surrendering

The need to surrender self may be the notion that most keeps me from being a formally religious person. I haven't thought this through before. But a post by Rev. James Ford over at Monkey Mind has started me thinking about this. Rev. Ford was at the Boston Symphony Hall enjoying the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Blind Boys of Alabama when, . . . well let him tell you:

Then, in a moment of clarity I noticed how the content of religion is so much less than the action, the movement of the heart. So, they call upon Jesus, someone else calls on Amida, another surrenders to Allah, and another just notices; whichever, the action is one of surrender. Letting go of our certainties. Just putting it all down.

And what follows is liberation.

I hope I don't take this too far out of the context intended, but this "liberation" following "surrender" . . . this choice of emotional response over intellectual response is probably central to the Christian notion of fully allowing God (or Jesus) into your life. In visiting Wikipedia, it appears, unsurprisingly, that the notion is indeed a center point among other faiths. I deem myself a spiritual person capable of surrendering myself to a moment. But this surrendering of self to a moment is a decision that I make from time to time, as at a wake or a celebratory communion, with full awareness that it is a temporary choice. It is a part, but only a part, of the complexities of self, of being the "i am" . . . a choice (even a path) that allows us to connect with one another in grief or joy, but as in a hug, there is no melding, only a temporary touching. No matter how profound and filled with emotion (or spirit) a moment may be, and no matter how total the letting go may be, it is more a hug than a melding. I consider myself a part of the larger UU body, that is the larger fellowship of living things (and on occasion the inanimate), but I also know that my integrity continues as a distinct being from, or within, that fellowship.

update:

I have been reminded of Bertrand Russell's opening paragraph in Mysticism and Logic:

Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men have achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others through the other alone: in Hume, for example, the scientific impulse reigns quite unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science co-exists with profound mystic insight. But the greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.

If Russell were writing this today, I think the word "men" might be supplanted with gender-free words like "people" etc. And to me that is not beside the point.