To Surrender

The first command of every revelation has been this:
His will be done.
Looking back to every age you’ll find, raging wild
The inner battle of the wills. Will it be His or mine?
But who, in the end, has lost and who has won?
He lets us win, as parents often cede to an ornery child.

Submission is not an easy task in times of post-modernity
The age of independence
Where values have been filed away and relativism reigns
Where freedom is supreme, dependence is disdained.
This doctrine just disguises our real calamity
The every-day assignment to surrender our domain.

This pertains to westerners who feel uneasy with
His kingdom come.
While those in the east sustain the bête noir of adversity,
A brutal persecution and yet they dance with joy.
With radiant acquiescence hasten to their martyrdom.
Surrender has become their every-day reality.

In His wisdom and compassion He has eased the undertaking,
Our hallowed, heavenly Father,
By showing us just how it’s done by gentle mother earth.
That the outcomes of her labor and constant resignation
Are the multicolored hyacinths of His knowledge, given birth.
This, notwithstanding the meekness of her station.

With humility and patience, acquiescence and assent
She bears the load they lay upon her,
Those who plow and plod, who plunder her for profit.
Those who poison, those who parch to multiply their gain.
She submits, continues giving wealth to those who crave it.
Her attributes belie the lowly placement she maintains.

So every individual who is concerned and makes a claim
To his own nobility
Must so completely consecrate his will that not a trace
Of worldly desire remains within his heart.
And every individual who is concerned about true unity
Must do the same, for heart and world cannot be kept apart.

To make us ready to forsake our personal aspiration,
He tells us with these words:
In the meadows of His grace, to grow as tender herbs
Swayed by the gentle winds of His good pleasure and decree
Our movement and our stillness wholly subject to the One
To whom we bend and bow our heads in full conformity.

Whatever’s been revealed is the beloved of our souls.
His is the authority to command!
Whatever He has loved is our only heart’s desire.
Ours is submission and complacent resignation.
Our hopes and doings discarded that His will may transpire.
Embracing heaven and earth, He has subdued the whole creation.

Our minds will be impelled, through prayer and contemplation,
To confess our helplessness,
In itself the highest tier of human understanding,
A recognition marking the long awaited culmination
Of our spiritual dilemma, our will has stopped demanding.
A view from the mountaintop to end the conflagration.