Surrender to Love E-Book

David G. Benner

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Spiritual Journey
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 177

Beschreibung

Surrender to the Only Perfectly Trustworthy Love In our self-reliant era, most of us recoil from the concept of surrendering to a power or authority outside ourselves. But surrender need not be seen as threatening, especially when the One to whom we surrender is the epitome of goodness and love. God doesn't want his people to respond to him out of fear or obligation. Rather, he invites us to enter into an authentic relationship of intimacy and devotion. And so God calls us to move beyond mere obedience—by surrendering to love. In this profound book, David G. Benner explores the twin themes of love and surrender as the heart of Christian spirituality. Through careful examination of Scripture and reflection on the Christian tradition, Benner shows how God bids us to trust fully in his perfect love. God is love, and he intends for you to live in his love. Surrender to Love will lead you to an unexpected place, where yieldedness to God frees you to become who he created you to be. This expanded edition, one of three titles in The Spiritual Journey trilogy, includes: - A new epilogue - An experiential guide with questions for individual reflection, as well as - Questions for group discussion.

Leseprobe

The Spiritual Journey

When applied to the spiritual life, the metaphor of a journey is both helpful and somewhat misleading. Helpfully it reflects the fact that the essence of spirituality is a process—specifically, a process of transformation. Unhelpfully it obscures the fact that we are already what we seek and where we long to arrive—specifically, in God. Once we realize this, the nature of the journey reveals itself to be more one of awakening than accomplishment, more one of spiritual awareness than spiritual achievement.

There are, however, two very good reasons to describe the spiritual life in terms of a journey. First, it fits well with our experience. We are aware that the self that begins the spiritual journey is not the same as the one that ends it. The changes in identity and consciousness—how we understand what it means to be me and our inner experience of passing through life—are both sufficiently profound as to be best described as transformational. The same is true for the changes in our capacity for love and the functioning of our will and desires.

The second reason is that the spiritual journey involves following a path. Much more than adopting a set of beliefs, a path is a practice or set of practices that will characterize our whole life. Following this path is the way we participate in our transformation. It is the way we journey into God and, as we do, discover that all along we have already been in God. It is the way our identity, consciousness and life become grounded in our self-in-God and God’s self-in-us.

Christian spirituality is taking on the mind and heart of Christ as we recognize Christ as the deepest truth of our being. It is actualizing the Christ who is in us. It is becoming fully and deeply human. It is experiencing and responding to the world through the mind and heart of God as we align ourselves with God’s transformational agenda of making all things new in Christ. It is participating in the very life of God.

This trilogy describes the foundational Christian practice of surrender, how this practice emerges as a response to Perfect Love, and the changes this produces in our identity, will and deepest desires. Each of the three books focuses on one of these strands while interweaving it with the others. Together they serve as a manual for walking the spiritual path as God’s heart and mind slowly but truly become our own. The Spiritual Journey trilogy includes:

Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

Desiring God’s Will: Aligning Our Hearts with the Heart of God

SURRENDER TO LOVE

Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

DAVID G. BENNER

Foreword byM. Basil Pennington

www.IVPress.com/books

To Juliet

Contents

Foreword by M. Basil Pennington

Preface: Surrender, Love and Spirituality

1 It All Begins with Love

2 Love and Fear

3 Surrender and Obedience

4 Transformed by Love

5 Becoming Love

Epilogue: Surrender and the Spiritual Journey

Appendix: For Reflection and Discussion

A Five-Session Discussion Guide to Surrender to Love

A One-Session Discussion Guide to Surrender to Love

Notes

Praise for Surrender to Love

About the Author

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Foreword

by Dom M. Basil Pennington, OCSO

This slim little book is one of the most beautiful, powerful and insightful books I have ever read. It took me several weeks to read. Right from the first chapter, Dr. Benner’s shared reflections, arising out of his lived experience and those of some of his patients, impelled me to spend hours just sitting, allowing the divine, unconditional love to pervade my being. Never before had I been able to so accept my sinfulness, my weaknesses, and my addictions and allow them to be before God, knowing that this prodigal Father’s love would in no way be deterred by them—rather that love would be the healing of them. And more: that love immediately flowed out upon all others, most especially those whom I had hurt, healing them wholly of all the hurt I had caused, if only they allowed it.

Surrender to Love brings us quickly beyond all the effort of willful love, all the need for any pretense, all the shame and self-hate, to the open space of an unearned, unlimited, wholly gratuitous love that allows nothing to stand in its way save our refusal to accept it. It is surprising how we fight against Love’s accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves—our defective, wounded, malicious self. But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!

The subtitle of this book is “Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality,” and I think that this is just that. At heart, essentially and necessarily, Christianity is a question of accepting a love that went so almost unbelievably far as to sacrifice the Love’s own beloved Son for me, for you, for each one of us, no matter how miserably unworthy we are of such love.

Benner is perhaps influenced by the Ignatian way as he invites us to allow our imaginations to bring us into the experience of that smelly little tramp embraced by the prodigal Father, all his foulness cloaked over with the Father’s own cloak; or that little one who, despite apostolic remonstrance, climbs up and snuggles in Jesus’ lap. Too much feeling, too much emotion, too much sentimentalism? Then why did God become a man who can feel, can have all the sentiments of the human heart, can give expression in a fully human way to the longing love that impelled him to create us for such love?

I hope that this little book will be for you the blessing it has been for me. It is so difficult for us to open to love—because we know in the end we will have to return love for love. Anything that helps us to open to this, which is the basic fabric of our lives, this interweaving of love, this embrace of divine love for which our whole naked being longs, is a great grace. May Dr. Benner’s book be such a grace for you as it has been for me.

Preface

Surrender, Love and Spirituality

Afew years ago I received an email from a woman who told me she had greatly enjoyed my previous books but was furious over something she had discovered in a recent one. “I can’t believe that you recommend surrender,” she said. “As a psychologist, you of all people should know how dangerous it is to submit to someone.” She went on to accuse me of being irresponsible as a spiritual guide and “a typical male” in my “uncritical acceptance of the way power is abused in relationships.” I had obviously hit a nerve!

I will tell more of this woman’s story in the pages that follow. It is a story that dramatically illustrates the transforming possibilities of surrender to divine love. But it also reminds us how frightening even the idea of surrender is to some people.

The concept of surrender has come upon hard times in recent years. Some view it as too close to submission; others associate it with codependence or an abdication of personal power. Consequently, the notion of surrendering to anything or anyone has become suspect.

However, despite the unpopularity of the notion, surrender plays a crucial role in the spiritual journey as understood by most major religions and spiritual traditions. Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation.

Christians often focus on obedience more than surrender. But while the two concepts are closely related, they differ in important ways. As we shall see, surrender is foundational to Christian spirituality and is the soil out of which obedience should grow. Christ does not simply want our compliance. He wants our heart. He wants our love and he offers us his. He invites us to surrender to his love.

Christianity puts surrender to love right at the core of the spiritual journey. Christ-following is saying yes to God’s affirming Yes! to us. If it is anything less than a response to love, Christ-following is not fully Christian.

Christianity is the world’s great love religion. The Christian God comes to us as love, in love, for love. The Christian God woos us with love and works our transformation through love.

In spite of the trivializing influence of romantic and sentimental views of love in Western culture, love is the strongest force in the universe. Gravity may hold planets in orbit and nuclear force may hold the atom together, but only love has the power to transform persons.

Only love can soften a hard heart. Only love can renew trust after it has been shattered. Only love can inspire acts of genuine self-sacrifice. Only love can free us from the tyrannizing effects of fear.

There is nothing more important in life than learning to love and be loved. Jesus elevated love as the goal of spiritual transformation. Psychoanalysts consider it the capstone of psychological growth. Giving and receiving love is at the heart of being human. It is our raison d’être.

This book is about love—not the soft, sentimental kind but the strong, spirit-transforming kind. It is about the paradoxical ways we often fear love and the way love uniquely offers release from our deepest fears. It is about the consequences of building the spiritual journey around anything else than surrender to love. And it is about knowing ourselves to be deeply loved by God as the first step in becoming genuinely great lovers of others and God.

But because this book is about love, it is also about surrender and spirituality. Love invites surrender, and surrender is at the core of spirituality. The interweaving of love, surrender and spirituality flows out of both the nature of love and the nature of human beings.

Carl Jung suggests that love and spirituality share many connections and surrender is the most important of them. Love “demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion.”1

Surrender is as much a part of genuine love as it is a part of authentic spirituality. Love invites abandon and intimacy. Love speaks to the depths of our soul, where we yearn for release from our isolation and long for the belonging that will assure us we are at last home. Love speaks the language of the soul as it awakens our hunger for relationship and connection.

The deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation. “Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself,” says John O’Donohue. “No thing is ultimately at one with itself.”2

We seek bridges from our isolation through people, possessions and accomplishment. But none of these are ever quite capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine. This is why the yearning for connection is spiritual. Our needs for love, connection and surrender form the spiritual core of our personhood.

For most people, nothing awakens feelings of deep terror like the experience of absolute disconnection from others. But in the same way, nothing vitalizes the human spirit like the experience of a loving connection—something that assures us that we are not alone and that we count for something to someone.

Love is the glue of connection. Love is the source of the deepest wellsprings of human vitality. Love is the only hope for overcoming our isolation. Love invites surrender and offers the intimacy and deep connection for which we long.

In my work as a psychologist and a spiritual companion I have been blessed to be able to accompany people as they learn to give and receive love. Journeying with others toward psychospiritual wholeness has been a rich opportunity for me to learn about love. Much of what I will present in what follows comes from these experiences.

But my personal journey as a human being and as a Christian has been even more important in this learning. Here I discover how easy it is to know that I am deeply and unconditionally loved and yet continue to strive to earn love. Here I learn how much I resist the very love that holds the promise of freeing me from my striving and fears. Here I learn how profoundly hard it is to make genuine progress in the school of love. And here I learn the most about how surrender to Perfect Love holds the promise of wholeness and holiness.

Those on the Christian spiritual journey form my primary audience for what follows. My own journey is being worked out as a Christ-follower, and my understanding of love is grounded in my experience of being loved by the Christian God.

However, while love plays a distinctive place in Christianity, the experience of love is obviously not restricted to Christians. The ability to love others is the pinnacle of fulfillment and health for all persons. Receiving the gift of love reminds us all of what it is to be fully human. What follows, therefore, should be of interest not just to Christians but also to those pursuing other spiritual paths, as well as those not consciously on a spiritual journey of any sort.

Surrender, love and spirituality—the big themes of this book—are, I believe, the big themes of life. In spite of the messages of Western culture, personal fulfillment lies in connection, not autonomy. Spirituality is the discovery of the fundamental connection that exists between us and God—a connection that then properly aligns us to others, the world and our deepest self. Love is the welcome that tells us that this is where we truly belong, the assurance that we have at last found our place.

All Saints’ Day

Tao Fong Shan Christian Centre

Hong Kong

one

It All Begins with Love

Take a moment and try a simple exercise. The results will tell you a great deal about the nature of your spiritual journey.

Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind?

When I ask people to do this, a surprising number of people say that the first thing they assume God feels is disappointment. Others assume that God feels anger. In both cases, these people are convinced that it is their sin that first catches God’s attention. I think they are wrong—and I think the consequences of such a view of God are enormous.

Recently I talked with the family of a fourteen-year-old boy referred to me by his mother, who had caught him dressing in her clothes. His parents were shocked and disgusted by this behavior, and they told him that God was equally revolted. When they discovered that he had been cross-dressing for some time—occasionally with another boy his age—they said that unless he immediately and permanently stopped he was no longer welcome in their family. They also assured him that God would damn him to an eternity in hell.

It was not much of a surprise to discover that this boy’s view of God was pretty similar to that of his parents. He told me he knew how disgusting he was to God. He said he had stopped asking for forgiveness, as he couldn’t control what he thought and did. Coming to God was simply too painful. He was convinced he knew how God felt about him, and it was not welcoming.

This makes me think about my own family. My parents expressed their love with a reserve that reflected their British background and Canadian culture in the 1950s and 1960s. It was clear, however, that they loved my brother and me deeply. And it was clear that nothing either of us could do or not do would ever change that fact. I know that at times I disappointed my parents. All children do. But this was never their preoccupation. With certainty I know that when they thought of me they felt deep and unqualified love. This made it easy for me to believe them when they told me the same was true of God.

Regardless of what you have come to believe about God based on your life experience, the truth is that when God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face. God bursts with love for humans. He is far from being emotionally uninvolved with his creation. God’s bias toward us is strong, persistent and positive. The Christian God chooses to be known as Love, and that love pervades every aspect of God’s relationship with us.

But . . .

After saying this, however, I think I hear a “but” that bursts forth from some readers. As I have encountered it when speaking on this topic, it often takes the form of “But you are forgetting about sin. Sin changes everything, especially how God feels about us.”

I disagree. I am neither forgetting sin nor minimizing its significance. I will have more to say about sin shortly, and I think it will be clear that I take it seriously. But I do not think that sin changes everything, particularly how God feels about humans. God is simply not that fickle. Like loving parents who can look at their children with disappointment that in no way dilutes their love, the God in whose image such parents are made loves us with a love that is not dependent on our behavior. If at least some humans can do this, how dare we question God’s ability to do the same?

God’s love is never compromised by anger. The presence of anger does not mean the absence of love—particularly in God. Love is God’s character, not simply an emotion. What a small god we would have if divine character was dependent on our behavior. The Christian God is not like this. The Christian God is slow to anger and rich in mercy (see Exodus 34:6, echoed in Joel 2:13 and many other places in Scripture). He is quite unlike the god we would create if we were making him in our image.

I said that the answer to this question about how God sees us has important implications for our spiritual journey. Think for a moment about how Christ-following develops if you assume God looks at you with disgust, disappointment, frustration or anger.

The central feature of any spiritual response to such a God will be an effort to earn his approval. Far from daring to relax in his presence, you will be vigilant to perform as well as you possibly can. The motive for any obedience you might offer will be fear rather than love, and there will be little genuine surrender. Surrender involves relaxing, and you must feel safe before you can relax. How could anyone ever expect to feel safe enough to relax in the presence of a God who is preoccupied with their shortcomings and failures?

I have known many Christians like this. The parents I described at the beginning of this chapter thought of the Christian life as measuring up to divine expectations by avoiding sin. This leaves little room for grace, little room for knowing and enjoying God or resting in his love. The boy’s father assured me that as a Christian I should understand that God and sin simply cannot go together. It was not my place to debate theology, but I knew that while he wanted to uphold the holiness of God, he had absolutely failed to understand Christ’s incarnation. The Christian God doesn’t turn away from sinners in disgust but moves toward us, bringing us his redemptive presence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Christians who assume that God is preoccupied with sin tend themselves to adopt the same focus. In fact they often seem to think that they honor God by taking sin as seriously as they do. Sometimes they judge other Christians by how seriously they seem to treat sin. Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God’s hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God’s love, they often experience very little of it.

What a different relationship begins to develop when you realize that God is head-over-heels in love with you. God is simply giddy about you. He just can’t help loving you. And he loves you deeply, recklessly and extravagantly—just as you are. God knows you are a sinner, but your sins do not surprise him. Nor do they reduce in the slightest his love for you.

Perhaps you find yourself wanting to believe that this is true of God but still not convinced. Fortunately, we do not have to be uncertain about God’s attitude toward us. It is clearly revealed in the life and teaching of Jesus.

The Prodigal Father