On Acceptance

I want to speak truthfully into the challenges and suffering of the human condition and how this level of human consciousness we call “Acceptance” is a recurring stop along each of our spiritual paths. Acceptance looks like the scenic overlooks on highways that few of us bother to pull over and let ourselves notice. Overlooking these spiritual overlooks keep us from sitting with what is that some fear within refuses to let us see.

We are all disciplining ourselves and being disciplined by certain spiritual forms of thinking, speaking, and acting, which condition our felt sense of reality. These forms or modes of being position us—they dispose us, toward an awareness of who we are, who others are, who God is, what creation is, which may or may not be true or helpful. We move about the world, often unawares, from our spiritual positionality, conditioned to relate to all things according to this constructed capacity and imagination.

Unfortunately, what is constructed out of our spiritual positionality is often a hindrance to our aliveness and the aliveness of others. Such spiritual positionality is often what we mean when we say that someone is self-righteous. It is a kind of indignation that places “me” at the center of all things. I become my own graven image, cast and carved by the illusions of my ill-tempered desire to control, rooted in the fear that I might otherwise lose my life. In the end, it is a drive to survive. And, as Jesus is frequently quoted as saying, “He who seeks to save his life will lose it.”

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There is so much hurting in this world. As I eat lunch, I overhear a woman speaking with a co-worker about her ex-husband’s efforts to keep her from seeing her children over the Christmas holidays. As she angrily speaks about her conversation with a lawyer and the rights her current husband has as a step-father, over against her ex-husband’s girlfriend who, because they’re not married, doesn’t have the same kind of rights, I could feel her agitation and anxiety and recognized in her a violence that betrayed her true desire to simply be with her children. She was giving voice to something far deeper than her anger and frustration with her ex-husband. She was giving voice to the pain of feeling separated—separated from herself.

This is the great challenge for us humans when we face real grief and pain due to the circumstances of life. The circumstances we face touch something in us that we have kept mercy from touching. Until we relinquish control and let go of the drive to save our lives, this wound will continue to widen. The trouble, here, is that though the wound widens and tears, the flow of Love through us is held back by our despair. Letting go of the drive to survive, we can release the flow of Love and let Love work its healing power in us and around us. And, as Jesus teaches, the greater the wound the greater can be the flow of Love through it. This is the great mystery of our pain and sorrow. We have all been wounded, even if our wounds are simply those of a society passing along to us a collective hurt. The gash of grief can run deep. The deeper it is the more relief, joy and gratitude available to us as it heals.

As we awaken to this deeper possibility of Love’s flow through our grief and pain, we open ourselves to become channels of Love. To become such a channel, we must surrender. We must reach a place of acceptance, where the goal-seeking of the ego is expunged, so that the portion of God within can ripen and flourish.

Just to be clear, surrender is not resignation. It is not denial or throwing in the towel. The deep acceptance of surrender acknowledges that there is a waxing and waning to life. We accept that good things can happen, even when we are not in control of the outcomes. “Acceptance,” writes Peter Block, “is to simply see what is real without having to color it, or fix it, or soften it.”

What often gets in our way of this deep surrendering and acceptance is the hidden belief that our life is in our own hands. Living in a world marked by self-esteem and self-defense, we have patterned our lives based on a myth of safety and security, and that we can acquire salvation through external means. One need only notice all the door-cams that litter our homes and offices, the passwords and passcodes we ceaselessly enter onto various devices all day, every day, or the vain trust in various institutions and structures that serve only to provide false certainty in our lives.

The paradoxical nature of acceptance is that when we finally relinquish control and become present to what is, we are finally able to see that what is is not all there is to see. The horizon of perception widens when we actually get off the exit and out of our cars to notice that there is a strange and mysterious beauty in the valley of that shadow of death. We begin to notice that we needed the energy of our grief and anger to propel us up the mountain. And while we may yet have further to go, once we learn how to metabolize our emotions into fuel, we know what to do the next time we find ourselves in some deep valley that would tempt us to save our lives by suppressing that grief and pain, as though we can’t handle it.

Daring to accept what is, we are propelled toward unconditional love, where all conditions on love dissolve with the awareness of our perceived limitations. This awareness opens to transcendence of the body of flesh; it frees us from fleeting thoughts; it helps us recognize that what we feel is our responsibility.

There is a distinct challenge that we face in the modern, English-speaking world when we describe spiritual realities like this way of surrendering we call “Acceptance.”

Part of the challenge with acceptance is that the word is a noun. The very word-structure tempts us to believe that there is a destination that we reach when we have accepted or surrendered. I may have to accept, which is an action, but once I accept it seems like I should arrive at this place we call acceptance. Acceptance, however, is a disposition, not a destination. It is a bodily comportment forged in us by a continual dying to and releasing from fearful, controlling behavior.

Acceptance is a recurring activity that carries us into unconditional love. Once again, unconditional love is not static. Each involves becoming aware of the conditions and expectations we place on others or that have been placed on us, acknowledging, and sometimes giving thanks for these for helping us feel safe and secure, and then letting go of these conditions and expectations, so that they no longer hinder Love’s flow in us and through us. Here we reach the truth of our verbal form of existence.

In his beatitudes from Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes what the blissful life of heaven really looks like. The word that we translate as blessed or blissful from the Greek, has a kind of “nounified” ring to it. In the Aramaic, however, the word Jesus would have used is tubwayhun, which means both ripe and ripening. In the Aramaic there are no verbs for “to be”—there is no “are.” No one is ever ripe without ripening. No one is without becoming.

To be blessed, then, as we read in the very first beatitude, is to become poor in spirit. This poverty is a constant emptying of our spiritual ego, or the egoic self, so that the true Self within has room to flower and grow.

What does all this mean? It means that I never actually reach some destination where I am finally me or where the world is finally in a perfect state of harmony. And, at the same time, accepting what is means that the evolution of my becoming is a kind of active-passivity, where I practice being still enough to notice that the challenges I face, the uncontrollable and uncertain circumstances of life, the relationships I share with others, and the ground beneath my feet, are all opportunities to experience and encounter deeper aliveness. And, as Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount, this is the way we go about exchanging the consciousness of self-esteem and self-defense for the consciousness of complete dependence on God—Consciousness of Jesus.

This acceptance, what Jesus calls poverty of spirit, is a deepening awareness of and attention to the reality that every good and perfect gift is from above, and our attempts to control others or the outcomes of a situation actually prevent us from receiving the good that God desires to give. It is trusting that there is more to see and more that is possible than what I see from the spiritual positionality of certainty, safety, and control. When I am poor in spirit—impoverished of my egoic, goal-oriented drive to determine or possess, I can actually experience the mystery of transformation in my own life, in others, and in the world.

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