Quotes About Surrender

God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object.

Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.

all mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone.

We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.

Remember finally, that the ashes on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.

We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the "naked self before the naked God." That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very "mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!

People who have been initiated broke through in what felt like breaking down.

All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go

In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of "winning" now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God.

There are three primary things that we have to let go of. First is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the compulsion to be right—even, and especially, to be theologically right…. Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control. I

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

You rest in God, not in outcomes.

It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.

Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don't know love, when we don't experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will only see what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. . . . So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say.

The spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we're prepared for death's final letting go.

So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must "hate" your home base in some way and make choices beyond it.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of "common sense," of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful "Beatrice.

As my father, St. Francis, put it, when the heart is pure, "Love responds to Love alone" and has little to do with duty, obligation, requirement, or heroic anything. It is easy to surrender when you know that nothing but Love and Mercy is on the other side.

In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete "decision to turn our lives over to the care of God," even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.

We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted—for nothing! "Or grace would not be grace at all"! (Romans 11:6).