Surrender
Sometimes, when we experience particular resistance to an idea we need to understand, the rug is pulled out from under our feet, and we no longer have any choice but acceptance. In the summer of 2001 I made a pilgrimage to Konya, the city in western Turkey where the thirteenth-century mystic poet Rumi lived most of his life and where he found and then lost his beloved friend and teacher, Shems-i-Tabriz.
I should explain that I am not someone who is comfortable with full prostrations, be they Buddhist or Muslim. At Shems’s tomb (he was murdered and his body never found, but this is the place where his coffin stands and where he is eternally remembered) I prostrated myself with the other women, but it made me uneasy. Later in the day, when we returned to our hotel, I missed my footing on the two low steps at the entrance to the restaurant. Before I knew it I had been catapulted face down on the ground and could not get up.
People rushed to my aid and carried me to a chair. Quantities of ice arrived, someone administered jin shin jitsu, and our ever-cheerful bus driver, who spoke no English, sat beside me and held my hand in his firm grasp. I had never had an accident in my life, and here I was completely immobile. People were asking if I thought I’d broken any bones and whether a doctor should be called. Since I was able to wiggle my toes, I didn’t think anything was broken, and I assumed that it was just a bad sprain, which only rest and time would heal, so I didn’t opt for a doctor. What I really wanted was a strong Scotch, but this was impossible because the hotel was strictly Muslim and therefore dry. My whole system had received such a violent shock that my torso shuddered for about ten minutes. I drank two whole bottles of water instead of the longed-for whiskey.
After dinner (to which I was carried by our driver and our guide), five dervishes arrived to give us a private demonstration of “turning” or “whirling.” As I sat watching them, it came to me that Shems, or perhaps Rumi, had heard what was reverberating in my mind and had responded: “You don’t like to humble yourself before Allah? Who cares what you like or don’t like? Down you go without more ado.” I had, it seemed, finally got my “come-downance.” I am reluctant to participate in rituals, and the evening promised to be one where we were expected to join in and learn how to perform zikr, or “remembrance of God.” I observed rather ruefully that it was amazing the lengths I was willing to go to, to avoid surrender and give up the tight control I try to exercise over myself all the time! Yet wasn’t the whole point of the pilgrimage to Turkey (and, indeed, of my life) the remembrance of God?
The usual translation of “Islam” is “surrender,” and the implication is that the surrender is to God. But in his novel Abandon, Pico Iyer describes how, if you see surrender in terms of a surrendering of rather than surrendering to, it becomes clear that what has to be given up is everything. We are such nitpickers—perhaps willing to give up this or that (for now, but probably not forever). But giving up everything? This is a tall order. When I was taught Transcendental Meditation, someone told me that nothing should come between you and the Divine, not even a mantra. Eventually even the mantra must be surrendered for there to be complete union. In India, around the third century B.C., the sage Patanjali wrote in his Yoga Sutras of aparigraha, or “not grasping or claiming,” and of ishvarapranidhana, or “surrender to the Lord,” two requisites, he said, for living a life of purity and devotion. Later, these ideas of nonattachment were developed by the Buddha. The question is What do they mean for us in the twenty-first century? The basic human condition has not changed, however much loot we have accumulated in our closets, our minds, and our hearts. How can we divest ourselves of all that we cling to in each and every moment of our lives?
