SURRENDER

Someone who read my last two blogs maybe thinking, “I wonder how the old Fart is.” Well the old Fart is rumbling through life, one day at a time, I think I am making slow, very slow progress.

One of my readers blessed me with the comment, “I hope you find your surrender.” I have done this before in my life where I need to give up a bit of paranoia or idea of the future before I will again experience peace. I can be staring it right in the face and not do what I need to do. Or I can misinterpret it as something other than surrender. I know what it is, and it is not a situation I want to write about today.

One of the great gifts of the last hundred years is the Serenity prayer popularized by AA. It has been chopped and abbreviated but the message is always solid. I didn't know which version that floated through my mind was the original, so I looked it up. None of them were.

I was surprised it was written by Reinhold Niebuhr.

It goes: “God give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

I never get over the power of that prayer. World peace would descend upon Earth overnight if everyone could hold it in their minds for a few minutes and feel the depths of its meaning.

It is easier to learn to surrender if you know, to what. Ram Dass makes it sound so easy. He can picture his spiritual teacher, the Maharaj-ji and peace descends. I am convinced we can all do this. All religions have some figure or essence that creates a path to surrender. In Christianity it is Jesus.

It is so awful to hold a little fear of the future in our mind that blocks the immersion of the present, where all love, joy and peace reside.

The methods for staying in the present are simple, perhaps I should write a blog on the subject, I learn from repeated failure. But in the end, “We all need a little help from our friends.”

Love and Peace, Gregg