Not My Will

by

Rev. Joy Atkinson

Presented to the Unitarian

Society of Santa Barbara

March 16, 2008

©2008 by Rev. Joy Atkinson

Santa Barbara, California

Not My Will, But Thine

Today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Passion Week in the Christian calendar—the week commemorating the drama of Jesus' last week of life. Most of you know the story. It begins with Jesus’ triumphant arrival in Jerusalem, when he was greeted with palm branches and hosannas, and it culminates in the story of his appearances before some of his followers on Easter Sunday. Although it is the holiest week of the year for many Christians, many of us Unitarian Universalists have little relationship to the traditional Easter story. I’m reminded of an old joke I can’t resist telling: a new Sunday school teacher in a UU Sunday school class asks the children what they think Easter is about. One child pipes up: “Isn’t that when kids dress in costumes and go door-to-door yelling ‘trick or treat’ to get candy?” Another chimes in: “No, that’s not Easter. Easter in when we decorate an evergreen tree and put presents under it.” This goes on for a while and the teacher gets frustrated. Finally, one little boy says, “I know. Easter is about Jesus.” The teacher encourages him to say more. “Jesus does a lot of preaching and makes the Romans mad, and then they nail him to a cross and he dies, and then he is put into a cave and a stone is rolled in front of it.” The teacher is encouraged, and asks the boy to go on. “And then three days later, the stone is gone.” “Yes,” says the teacher, “and then what?” “And then Jesus comes out of the cave and…and…uh, if he sees his shadow, there’ll be six more weeks of winter!”

A great deal happens during Passion Week, according to the New Testament. Jesus goes into the Temple to drive out the moneychangers and profiteers, angering the authorities. He teaches at the Temple courts and in small communities each day during the week, making more enemies among Temple authorities. Many of his most well known sayings and parables occur during this fateful week. In the latter part of the week, he shares the Passover Seder, his Last Supper, with his disciples, and the next day he is arrested, tried, sentenced and executed by the swift cruelty of Roman justice, and the insistence of mobs of people who only a week before laid palm branches in his path.

One of the passion week events that the gospels recount is one that has always held meaning for me; it held meaning for me as a young Catholic, and it still does, long after I gave up my childhood faith, long after I stopped believing in Jesus as God. In fact, this part of the story has more meaning to me because to Jesus was fully human.

After the Seder, as the story in Mark tells it, Jesus and his disciples go the garden at Gethsemane to pray. A very depressed Jesus takes Peter, James and John aside and confesses, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” He implores his three tired disciples to keep watch for him, while he goes a stone's throw further to pray, but they keep dozing off, disappointing him with their fleshly weakness. While praying in the garden, Jesus experiences a moment of grave doubt about his mission and his upcoming ordeal. He sweats with fear, understanding too well the danger he was facing: knowing that he would be ultimately alone, that his loving disciples would get cold feet and betray, deny, turn away from him. So he prays to his God: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me!”

How fully human, and entirely understandable! As the Persian mystic Kahlil Gibran said, “Jesus was a man and not a god, and therein lies our wonder and our surprise.” Jesus was afraid, just like any of us would be; he didn't want to face the challenge and bear the pain. We've all been there, though perhaps not under such extreme circumstances: Facing an ordeal, a challenge, a difficult path alone, wanting more than anything to turn and run from it. “Take this cup from me.” Maybe we did run—into some distraction, perhaps: alcohol, drugs, some other comforting compulsion. Or, maybe we fought with all our might to control the situation, to dissolve the pain by a sheer act of will, so we wouldn't have to deal with the challenge, the disruption to our lives.

In his weak moment, Jesus prayed to be excused from the difficulty he believed it was his responsibility to face. But, in the very next breath, he found his courage—and it was a particular form of courage—the courage of surrender. He surrendered his own will to what was for him something greater, and said: “Yet not my will, but thine, be done.”

Once, at a challenging time in my life, a counselor quoted those words to me. It was a time when I was fighting hard to make things happen in a relationship the way I wanted them to happen. The problem was, some of what was happening was out of my control. But I was flailing around, believing I could control the outcome. At one point, the counselor suggested that maybe I had done all that I could, that the outcome was not entirely up to me. He suggested that perhaps I might now let go of the need to control, that it might be time to say to myself “Not my will, but thine,” that is, to let the process unfold as it was going to. That helped to wake me up. It brought me to the realization that I really could not control things, that all I had control over was how I reacted to some givens in the situation. I slowly realized that it was time to stop pushing the river and let it flow by itself. And since then, a few other times when I have found myself struggling too much to control a situation, or worrying too much about a future I couldn't control, I have used those words of Jesus, so appropriately quoted by that counselor, “Not my will, but thine,” as a meditation, and have been able to relax a bit, and let go.

There is a prayer I'm sure most of you have heard—the Serenity prayer, as it is commonly called—which has been attributed to a number of different people: Reinhold Niebuhr, St. Teresa of Avila, others. “God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It is so popular that it’s almost a cliché. Yet it expresses a very wise, and very difficult, aspiration. There are certainly things that we can and believe we should change, if we can find the courage: getting out of an abusive relationship, making an important decision about our life's work, taking a stand against social injustice. But there are also situations that no amount of action or willfulness on our parts will change: like making someone love you or stay in a relationship with you, or forcing someone else to be responsible, or bringing a loved one back from the dead.

What is especially hard, and requires the wisdom of experience, and sometimes that of a trusted guide, is to know what really can be changed, and what must finally be accepted—to know when to surrender action and will, and let what is in progress just unfold. On one Star Trek Voyager episode, the crew of the starship Voyager began experiencing technical difficulties. There were waves of distortions of the space within the ship, and systems started malfunctioning. Throughout the episode the crewmembers dashed around frantically trying to fix the problems, but nothing they tried could completely stop the distortion waves. Finally, Tuvok—the calm and cool, self-disciplined crewmember from the planet Vulcan, said to the crew that he had an idea. The others were hopeful, until he said, “I suggest that we just do nothing!” His crewmates objected. “Are you crazy?” they said. “Things are out of our control here!” Tuvok pointed out that they had already done everything possible to regain control of the ship. So he just surrendered, and waited calmly, while the others still desperately but uselessly tried to fix the problem and hold back the distortion waves. The distortions washed over the crew, and then, they passed, and everything went back to normal. The problem, as it turned out, was an innocuous force—just a curious but non-threatening alien looking over the ship.

It is particularly hard for us in our Western culture to surrender our will. We're fond of doing, acting, controlling, making things happen. But letting things happen, letting go of the need to steer, surrendering our will, yielding, is a lot harder for most of us. The ancient sages of the East understood that yielding, giving up power, is sometimes, paradoxically, the most effective, courageous and powerful way. As ancient sage Lao Tsu puts it in the Tao Te Ching: “As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone, so to yield with life solves the unsolvable...Yield and you need not break. Bent you can straighten...Torn you can mend.” To try to control the outcome of events—to believe that we can always be in control—can be an arrogant stance. In Lao Tsu's words: “Trying to control the future is like trying the take the Master Carpenter's place. When you handle the Master Carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand.”

What is necessary for us to be able to yield, to surrender our will, is trust that the future can unfold just fine without our always meddling. In the many Twelve Step programs that people follow to help them deal with what feels like an out-of-control addiction, the very first step involves admitting to being powerless over the addiction. This step alone is a hard enough one to take—admitting that one's life is really out of control. But a later step, the Third, is even more challenging for most people; it involves making a deliberate decision to turn one's will and very life over to a power greater than oneself—that power which is called God by most. “Not my will, but thine,” is the essence of the Third Step.

The higher or broader or wider power one surrenders to, and places trust in, may be different things for different people. For Jesus, it was the One he addressed affectionately as "Abba"—his Father in heaven. For Lao Tsu it was the Tao—the unnamable Way, the cosmic process from which life emanates. For a given person on the 12-step path, or on any spiritual path which involves the humble and courageous act of surrender, it may be God, or God's amazing grace, it may be Allah, or the Goddess, or the world soul, or the unfolding process of the universe, the ever-renewing force of nature, the power of love or loving community, or even the God within, that core of strength at the center of our being that we may not understand, but we know from experience can buoy us up through difficult times. Can we let go enough of our need to steer and direct and control our lives, at least at times, and especially when we can't control what happens? Can we let go enough to let a challenging situation unfold in its own way, and in its own time? Can we ever stop pushing the river, and let it flow of its own accord? If we can, we may well find that we can float without sinking, and, although there is no guarantee, we may discover in letting go that something supports us, and, letting go of fear, we may be more open to love, and closer to joy!

One rainy winter weekend, when my son was 10, I went to Disneyland, with sister, son and nephew. It was the first time I had been there since I took my now grown niece some 20 years earlier. Because it was a rainy non-holiday weekend in February, there were practically no lines, so we could practically just walk onto the rides. We first went to the space mountain ride. This was the first time in a long time that I had been on fast rides like that. I sat in the ride car next to my 7-yr old nephew, and we were off! The ride was FAST, and winding, even going sideways at times. My nephew turned to me and said: “Isn't this fun, aunt Joy?” I weakly said, “uh…yeah, fun, but my knuckles were while grasping the bars, and I got out with weak knees. After getting out, I decided to have a little talk with myself; I didn’t want to be a wet blanket for the rest of the day. I realized that I needed to let go of that fear, that I couldn’t control the speed or tilt of the ride, but that I will be OK. When I let go of the fear, I relaxed, on the next ride. And then, to my own amazement, I couldn't get enough of all the fast rides!

I’ll offer one more personal example of the outcome of letting go. This one took place much longer ago, when I was in seminary. I was in a Yoga class, and in those days, being more flexible, I could do most of the physical positions. But there was one that always stumped me—the headstand. I could never get up into that position and stay up. I kept trying, and comically falling over. One time, when I was struggling with this posture and very frustrated, the teacher came to me and suggested I stop trying, and just get into the previous crouching position, and then just stay in it, while just visualizing myself doing the headstand. So I went into the crouched posture, called “the child,” and imagined myself doing a graceful, successful headstand. After a while the teacher came around to me again, and she bent down and said, “You’re doing it, you know.” To this day, I do not know how I got up into the position—I only remember crouching quietly and thinking about doing it! Somehow, when I stopped trying so hard, it just happened!

As the Tibetan Lama Rimpoche has said, “Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already there, in relaxation and letting go.”

To close today, I invite you into a meditative space for a moment. Think about some situation in your life that is causing you or has caused you difficulty… Hold the feelings in your mind… Ask yourself gently: is there something I can do to change the situation, to improve it? … If you believe that your actions cannot change it, can you imagine yourself letting go, letting the process unfold as it will, letting go of the struggle to change it, letting go of the burden of trying to control, perhaps letting go of some of the worry, fear, concern? …How might it feel to truly let go?

I would like to give you all a gift. This little woven tube is called a Chinese finger puzzle or finger trap. Embedded in this simple toy is a great lesson. After you put your fingers in at each end, and you try to struggle with it to get free, the weave makes the finger trap tighten its grip. But if you just stop trying to pull your fingers out, and keep the weave loose, thusly, you can slide them right out. I keep one on my desk as a reminder. I have one for each of you in these baskets. Come greet me after the service, and get one.

Benediction:

May you have the courage to act

and the serenity to wait,

the conviction to speak

and the patience to listen.

In the brightness of your days

may you walk with love

and in your deepest darkness

may the astounding,

amazing grace of the world

hold you close.