Kinosis

"One who clings to his life will lose it; one who loses his life will find it." (Luke 17:33)

I cannot surrender to my self. I can only surrender to the Other. 

Some time just before dawn, the wild plum blossomed. A green bud on a tip of forsythia. Sudden frog song from a still green pond, reminding me of my old friend, Basho. Through any ordinary sacrament of perception, dissolving into its moment, I may surrender, encountering the One who is ever more than I.

In chapter two of the Epistle to the Philippians, there is a hymn which may be the most ancient text embedded in the New Testament. It says that Christ emptied himself. "He did not cling to the status of being God, but emptied himself, and became a servant." The Greek word is kinosis, self-emptying.

In the Sufi tradition this is fanaa, self-annihilation; in Buddhist teachings, anatta, no self; in Yogic experience, nirbija samadhi, awareness without any seed of thought or I-concept.

To realize my self is no great wonder, even when I spell it with a capital S. But to lose my self there, in the vast Presence of the Other, even as the Other flowers here, in the center of my heart, is a wonder indeed, and the mystery of mysteries.

After sublime loss, if some remnant of a me exists, I exist only moment by moment by the grace of the Other, a flicker in God's fire, a wave that rises and falls by the whim of the divine sea, a breath breathed by the Beloved.

Even though God becomes my life, my core, my very breath, God is never I. Even though God is deeper inside me than me, God is ever Other. This is why, in the moment of innocence, one prays O Lord and not O Me.