Our local newspaper’s recent “Faith Forum” reminded me that the “Kingdom of Heaven/God” is within us—now—at the very moment you are reading this.  

The Saturday article was written by a member, Matt, of the Christian Science Church in Victoria. I admit I don’t know much about Christian Scientists.  When I was young, I remember going with my dad to visit his friend Oak whom he’d known for years.  I knew we were going to visit because Oak’s wife, whom I’d never met, was dying.  I can still see in my mind the living room of their house when we entered, the stillness and the light that seemed especially dim.  I imagine that my dad and Oak talked but what I heard were moans and cries from another room.

I don’t remember how I knew this, whether I was told or simply overheard, that Oak and his wife were Christian Scientist and that she did not believe in treatment for the cancer that was taking her life.  I had no idea what that exactly meant, but I did sense the gravity of being in that living room.

I almost didn’t read this week’s faith forum titled, “The Way of Gethsemane and …” except that part of the title was “…and the lesson of surrender” and that caught my attention. The author told about his personal experience when he had a chance to pray with this idea of surrender. He was hiking in the Jordanian desert when one of his group collapsed suddenly, hitting her head on some rocks. As others panicked, Matt separated himself from the group to pray. He writes,

“I surrendered the surface picture—that a hiker had just collapsed onto the rocky trail and might now be injured.  Instead, I prayed to see the woman as spiritual, perpetually supported and cared for by an omnipotent, loving God.”

From my own perspective, this doesn’t mean that Matt prayed that the hiker not be seriously hurt. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason.  Stuff happens. He prayed that he would see her as a spiritual being loved by God. We have no control other than responding in love, trusting and attentive to the life force around us. 

What would it take for me to do the same with the “surface pictures” of stories I tell myself that are imagined or anticipated as true.  All my angst about other peoples’ lives and, yes, my own.  With my adult children, I make up stories about this and that based on what I know about them over the course of their lives, usually the troubling parts that I wish they wouldn’t have to suffer through and the ways I hiddenly want to manage and fix instead.

Could I simply see them as the spiritual being they are—perpetually supported and cared for by a loving God, even if they don’t always acknowledge that presence?  Could I let go of the ways I see them as needing “help” that hinders rather than gives life.

In the beginning of Matt’s forum article, he recalls Jesus’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, faced with sleeping disciples, betrayal and death.  Matt describes another side to this story that is “Jesus’s childlike surrender.” He writes that in today’s world where “fighting for ones’s rights or worldview seems a normal part of our existence,” surrendering seems radical.

I’m reminded of what I wrote in this blog in 2015 that I must absorb again. Surrender is not acquiescence, reluctantly yielding; it is an opening up to unknown possibility.  In Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner explains sleep as surrender,

…a laying down of arms.  “Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere, close your eyes and wait…”  

An inner yieldedness, surrender is not an outer state, like rolling over and playing dead, but setting aside or laying down all anxiousness, all the reasons “the surface picture,” as Matt calls the situation, isn’t the final truth.  Laying down all our inadequacies to stretch-out in God’s provision, whatever form that might take. To have the strength to let go—of control, of despair, of anything that keeps me from this reality that the Kingdom of God is within and among us.

Matt ends his article,

“for me, striving to surrender our human limitations in exchange for our God-given spiritual inheritance—the Kingdom of Heaven inside us—can bring only blessings.” Blessing indeed.