Thy Will Be Done: A Sweet Surrender

Sermon by Beth Nalick on July 23, 2006

 

I           Introduction

How did this happen? How is it that a frazzled and completely stressed-out woman - who, mind you, has been frequenting the Twilight Zone more often than not, finds herself standing before you this morning – at the pulpit- delivering a sermon. A sermon that requires a lot of time and effort to compose all of which I feel I have precious little of – How did this happen?

 

I do recall Mona Hebert coercing me – excuse me – gently asking me one Sunday after service if I would accept this burden – sorry – I mean invitation to stand before you today and fill your minds and hearts with something spiritually and emotionally profound.

 

So how did it happen that I ever so graciously accepted this invitation without even the slightest bit of hesitation – when the voice in my head was screaming “NO!”

Did I accept because I was raised to never shy away from responsibility and duty, especially when I am needed OR was it simply because standing next to me was my daughter and nephew, and how could I let them think I was not up to the challenge? – How did this happen?

 

Thinking I had a couple of months to work on this put me at ease, until Mary Johnson shattered my calm with an email asking me to send her information about the topic of my sermon for the July newsletter. What topic?

 

I can tell you I was afraid that Mary’s request would cost me several hours of sleep – but it didn’t. Shortly after retiring for the evening, eyes closed and drifting in to the silence of sleep – out of nowhere the word “ACCEPT” came to me, surfacing from somewhere deep within, as if it were drowning and coming up for air – (gasp deep breath) “ACCEPT”   And at that moment I knew in what direction my sermon was to take me. I HAD A TOPIC!

 

II   How does it happen that acceptance – which has become a close companion of mine – taps me on the shoulder and tells me to step aside and follow its lead, giving me focus, clarity, and ultimately a good night’s sleep? I can’t explain those moments of incredible coincidence that occasionally visit me, but I can tell you that the idea of acceptance couldn’t have arrived at a better time in my life. Not only did I need a topic, but my self-will, my insistence on directing the course of my life – my efforts at control - to call my own shots - were definitely wearing me down. So I needed a wake-up call. And acceptance literally did just that.

 

Acceptance has also paid nightly visits to Paul McCartney of Beatles’ fame. He said often while he slept in times of trouble, his mother, Mary, who died when he was 14, would come to him whispering words of wisdom, “Let It Be.” In other words, to accept…leave life alone…there will be an answer, let it be.

 

A. The journey to acceptance for me is often a volatile and emotional experience. But once I arrive, it embraces me like a warm and loving friend enveloping me with peace, comfort and serenity.  Unfortunately I know of only one way to get there – the way I have been taught - through prayer. Eastern religions and other New Age philosophies have their own routes. They are increasingly becoming very attractive to me – because of their softer, gentler approach to acceptance – which is typically through meditation.

 

But you may be thinking? How does this woman pray if it is such and emotional and volatile experience? It’s not the praying, but the journey that is so difficult. I’ll explain.

 

B. I have always been a prayerful person; literally schooled in Catholicism from birth through college. I can recite all the classic prayers: the Hail Mary, Our Father, Act of Contrition, the Memorarae, and Glory Be to the Father. I can say a mean rosary – the repetitive chanting of the Hail Marys –one decade at a time – interspersed with Our Fathers and Glory Be’s. Saying the rosary can sure make the hour and ½ of an MRI fly by. These prayers are so ingrained in my psyche, they simply pop into my head, especially in times of stress. That’s ok - I recognize them for what they are: habit, a part of my past and perhaps it’s the result of a subtle form of brainwashing by the Mercy nuns who taught me. It all depends on your point of view.

 

And in addition to the ‘scripted’ prayers, I am also proficient at ad libbing. I talk to God constantly. I would like to think my prayers have matured over time – from the self-centered, childish prayers of youth, like asking God for that certain bike for Christmas or letting me win the beautiful doll at the school’s raffle – to the more mature, more humanitarian, selfless prayers - like asking for world peace.

 

C. Mature perhaps…. Selfless – NO.  While I no longer pray for material things, I now humbly and gratefully pray for ABSTRACT NOUNS. “Fill my heart with love; let me live my life with generosity, trustworthiness, with kindness, empathy…Give me clarity, courage. Give me patience … peace of mind. OR I’ll ask God for directions – as if God were On Star or Mapquest – ‘Point me in the right direction or Show me the way.’ These are the prayers that make up my day, keep me grounded and self-aware.

 

And then there are the prayers during crises and times of real suffering, when I simply can not endure any longer whatever it is that has invaded my life, I’ll scream at God – with a powerful anger – “STOP THIS – MAKE THIS GO AWAY – I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

 

And when I am finished screaming at God, tired and spent of emotion, in complete resignation, I surrender and pray “THY WILL BE DONE”. Not my will be done, mind you, but God’s will. And in that moment of surrender to God and acceptance to the Now and what IS – my suffering ceases and my mind is at peace.

 

When I pray this way it reminds me of what the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says about prayer.   He says that whenever we pray, we should cry out, imagining ourselves hanging from a cliff by our hair, with a tempest raging around us so violently that we are sure we have only a few seconds left to be saved. Buber goes on, “And in truth there is no counsel, no refuge, and no peace for anyone save to lift up his eyes and his heart to God and to cry out to him. One should do this at all times, for a man is in great danger in the world.”

 

These are the prayers that come only after I have struggled and wrestled with my self-will, struggled to hold on to control of things that are impossible to control, and struggled with emotions that should have left my heart long ago. This is the volatile emotional journey I spoke of earlier. So if I eventually surrender to the Will of God, why do I do this to myself?

 

D. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in his book Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness, explains that my unawareness of an impending emotional meltdown or wrestling match for control is just that -  unawareness or mindlessness to the here and now of life. I quote “Much of mindlessness is not simply innocent or insensitive, quaint or clueless. Much of the time it is actively harmful, wittingly or unwittingly, both to oneself and the others with whom we come in contact or share our lives.”

 

He goes on to reveal what Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, mindfulness teacher, poet, and peace activist, gives as a reason why we should practice mindfulness. He says because “….most of the time we are unwittingly practicing its opposite. Every time we get angry we get better at being angry and reinforce the anger habit. When it is really bad, we say we see red, which means we don’t see accurately what is happening at all, and so, in that moment, you could say we have “lost” our mind. Every time we become self-absorbed, we get better at becoming self-absorbed and going unconscious. Every time we get anxious, we get better at being anxious. Practice does make perfect. Without awareness of anger or of self-absorption, or ennui, or any other mind state that can take us over when it arises, we reinforce those synaptic networks within the nervous system that underlie our conditioned behaviors and mindless habits, and from which it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle ourselves, if we are even aware of what is happening at all. Every moment in which we are caught, by desire, by an emotion, by an unexamined impulse, idea, or opinion, in a very real way we are instantly imprisoned by the contraction within the habitual way we react, whether it is a habit of withdrawal and distancing ourselves, as in depression and sadness, or erupting and getting emotionally ‘highjacked’ by our feelings when we fall headlong into anxiety or anger.

 

It is at this moment that we can simply choose not to fall into the trap – the trap of the automaticity of our reactions and their downstream consequences. We can recover more quickly– if we can bring awareness to it.”

 

Although practicing mindfulness through meditation appears to be hard work, it is something I am very interested in pursuing especially if Kabat-Zinn sees “meditation as an act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others…”  In my past I have experienced some very dark moments, and at the time I was not well-equipped to deal with the stress of infidelity, my ex-husband’s mental illness, financial crisis, and a newborn. In hindsight, I lost a lot of my life worrying about things I really couldn’t control, and I suffered greatly. Meditation would have saved me from myself. I knew my life was changing and I refused to accept it. I held on to a marriage that was killing me and my children. And although I prayed fervently, my Catholic guilt prevented me from seeing that I was not responsible. I was frozen like a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

 

In their book, “Life Lessons,” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler write, “change…usually begins with a door closing, an ending, a completion, a loss, a death. Then we enter an uncomfortable period, mourning this completion and living in the uncertainty of what is next. This period is hard. But just when we feel we can’t take it anymore, something new emerges: a reintegration, a reinvestment, a new beginning. A door opens. If you fight change, you will be fighting your whole life. That’s why we need to find a way to embrace change, or at least to accept it. Through aspiring to accept life on life’s terms we begin to move from feeling like a victim and blaming the world around us. We get a glimmer of a larger purpose at work in our lives.”

 

 As they say in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today…I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is suppose to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.”

 

III. This concept of accepting life on life’s terms (which for me means surrendering to the will of God) and the concept of a powerful but benevolent force (God) in control of the universe, as well as, other spiritual beliefs of mine, were discussed with Ron Glossop, our resident philosopher.  When I asked for his philosophical opinion about divine intervention and surrendering to the will of God, he told me I must be a Stoic, and he steered me in the direction of Epictetus and the ethics of Stoicism, as well as, to a sermon that he presented on that topic entitled Stoic Topics for Today which can be found online in our church’s sermon archives. I encourage you to read it.

 

A. Who was Epictetus and what exactly is the philosophy of Stoicism that I am supposed to be unwittingly practicing?

 

Epictetus was a Roman slave born in Hieropolis in (which is now Turkey) around A.D. 55. He was the slave of a former slave, Epaphroditus, who allowed Epictetus to study the philosophy of the Stoics before freeing him. Epictetus, eventually set up his own philosophical school in the city of Nicopolis on the Adriatic coast of northwest Greece. His teachings influenced such men as Hadrian, the Roman emperor and Lucius Flavianus Arrianus Xenophon, who was an historian and thankfully recorded Epictetus’s school lectures and conversations. This book is entitled the Discourses.

 

Discourses influenced the great Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius Antoninus who was emperor of Rome from A.D. 161 to 180. Aurelius’s own book, Meditations, was largely a reflection of the basic Stoic ideas of Epictetus.

 

Epictetus died in A.D. 135 when Aurelius was 14 years old. Apart from his teachings, there is not much to know about the man Epictetus, other than he was a slave, crippled, and he married and adopted a son late in his life.

 

B. What is the philosophy of the Stoics? Stoics believed in the rational order of the universe, the relative insignificance of the individual or anti-egoism, the significance of the community of man, that God can be found in each human, that the whole of the universe is God, (they were pantheists), adherence to what is now called “the Golden Rule”, and just how powerless man is in the total scheme of things. And since Stoicism is a pre-Christian philosophy, they had no concept of grace or redemption. They believed in free will governed by rational choices. These rational choices should lead man to live a virtuous life - to live wisely, courageously, justly, and temperately. He could not be forced to form judgments or to have beliefs, or simply to act without voluntarily choosing to do so. Man was free to choose his attitudes, emotional responses, and his overall mental outlook.

 

To quote Ron, “Given the Stoic doctrine of how little power we have in the big scheme of things, one might ask whether we have any free will at all. The Stoic answer is, Yes, you have free will in the sense that you can control your reactions to what happens and in the sense that you can try to do one thing or another – though whether your efforts succeed is not within your control. Whether you are healthy or sick is to a great extent out of your control, but the attitude you have toward your sickness is within your control.

 

And what are the possible attitudes you might have. Essentially, there are two, (1) acceptance or (2) lamentation and complaining. How often we are wont to think, Why did this happen to me? But note the egotism here. Would you prefer that this misfortune would happen to someone else? The Stoic view is, I have a duty to accept what nature dishes out. There is no point in complaining. It is egoistic to do that. It is immoral to wish that such misfortune should instead have happened to someone else. Ultimately, it is irreverent to do that because all that happens occurs in accord with laws of nature, which are but another way of talking about God’s will. Would you have the laws of the whole universe changed so that you could avoid this or that misfortune?”

 

Not only are we supposed to accept what nature dishes out, but we are to accept it with dignity and grace. Like the Stoics, I was raised to believe that a true measure of a man was how he rises to the occasions of life. In other words, when life throws the proverbial curve ball, do we cave or do we stand tall. If we are run off the road by a crazed driver in the midst of road rage, do we in turn, follow him and try to run him off the road? If we lose our fortune, house, job, etc. do we hide in shame, blame others, or seek revenge? If we find out we have cancer, do we give up on life and hide from the world in depression? If your spouse is unfaithful, do you get even and go and have an affair? Of course not.

 

Again I quote Ron who in turn quotes Epictetus: “It is not possible that things should be otherwise than they now are…Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the author chooses. If short, then in a short one; if long, than in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should act a poor man, see that you act it well; or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business, to act well the given part; but to choose it, belongs to another.”

 

In other words, a man is not defined by the job he holds but by his character.

 

C. William O’ Stephens, a professor and student of Stoicism, who has published The Ethics of Stoic Epictetus, states that “The Stoics believed that if we strive every day to do our best, then we can accept the rest. That is, we can rightly take satisfaction in the lifelong enterprise of maintaining rational judgments and attempting virtuous actions. More over we can respect ourselves for the moral progress we achieve, and thus enjoy peace of mind and happiness regardless of how events in the world unfold. After all, we are responsible for what we try to achieve, but not for the outcomes of our attempts since those outcomes are subject to chance factors.”

 

Stephens believes that Stoicism is the philosophy for the 21^st century and sees a contemporary rebirth of its theme in the movie Gladiator and in Thomas Wolf’s book, A Man in Full. I’ve seen Gladiator, but I haven’t read Wolf’s book. It would certainly make for interesting reading and possibly a future Adult RE topic of discussion.

 

IV. So in conclusion, I suppose if I continue to practice Acceptance and surrender to the will of God, be mindful of the here and now and learn to meditate, and strive to live with dignity and grace by adopting Stoicism as a way of life, I should expect to live the next half century of my life less stressed, less frazzled, and less in the Twilight Zone. In other words in peace.

 

And so I’ll end with what Stephens says is the quintessential Stoic prayer - the Prayer of Serenity: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’