Okay, I Surrender
Spirituality and Health Magazine Fall
2001
© Melissa Gayle West
On my birthday, September 6, 2001, I leaned against the redwood
in the center of a labyrinth at Harmony Hill Retreat Center,
where I am program director, and prayed for a word to guide my
next birth-year. I kissed the soft, fissured bark and heard, "Surrender."
My eyes startled open. Surrender? I was looking for something
more comforting. Healing, perhaps. Or abundance. Or joy. With
a shudder - what would I be asked to surrender to? - I reluctantly
prayed to learn more of its graces and gifts. I've been a psychologist
for more than 20 years and have worked with cancer patients here
at Harmony Hill for five years. If I've learned anything, it
is to pay attention to these gifts of the spirit. But surrender?
Ouch!
Five days later - September 11, 2001 - I was once more at the
center of the redwood labyrinth, this time with the Harmony Hill
staff and 15 women in gray overalls from the Women's Correctional
Center who had been working in the gardens. We held one another
and cried as the world erupted in fire and pain. In the weeks
that followed, I woke up afraid of anthrax and went to bed terrified
of nuclear attack. I cried at the pictures of the dead and families
left behind. I didn't know if I was more scared of the terrorists
or the political climate.
Then my best friend, Gretchen, was hospitalized with cancer.
When we first became friends, I was visited by a recurrent, touching
image of us gardening together as little old ladies. After her
diagnosis, I didn't know if she would live that long. Helpless
to stem the tide of her nausea and pain, I swam through those
months doing my best to keep my head above anger, grief, and
despair. I wanted desperately to return to the ease and relative
unconsciousness of my old life, but I couldn't. I felt betrayed
by God.
Contemplative Bede Griffiths described three paths to the center:
a near-death experience, falling in love, and meditation. Trauma
can be a fourth. It differs from Griffiths' three because trauma,
whether personal like Gretchen's lymphoma, or collective like
the devastation of September 11, can contract and harden our
hearts and souls or it can break them open, allowing the unbearable
to heal us into life. For the past five years, I have witnessed
participants in Harmony Hill's cancer retreats surrender to the
mystery of their journeys, and offer a passionate and unreserved
Yes to life even in great pain and uncertainty.
Surrender is a dirty word in our control-focused culture, smacking
of defeat and failure (one cancer retreat participant called
it "the S-word"). But Surrender, I would tell them,
is not giving up: Its Latin root means "to give back." In
surrender, we simply give back to God what is not ours, the ultimate "control" of
life, to receive the love awaiting us at that Center which is
our home."Surrendering yourself to God," says Buddhist
teacher Shantideva, "is giving up what you really can't
keep in order to realize what you really can't lose."
Surrender takes many forms. We may need to surrender to the
truth of a situation, rather than resist it. The ultimate surrender
is to the Loving Presence in whom we live and move - letting
go of outcome, trusting that it is cradled in the wide arms of
the Beloved. "All shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well," said the medieval
Christian mystic Julian of Norwich.
I knew all this, but it didn't help. Back in college, my friends
and I shook our fists at the stars, reciting, "Do not go
gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the
light." I had vowed to go down fighting, and I was still
shaking my fist at God. Nothing in my life, my culture, or even
my own teaching, had shown me how to surrender. I needed to find
a way to understand surrender that bypassed the desperate attempts
to grasp it with my mind.
But gradually I dropped down into my heart and body and I understood.
I remembered the difference between "having sex" and
surrendering to the sweet vulnerability of lovemaking; I remembered
surrendering to the contractions of childbirth, the bracing joy
of swimming laps, the ecstasy of performing Bach fugues and Beethoven
sonatas.
I searched for a practice to let my heart lead me into deeper
surrender and discovered it in the five-times prayer, Salat,
of the Muslims. I learned to bow before the immense grace of
What Is under the tutelage of a teacher of Sufism - the mystical
branch of Islam. I added my own prayer to the postures: Oh God,
I surrender my mind to Your wisdom, my heart to Your love, my
life to Your healing presence. I prostrated myself right into
the boundless arms of the Beloved.
Nothing changed on the outside: Gretchen still struggled with
chemotherapy's devastation. The world still wrestled with terrorism.
Women widowed that September morning gave birth to fatherless
babies. My response, for the most part, changed. Life opened
up. I stroked Gretchen's hand, watching her wince as the chemotherapy
needles pierced her skin, and I remembered to breathe, to soften,
to surrender to the present moment: a room full of people suffering
with cancer; an inhumane and overloaded medical system; nurses
doing their best to dispense caring and hope as well as drugs.
I read the news, grieved for the women and children in Afghanistan,
fumed over Americans' quiescence as civil liberties fell away.
The more I practiced surrendering it all to God's wisdom and
care, the more I could open my heart to it all. I lit candles
for peace, signed petitions, and surrendered the outcome of everything
back to where it belonged, in God's hands. When I was frightened
by the possibility of Gretchen dying, I prayed to let go and
trust the larger unfolding. I began to viscerally understand
Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things
I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
Gretchen's last CAT scan came out clean. At the time of this
writing, the world is relatively calm. We have just completed
our 33rd cancer retreat at Harmony Hill, once again reminded
of the tremendous healing inherent in surrendering to the love
that shines through us all.
I am now tempted to quit my prostrations, dismissing them as
medicine for an acute ailment now cured. But I know that this
relative quiescence will pass. Gretchen, like all cancer survivors,
will live with the uncertainty of being in remission. We all
live with tremendous fragility, so I will continue Salat, knowing
that my prostrations will ensure neither peace nor a "happy
ending" for myself or anyone else. They simply remind me,
breath after breath, to keep opening my heart wide to love and
the wild adventure of living in these times. Jelaluddin Rumi,
a 12th-century Su®? mystic who also lived in wild times,
wrote:
Gamble everything for love,
if you're a true human being.
Half-heartedness doesn't reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses.
Trauma shocks us out of half-heartedness. Surrender keeps us
out of those mean-spirited roadhouses, and on the path of love.
Spirituality & Health Magazine
Issue: Winter 2003
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