteen of the twenty-seven years he was behind bars. I found it miraculous that Mandela could see his inextricable connection to the humanity of his captors, the ones who took away his liberty and humiliated him daily. He observed that no one is born hating another because of race, religion, or background. Mandela understood that just as hate is taught, love must be taught.

For some folks, talk about love sounds weak, but from my point of view love is the strongest force on the planet. I learned my favorite definition of love from one of my seminary professors, the late Dr. James E. Loder [1931–2001]. He defined love as a “non-possessive delight in the particularity of the other.” All these years later, I am still so moved by this sentiment. Non-possessive delight sounds like devotion to me. Rather than trying to change, manipulate, or devour the object of our affection, fierce love delights in the particularities of who they are. So, when you love yourself, you take delight in the unique particularities that add up to you, without judgment.

Reference:
Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to a Better Life and a Better World (New York: Harmony, 2021), 28, 30, 31–32.

Explore Further. . .

Watch Richard introduce a Daily Meditations series on Love.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

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Expanding Circles of Love

Father Richard describes how we can grow in our love for God:

The God Jesus incarnates and embodies is not a distant God that must be placated. Jesus’ God is not sitting on some throne demanding worship and throwing down thunderbolts like Zeus. Jesus never said, “Worship me”; he said, “Follow me.” He asks us to imitate him in his own journey of full incarnation. To do so, he gives us the two great commandments: (1) Love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength and (2) Love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:28–31; Luke 10:25–28). In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37), Jesus shows us that our “neighbor” even includes our “enemy.”

So how do we love God? Most of us seem to have concluded we love God by attending church services. For some reason, we think that makes God happy. I’m not sure why. Jesus never talked about attending services, although church can be a good container to start with. I believe our inability to recognize and love God in what is right in front of us has allowed us to separate religion from our actual lives. There is Sunday morning, and then there is real life.

The only way I know how to teach anyone to love God, and how I myself seek to love God, is to love what God loves, which is everything and everyone, including you and including me! “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). “If we love one another, God remains in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). Then we love with God’s infinite love that can always flow through us. We are able to love things for themselves and in themselves—and not for what they do for us. That takes both work and surrender. As we get ourselves out of the way, there is a slow but real expansion of consciousness. We are not the central reference point anymore. We love in greater and greater circles until we can finally do what Jesus did: love and forgive even our enemies.

Most of us were given the impression that we had to be totally selfless, and when we couldn’t achieve that, many of us gave up altogether. One of John Duns Scotus’ (c. 1266–1308) most helpful teachings is that Christian morality at its best seeks “a harmony of goodness.” We harmonize and balance necessary self-care with a constant expansion beyond ourselves to loving others. This for me is brilliant! It is both simple and elegant, showing us how to love our neighbor as our self. Imagining and working toward this harmony keeps us from seeking impossible, private, and heroic ideals. Now the possibility of love is potentially right in front of us and always concrete; love is no longer a theory, a heroic ideal, or a mere textbook answer. Love is seeking the good of as many subjects as possible.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2012). Available as CD and MP3 download.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s book Essential Teachings on Love.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Providing daily care to my loved one for eight years has been transformational. With each conflict and fear, I look for the good and holy. The angst, fear, and resentments have morphed into a softened, peaceful, and contented life. Experimenting with surrender, acceptance, faith, and hope, I eventually realized I don’t need to sustain my loved one and myself. God is sustaining us. I see it. I feel it.
—Susan S.

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Allowing Life to Wax and Wane

Palm Sunday

Jesus’ state was divine, yet he did not cling to equality with God, but he emptied himself. —Philippians 2:6–7

This week’s meditations focus on a surrendering love, particularly as modeled by Jesus. Father Richard Rohr reflects on Jesus’ intentional path of descent:

In the overflow of rich themes on Palm Sunday, I am going to direct us toward the great parabolic movement described in Philippians 2. Most consider that this was originally a hymn sung in the early Christian community. To give us an honest entranceway, let me offer a life-changing quote from C. G. Jung’s (1875–1961) Psychological Reflections:

In the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve. [1]

The hymn from Philippians artistically, honestly, yet boldly describes that “secret hour” Jung refers to, when God in Christ reversed the parabola, when the waxing became waning. It says it starts with the great self-emptying or kenosis that we call the Incarnation and ends with the Crucifixion. It brilliantly connects the two mysteries as one movement, down, down, down into the enfleshment of creation, into humanity’s depths and sadness, and into a final identification with those at the very bottom (“took the form of a slave,” Philippians 2:7). Jesus represents God’s total solidarity with, and even love of, the human situation, as if to say, “nothing human is abhorrent to me.” God, if Jesus is right, has chosen to descend—in almost total counterpoint with our humanity that is always trying to climb, achieve, perform, and prove itself.

This hymn says that Jesus leaves the ascent to God, in God’s way, and in God’s time. Most of us understandably start the journey assuming that God is “up there,” and our job is to transcend this world to find “him.” We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” we miss that God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” What freedom! And it happens better than any could have expected. “Because of this, God lifted him up” (Philippians 2:9). We call the “lifting up” resurrection or ascension. Jesus is set as the human blueprint, the standard in the sky, the oh-so-hopeful pattern of divine transformation.

Trust the down, and God will take care of the up. This leaves humanity in solidarity with the life cycle, but also with one another, with no need to create success stories for ourselves or to create failure stories for others. Humanity in Jesus is free to be human and soulful instead of any false climbing into “Spirit.” This was supposed to change everything, and I trust it still will.

References:
[1] C. G. Jung: Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings, 1905–1961, ed. Jolande Jacobi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 323.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2011), 122–124.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Richard preach a Palm Sunday homily.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Surrendering Love: Weekly Summary

Following Christ Crucified

God Surrenders to Us in Love

Love Poured Out

Love of Others Begins with Love of Self

Expanding Circles of Love

Allowing Life to Wax and Wane

Category Archive

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Stay connected

explore more

A Surrendering Love: Weekly Summary

Following Christ Crucified

God Surrenders to Us in Love

Love Poured Out

Love of Others Begins with Love of Self

Expanding Circles of Love

Allowing Life to Wax and Wane

Category Archive

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