Book Excerpt: Joanne Lauck on the Idea of Surrender

Excerpt from The Voice of the Infinite in the Small, on “necessary humbling:”
 

Surrender has to do with how we go into our initiations. Does the caterpillar say, Excuse me, I’m not going in that cocoon, or, I’m not doing that last molt because I don’t know what it might lead to? No. I call what’s needed an “active receptiveness.” It’s not like, Oh, I give up, do what you want with me. It’s more an anticipation that’s tinged with hope and fear. It’s kind of what you would expect if you met an angel. You’re going to be awed and a little bit nervous. It’s important to be able to name what’s happening to you, because it’s something to hold onto. It will help you drop into the deeper story of your life. And we’re not good at it. We’re taught not to surrender, period. And when you find people who are beaten down by life, who are trying to hold up that Envictus stance, you find deep despair and a fear of failing. Instead of seeing that they just went through something real powerful, they feel like failures.”

What is often humbled in a painful encounter with another creature—especially a small one—are the self-important, inflated parts of ourselves. Those parts mask our general fear of the unknown and our resistance to the pain of being overcome and changed. “Forget about transformation and renewal,” protests our personality, which fights for order and predictability. It is this familiar aspect of self, playing at king or queen, that prefers safety to knowledge. And it is this aspect of self that builds an empire on false power and scrambles for position and visibility among other false leaders.

I suspect that our task, and a monumental one at that, is not to withhold ourselves or defend ourselves from that which would help us grow strong and move closer to our true natures. “What we choose to fight is so tiny, what fights with us is so great,” Rilke reminds us in A Man Watching. When we let go of our resistance to pain and change and actually seek out these transitional places where the subjective and objective worlds intersect— in dread and expectation—we will have altered our way of being in the world enough to open avenues of thought and action previously unavailable.

If we trust that the creatures of the natural world that move into our lives bidden by unseen powers are intent on arousing us and helping us grow, we can learn to submit to them. As Marlo Morgan learned to surrender to the swarms of Australian bush flies, perhaps we can also let go and refrain from erecting elaborate defenses—or engaging in righteous retaliation. Maybe we can enter the small and great initiations that our soul brings us without doing battle with forces and creatures that are ultimately allies of a fundamental natural self at home in the world. There is power in our defeats and our surrender, and blessings are due to those messengers who disrupt our familiar world. As Rilke so eloquently explains in the last passage of the same poem:

Whoever was beaten by this Angel…went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being
defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

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