Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
Recently during prayer, I was drawn toward a posture of deep surrender. As if “regular” surrender were not enough, this particular invitation on this particular day led to a powerful insight on the nuances of surrender in everyday life and actual practice.
Literally, while lying prostrate on my prayer rug, my face facing down and my hands cupped open, I felt an urging to surrender myself completely—but into fullness. The paradox of the invitation surprised me. I admit that I had to simply lie there, still, for a good while to soak it up. How do I “fill up” as I try to “let go”?
In contemplative circles, we are fond of drawing upon the fancy Greek word kenosis, which means to self-empty. In the Christian scriptures, this word is used to refer to Jesus’ work of letting go of divinity to make room for his humanity. In other words, the active work of surrender involves a process of emptying the self. Thus, my surprise—how can I be full when I am trying to empty? With my face flat to the ground, practicing kenosis, how could I also hold my cupped hands open and practice pleroma (the Greek word for fullness), accepting all that I really am?
Given the particulars of my life trajectory, personally and professionally, it was a particular call, for me, to live fully in to the priestly mantel of my work, both as a teacher and a healer. I was led into “remembering” the fullness of those qualities, already in me, and to “forget” the patterns of woundedness that kept me running my tank on empty. In accepting the fullness of all that I am, I had to surrender the limitations of old assumptions and postures about what I thought I “could” or “should” be.
The power of the paradox—fullness in surrender—is still working on me as I plow though the activity of daily life. I suspect that we each carry a particular expression of this paradox. I wonder what Jesus’ Reign of God would look like if we could all find our fully alive expression grounded in a posture of emptiness and surrender.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- When have you practiced or experienced the self-emptying of kenosis? What teachings or practices help you in this? What ideas, patterns, or assumptions do you wish to surrender?
- When have you practiced or experienced the fullness or pleroma? What teachings or practices help you in this? What qualities or aspects of your own fullness do you wish to remember?
- Think about the paradox of “fullness in surrender.” What emotions, images, or ideas does this evoke for you? How might you hold this tension in your prayer life?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
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