Week 47—Sunday Luke 9:23-25
Luke 9:23-25
Week 47—SUNDAY
DIVINE AND HUMAN SELF-SURRENDER
At the very center of the conception of the Word become flesh is the fact of the divine Self-surrender. The Christian faith demands of us as its deepest demand, self-surrender. And the Word became flesh shows God doing the same thing—the divine Self-surrender.
This is an essential difference between the Christian faith and other faiths: in the Christian faith the Divine practices everything God asks us to practice, especially, in regard to self-surrender. A prominent Hindu philosopher said to me, “Self-surrender is everything.” But in saying this he departed from his Vedantism, for in it Brahma is impersonal. You cannot surrender to an It.
In the different faiths it is important to see what happens to the self, the ego. This is important, for the only thing we own is just ourselves. What happens to the self is all important. The faiths which came out of India are world weary and personality weary. They want us to get rid of both. Buddha, sitting under the Bo tree in Gaya, came to the conclusion that existence and suffering are one. The only way to get out of suffering is to get out of existence and the only way to get out of existence is to get out of desire, even for life. “Is there any existence in Nirvana?” I asked a Buddhist monk in Ceylon. “How can there be? There is no suffering, hence there can be no existence.” Buddha would get rid of the problems of life by getting rid of life; he would get rid of our headaches by getting rid of our heads. The Vedantic Hindu wants to rise above personality into the impersonal Brahama. Like a raindrop losing itself in the ocean, so the personal will lose itself in the ocean of Impersonal Being. The personality is wiped out. The Bhakti Hindu merges himself in the object of his devotions. I asked a “holy man” what he wanted. Where had he come from? Where was he going? And what was his name? And to every question there was one answer, “Ram Ram”—the name of his god. His personality was lost in Ram Ram.
O Father, teach me your purpose concerning my very self. Are you striving to cancel it? To reduce it to zero? I must know, for I want to know where I am headed in my goal. I think I see, for I see Jesus. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: What happens to my self is important, for it is the only thing I own.