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I had a useful answer to a question I asked in prayer that, with a different response, would have long-term implications in my life. It felt like a nudge in a direction or an affirmation of my path, but I also feel a bit like I am learning a foreign language. All the information I need is all around me and Good (or God) has been trying to communicate, but I don’t understand.

Fluency is about sitting in it, right? It is about paying careful attention and making new associations between things we know and things we do not know. Such is the experience of an evolving spiritual interpretation of existence. Such is the experience of learning the language of God (or Good). We have to start somewhere, but it feels cumbersome, frustrating, and confusing. It puts us back to a time when we were very small, associating words with gestures, pointing, and basic phonetics.

I think the ego makes its own attachments to outcomes that are often contrary to what we really need. We love people who are terrible for us. We leave a perfectly good job, partnership, or path searching for something even better, only to realize that we can’t find what we’re looking for… out there. 

That is the most confusing part of all of this, I think. The voice of the ego is so powerful, yet often so misguided, it can get us into heaps of trouble. I have read quite a bit about the ego and what it is or what it means, but I also cannot quite discern where it resides within me. I can’t even tell when it is getting me into trouble. It hasn’t been until now that I even associated the word with my own problems of the self. I don’t even know what my ego is, which part of me it owns, where it resides in my body or what it sounds like. Maybe I am living entirely in my own ego or at the mercy of it. My hope is that waiting around for God (or Good) to provide me with an answer is a better alternative.  

I know self-help books talk a lot about the dangers of the ego, about how demanding and destructive it can be, but it wasn’t until just now, wandering around in my own writing, that I associated my own troubles with that simple, loaded, three letter word. 

Loaded is probably an understatement. Ego is often associated with an inflated sense of importance or machismo or grandiosity. I’m not sure I suffer from any of those things, but maybe. I know spiritual practices describe the ego as some sort of little, internal gremlin, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, driven to obtain this or that in the name of power, pleasure, or feeling better. 

Whatever it is that has been driving me, I no longer want to listen. I want off that ride. Call it ego or anxiety or stress, call it misery or confusion, fear or pain, whatever it is, it smacks of lacking faith, and that is not what this grand experiment is about. 

Meanwhile, I am finding surrender to be a verb. It’s not just about getting on our knees with permanence. It’s not just about deciding enough is enough. It’s not just about turning our will and our lives over to the care of God (or Good) as we understand It. It’s not just about yielding power, it’s also an action, the giving up of something we possess. 

In recovery, addicts find that they must turn their will over to the care of God over and over and over. They take their will back and make a bit of a mess of things, then have to be reminded they are not in charge and need to return to faith and prayer. Addiction is a very powerful expression of pain, trauma, and ego. One can be in recovery, clean and sober, for years, and still have managed to avoid actual relinquishment of all the potent psychology that feeds the addiction itself. In the program, they call that being a “dry drunk.” God hasn’t taken up residence in the heart and mind of such souls. They have further to fall before they find true surrender. They “white knuckling it” - clinging to their old ways without alcohol. It’s only when people start bringing everything to God (or Good) first that they find real relief. 

I am trying to keep that in mind myself. Every time I want to pick up a well worn worry object and go all Sméagol on it (that was a Lord of the Rings reference, work with me here, people), I have been saying to myself God (or Good), I surrender X to you with love.

I probably should add, Because I don’t know what the BLEEP to do with it anymore, and I believe you do. That is basically the sentiment behind the gesture, right? I cannot fix this. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work, so you take care of it. 

Does that sound like passivity or apathy? Maybe. Does it matter? So far, it’s made life a bit easier. So far, I am abstaining a little less from investing in outcomes I can’t control. So far, it’s creating distance between me and my problems, and that’s okay, because I was kind of living in them without solutions and I needed to get some rest. It’s given me courage to accept defeat or have difficult conversations and even be assertive when I have to. I make a choice, I act or refuse to act, and then I surrender the outcome, the person, place, or thing that has been giving me hell to begin with. 

It’s actually quite nice. Perhaps you should try it sometime.