Part of the quote on my Hafiz calendar for May:
Submit to love without thinking . . .
What could this mean?
When the Reality is that everything, every moment, arises out of the still, empty ground of Love, and that that arising includes you and everything you experience, and everyone you love and the entire manifest universe, then perhaps we are more prone to “submit” to the reality that is and accept wherever we are in the moment. Perhaps if we can allow in our normal waking consciousness that whatever we are experiencing is where Love wishes us to be, we could be more accepting of states of consciousness, feelings or thoughts that we would prefer not to have.
In a beautiful, free-form prose poem, Mark Nepo includes a few words about what might happen when you submit to love, and the attendant “opposites” that may well ensue in at least one sense. When you submit to love, he writes:
…you might feel some spot of peace that’s
been waiting beneath your name, and then you
can secretly feel the pain of wanting to be touched
by everything, and not being touched feel lost, and
being touched feel found, and not being touched
feel lonely, and being touched feel there might be
such a thing as joy…
I hope this short example clarifies that I am speaking here of fairly normal or usual experiences that we might wish to reject, which might include these kinds of states: feelings of sadness, grief or even brief depression; feelings of frustration or anger or even hate; feelings of lostness or emptiness or even momentary times of despair; feelings of weakness, helplessness or even times of hopelessness; feelings of uncertainty, insecurity and fear. Strange as it often seems, we may even want to reject feelings of joy, love, power, compassion and strength if those cause discomfort. What I am not referring to are profound experiences of trauma, violence, abuse, etc., which need far more time, distance, support and working through to find healing, meaning and integration.
But for sustained growth on the inner journey, as painful as it might sometimes be to be where you are (as Nepo reflects on “the pain of wanting to be touched…of feeling lost…of feeling lonely”), this being with where you truly are means to be closer to the Love that “steers the stars.” In this case, to “submit to love” means to settle into the truth of what and who we are as fully as possible. As we do so, we actually become more intimate with that Love, with the Beloved if you like that term. Otherwise, when we reject or deny or try to meddle with our experience we are in effect saying in that moment that “I know better how I am supposed to be than does the Beloved.” If you happen to call the loving nature of reality “God,” then you’re saying “I know better than God what’s best for me right now.” Pretty arrogant, right? Some angels have been known to get kicked out of heaven for that kind of talk!
And that’s the real rub of maintaining the (very natural) willful position the ego takes toward reality: We end up kicking ourselves out of the ever-present reality of “heaven” that is our birthright as children of Love.
“…everything, every moment, arises out of the still, empty ground of Love, and that arising includes you…”
When we defend against our lived experience we harden in some way. So to submit to love means also to soften in a particular way. Simple stuff here: we take a breath. We might relax our tense shoulders. Soften our eyes and foreheads. Sense into our arms and legs. Take another deep breath into our belly and up into our chest.
I’m doing all these as I write this because our natural, well-developed and necessary ego-activity is also designed to keep us “hard” in certain protective ways, designed to create and maintain structures that support a certain image we want to present, or a certain feeling tone (which is always at a distance from our true, deep feelings). Thus, we remember to engage in practices of awareness, or how I define the apostle Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.”
And those practices are primarily ones I just listed above. Difficult stuff: breathing, sensing, looking, listening, experiencing what’s really present in the moment, inside and outside. Things that even children can do. In fact, the best spiritual practices are those that children can also do, which frustrates the hell out of the spiritual superego. Didn’t good old Jesus say, “Become like children?”
Actually, when we take the time to breathe and to explore whatever our experience is: sadness, happiness, grief, joy, anger, love—whatever it is—miraculous transformations have the potential to occur: our anger may transform into true Strength, our grief might transform into powerful Compassion, even hatred might transform into Power, and our joy might expand to an even greater immensity (and that may actually become painful as our souls begin to bear more of the full intensity of divine joy that is possible for humans of Being—in fact, my own experience is that true joy, true love can be far more difficult to tolerate than the “bad” feelings to which I’ve grown far more accustomed).
I know the word “submit” is a difficult one to accept—I don’t like it either—especially for autonomous, individualistically-oriented, and let’s face it (at least speaking for myself) fairly narcissistic postmodern Americans, but to submit to Love brings the possibility of resurrection, which is the possibility of living life fully, abundantly, courageously, compassionately and joyfully, here and now.
Shalom,
David
Rev. David Hett is the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center
