ENTERING WHITE-WASHED TOMBS
The ego can be an impressively clever and subtle little beastie. Back in April I confronted an impasse, where I couldn't fully surrender to God because I was doing so in order to get something from him in return. This impasse centered on the relationship between surrender and rebirth. An undercurrent had developed in my mind, where I found myself regarding surrender as dying in order to live, losing in order to win. Certainly, Jesus spoke of death and losing one’s self in this manner, and why shouldn’t he? He’s quite right. The problem arose because I was regarding it dualistically, focused exclusively on external outcomes. Thus, I was approaching surrender with an achievement mindset, a formidable barrier to authentic ego-death. Once it becomes ego-driven in this manner, surrender is reduced to mimicry – an ordering my external reality mirroring how I think rebirth should appear, a la, white-washing tombs. How can this perversion be overcome?
In the end it’s simple. The consummate pitfall of grasping and avoidance play a major role. When it comes to surrender, it's important to remember that death and rebirth are derivative results, rather than foundational pursuits. Death and resurrection are experienced from a place of kenosis, the seat of transcendent love. Only when I overcome my mind's tendency to ask what’s in it for me will I be able to give myself entirely to authentic surrender.
Embodying genuine kenosis is the work of a lifetime, but at least I now recognize it as the destination. In it, I’ve discovered the root of one’s willingness to die and the death itself is love. Self-emptying, then, is both love and death, and love itself is a kind of dying. It’s a dying that is subsumed in new life, such that love resides in both the living and the dying, the losing and the finding, and is the one force able to hold both aspects in its hands as mirror images of the same reality.