Acceptance and abandonment

In this life, we need to acquire a good, healthy sporting spirit, because life is actually like a game. Yes, life is like a game. We set out to pursue a goal, we have to follow certain rules, we are given some means, tools and instruments, we are primed to win and we do our best, but losses can come, and yet, we just have to move on.

Woe to us when we get stuck with our defeats and failures, developing a loser’s mentality. That would be the epic fail that puts a period and a finis in a hanging narrative, when a comma, a colon or semi-colon would have sufficed.

We need a sporting spirit because life’s true failure can come only when we choose not to have hope. That happens when our vision and understanding of things is narrow and limited, confined only to the here and now and ignorant of the transcendent reality of the spiritual and supernatural world.

An indispensable ingredient of this healthy sporting spirit is the sense of acceptance and abandonment that we need to deliberately cultivate. This does not come automatically, as if it’s part of our genes. We have to develop them.

We have to learn to accept things the way they are or the way they can be. Yes, it’s true that we can shape things and events in our life. We can even shape, to a certain extent, persons.

There’s a certain validity to the saying that “life is what we make it.” But this cannot be true all the time. We cannot succeed in all our plans all the time, no matter how pure our intentions and heroic our deeds. Life has aspects outside our control.

It would be wrong to fall into anguish and bitterness just because of these frustrations. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, we are already warned to be ready to accept all kinds of possible situations and predicaments.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” What does it a profit if one works or not, is wise or not, if he succeeds or loses. Everything will just be the same in that everything ends and is thrown into Sheol, that is, into darkness and oblivion.

Of course, this Old Testament wisdom has a limited validity. It is imperfect and incomplete, in that it has not yet known the liberation and perfection brought about by Christ, the Son of God who became man precisely to save us.

But it is basis enough for us to develop an attitude of acceptance in life, which also has to be accompanied by an attitude of abandonment in the hands of God. This latter attitude is rooted on a richer truth that comes from our faith, our belief that there is God, our Creator and Father, who loves us and provides for us everything that we need.

We need to enliven our faith, detaching ourselves from the suffocating grip of our senses and reasoning alone that can only discern things to a certain extent, but not all the way. We need faith to put ourselves in the omniscient and omnipotent system of God.

As Pope Benedict said in his Letter, Porta fidei (Door of faith), that proclaimed the Year of Faith for 2012 to 2013, “there is no other possibility for possessing certitude with regard to one’s life apart from self-abandonment, in a continuous crescendo, into the hands of a love that grows constantly because it has its origin in God.” (7)

Only the doubters and skeptics, the agnostics and atheists subjectively exclude themselves from the all-embracing providence of God, who governs everything out of wisdom and love.

A certain sense of abandonment is needed in life. It surely is not the type where we just do nothing. It’s an active, intelligent abandonment, driven by faith and love for God.

We can know God, and know him a lot. We can cooperate with him, and cooperate with him a lot. But we cannot know him completely, nor cooperate with him 100%.

Someone said that if anyone claims to know God completely, and by corollary, to cooperate with him completely, we can be sure that that God is not the real God, for God, while knowable and relatable, always transcends our ways. So trust, a sense of abandonment, is unavoidable.

Christ, the fullness of divine revelation, himself taught us to live a certain sense of abandonment. And he lived it to perfection when he abandoned himself to the will of his Father by accepting his death on the cross.

Let’s meditate on his passion and death often.

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