Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality (The Spiritual Journey, #1)

by David G. Benner

When I am confronted with my frequent failures in love, my first instinct has always been to try harder. I recognize the poverty of my love. I recall how love is the single most important criterion of my spiritual transformation. I feel regret and discouragement. I pray for help in being more loving. I try harder. And nothing changes. The reason nothing changes is that the focus is still on me—my failures, my remorse, my discouragement, my effort. Love requires leaving all of this behind—all my self-preoccupation and all my willful striving. Love cannot be simply a result of discipline and resolve. It must flow from the heart. Regardless of the amount of love I naturally tend to have in my heart, it is not enough. The love I need is the love of God as his love becomes mine. Christian conversion is not merely encountering love. Nor is it developing new ideas or values about love. Nor is it committing myself to trying to be loving. Christian conversion involves becoming love. But like all becoming that occurs on the Christian spiritual journey, becoming love involves death. In spite of how central the cross is to the Christian story, Christians are always tempted to minimize its importance in their own journey. We want a spirituality of success and ascent, not a spirituality of failure and descent. We want a spirituality of improvement, not a spirituality of transformation. But the way of the cross is the way of descent, abandon and death. This is the foolishness of the gospel.

Christian love emerges only from the journey through the cross. There are no shortcuts that allow us to bypass the cross on the Christian spiritual journey.

Love and love alone is capable of making a person willing to give up his or her own life in loving others. Love always involves not just saying yes to someone but also saying no to self. The life of love is a life of death to the kingdom of self.

For only if I have met the heart of God in love can I ever hope that his heart of love might become mine.

It is only when I give up trying to be more loving that God’s love can really touch me. It is only when I come to him in the midst of my failures in love that his love can transform me.

Ultimately, taking care of Number One takes care of no one. For the only way to truly care for myself is to give myself in love of others. There I will find my truest and deepest fulfillment.

Love that comes from the heart of God connects us to all of God’s children. It also connects us to his creation—our world. God’s heart of love moves me from the isolation of self-interest to a connection with life that cannot allow any ultimate divisions or categories. Love cannot exclude concern for social justice. Nor can it exclude ecological concern for the planet. Love cannot exclude concern for any human being, because all humans bear the image of the Christian God, whose heart is increasingly becoming our heart.

Because God is love, and because human beings are made in God’s image, love is who we are. Love is not, first and foremost, something that we do. More basically, it is who we are. It is in loving (or not loving) that we are (or are not) human. It is in heeding the call of love—in making life-affirming connections—that we become human. . . . Loving is not merely one thing among others that we are called to do—an extraordinary achievement, a heroic gesture that completes ordinary acts and raises them to a higher level. Love is not an additive, a spiritual supplement reserved for saints. . . . Loving is of the essence of being human, the connective tissue of reality, the oxygen of life.

Growth in love is not an accomplishment but the receipt of a gift.

Conversion is a process—a lifelong journey of formation, de-formation and re-formation. It is the ongoing journey of being born and reborn and reborn again—over and over. But rather than being bad news, suggesting a job that is never ending, this is actually good news, revealing a life that is never ending!11

Real change is possible. We do not have to be victims of either our personality or our past. The gospel proclaims the availability of transforming love for all persons, and the process of that transformation is the same for all. Only the details of our journeys differ.

The truth is that we must all surrender to something or someone. To refuse to find our place in relation to that which transcends the ego is to be in bondage to futile attempts to be in control. If we do not become free in relation to the something or someone larger than our self, we become unfree in relation to tyrannizing powers within our self that we have inflated into god-like proportions.

Doing so, however, we never become the Divine essence. Union is not fusion. In union with God, human personality is neither lost nor converted into divine personality. It is, however, transformed in ways that are sufficiently profound as to be worthy of being described as rebirth.

Only when we are willing to recognize that we do not control life can we truly offer our consent to the inflow of Grace. Willingly opening our hands and releasing things we normally cling to is the most important way we can offer that consent. Only when we truly welcome the unwanted can we be free of our natural upsetting reactions to it that cage our spirits, darken our souls and damage our bodies.