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"I shall abide until I am spoken for, if it be your will." - Leonard Cohen. This song perfectly exemplifies the beauty and sublimity of spiritual submission for me. This is an idea which many Pagans, particuarly those in Recon circles, have a difficult time with. They often cannot draw a distinction between humility and humiliation, and equate this with spineless grovelling and abasing one's self. There seems to be a real fear of recognizing something greater than themselves and humbling themselves before it. They are afraid of letting go and giving themselves to the moment, of making themselves vulernable by recognizing this immensity in whose presence they stand. And so they cling to theological ideas and ritual actions which do not require this of them, which don't require them to get "wet" - and then, eventually they drift away, because their souls are arrid and dying. But humility need not be weakness. It takes strength, and at times courage to divest yourself of ego-attachment, to open yourself to awe and wonder before the greatness of the Gods and creation. It is fear which causes one to cling to ego, fear that they will lose something of themselves, insecurity that if they do not bluff and bolster themselves up, the feelings of smallness and worthlessness that they feel and suspect deep within themselves will be seen by others and made tangible. Only one who is truly confident in themselves, in their place in the world, can let go, put aisde that ego, give themselves to the Gods and the moment, can find their greatness in their smallness. The best example that I have of this is when I visited the Grand Canyon. I stood at the ledge and gazed out into the abyss - and literally felt my breath taken away. The chasm was so huge, vaster than myself, beautiful in its wildness and destruction, ancient beyond anything I could conceive - how many thousands and thousands of years had this gorge been slowly chisseled out by nature? I knew that even as strong and powerful as I was, if I slipped I would fall to my death on those rocky slopes, swallowed up by the vastness of the canyon. I touched God in that instant, in that brief encounter with mortality. I saw the fragile balance of life, how every second we are perched on a thin line holding us up above the chasm - how delicate, fragile, and beautiful life was because at any second it could all be snatched away. I was a tiny speck compared to the chasm - but I was still a speck, still something. I was here, a living, breathing creature, kindred to all of creation, as fragile and beautiful and unique as everything else that existed. No more special, and no less than the rest. Submission doesn't mean passivity in the sense of
non-action - it is rather a surrender to the divine will,
knowing that you can trust in the Gods, and that when you
act according to this wisdom, things will work out for the
best. This is not necessarily always what we expect, what we
want, what we cling to and demand - but that is a part of
the submission, recognizing that "Thy will be done" - and
that this is as it should be, and that you will have the
strength, courage, love, resources, etc. at hand to
accomplish the task set to you. |
