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Surrender: Your Way to Spiritual Health and Freedom
Book by Hynes, Mary
102 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1999
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August 14, 2014
I think the first thirty-three pages of this book are an amazingly clear and helpful discussion of the concept of surrender described by a person with a pretty analytic, literal frame of mind, and so extremely helpful to me. Surrender is a concept I have a hard time defining well enough to use. This book has the potential to help with that tremendously. As a depressed literalist, I am quite capable of taking, say, Jesus' [translated!] pronouncement "He who loves his life in this world will lose it, and who hates his life will find it" like this: Hey, I'm *SUPPOSED* to hate my life! I must be on the right track! Right, because nothing else in the Bible contradicts that interpretation in ANY way. Yes, it sounds stupid, but that sort of thinking has been lurking in the background of my life for all my thirty-five years. It takes Dr. Hynes three chapters to lay out a reasonably precise answer to the questions implicit in statements like this, and for that matter, in my twelve-step program, where "surrender" is also essential, but a solid definition for a person like me is lacking.
The book then starts to get repetitive. I didn't glean any extra value from the remaining chapters. Mary starts to wander off into the weeds, with occasional allusions to her being a liberal Catholic. Gee, that's great. I'm glad your Irish Catholic mother and grandmother gave you all these fuzzy notions about thumbing your nose at the precepts of the Church. Meanwhile, your point is...?
One sharp weakness in the book is Dr. Hynes' idea that authentic surrender never involves "emotional violence" to oneself. I wonder if she ever dealt seriously with an addict. There are definitely holes that a human being can fall into where the only way out involves cutting a behavior or line of thought off in a way that cannot be described as anything other than "emotionally violent." It's possible that if you parsed her words even more carefully than I did, you might find how this sort of situation is actually accommodated in her system, but even if that's true, I think that pronouncement is too easily misconstruable by a whole range of people, from timid anxious nothings to domestic batterers, who can use their emotions to hide from truth and NEVER COME OUT. I think the "emotional violence" concept is on to something, but there absolutely needs to be more nuance in the way it's thought out and presented.
Still, an excellent book. I plan to read the first three chapters again immediately.
The book then starts to get repetitive. I didn't glean any extra value from the remaining chapters. Mary starts to wander off into the weeds, with occasional allusions to her being a liberal Catholic. Gee, that's great. I'm glad your Irish Catholic mother and grandmother gave you all these fuzzy notions about thumbing your nose at the precepts of the Church. Meanwhile, your point is...?
One sharp weakness in the book is Dr. Hynes' idea that authentic surrender never involves "emotional violence" to oneself. I wonder if she ever dealt seriously with an addict. There are definitely holes that a human being can fall into where the only way out involves cutting a behavior or line of thought off in a way that cannot be described as anything other than "emotionally violent." It's possible that if you parsed her words even more carefully than I did, you might find how this sort of situation is actually accommodated in her system, but even if that's true, I think that pronouncement is too easily misconstruable by a whole range of people, from timid anxious nothings to domestic batterers, who can use their emotions to hide from truth and NEVER COME OUT. I think the "emotional violence" concept is on to something, but there absolutely needs to be more nuance in the way it's thought out and presented.
Still, an excellent book. I plan to read the first three chapters again immediately.
Displaying 1 of 1 review