The question with surrender - with devotion and also realization of any kind - is not so much if you should do it, but rather: to whom/what are you surrendering?

To whom/what energy is your devotion directed?

I'd like to think I surrender to Her, that powerful Presence in my life, that (sometimes literal) ground of my being-ness that also shapes my knowings and my relationality and my doings. I don't think I always do.

That includes recognizing limitations, including new ones imposed by a changing world. Including a changing climate.

Like: coming home from a really lovely trip in California (I saw soooo many people and if I didn't see you don't take it personally!!!!) and then here in the Hudson Valley there's wildfire smoke. I'm sensitive to smoke, so on Thursday afternoon I got a big headache and had to call everything to a halt, lie down, and toss that day's to-do list away. Everything (the dishes, the recycling, writing a newsletter, responding to a client) not only could wait, it had to wait. Krissy had a bad cold, and so she was coughing, and I was headache-ing, and we were both rather miserable.

Climate change keeps grinding us/me to various forms of pauses/stops. It's too hot or too cold or too uncertain to do..... xyz. The air quality is too bad for many kids to do outdoor camps. For many adults, too. This summer, I've started preparing for heat domes by saying: ok, on this and this day, when there's a heat dome, I'm cancelling the kind of work that I just can't do well during the heat (I'm so susceptible to heat and I don't have AC in my office and I've got issues with AC, anyways.)

Pause: pause the continued emissions; pause the plans that go against decarbonizing, pause the rush towards ever-new levels of consumption. Just stop.

Obviously that pause is not happening at a federal level right now.

So I surrender: yes, this heat/smoke is happening. This is what I can do. This is what I can't do.

I don't surrender to the notion that it is totally inevitable that it will only get worse. Or that we as a people can't still change course (though the politics right now are not in favor of changing course). I don't surrender to the climate deniers who read into the same phenomenon other origins. Absolutely not.

Perhaps because of my time in 12-step programs in my twenties, thinking about what we surrender to (and what we don't surrender) leads me back to the Serenity Prayer. which for so long was a key part of my morning routine. I often think of the nuance within that prayer as part of so much of the work of discernment.

The prayer was originally penned in 1926 by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. One of the more prominent and influential theologians of the last century who taught at Union Theological Seminary for many years, it was hard to escape his name when I studied at Union about 90 years after he wrote the prayer.

Niebuhr's experience of the automobile industry in Detroit in the 1920s (pre-existing labor laws) led him to become a socialist and to develop 'Christian Realism' - which recognizes and looks at the persistent roots of evil in human life. He was distressed by the egoism, pride, and hypocrisy of America and (especially) the elite classes, seeing these as the fruit of insecurity and an anxious defensiveness of humans in their finiteness. To assume that humans will, assuredly, 'progress', he argued, was a form of destructive pride; a significant sin. Power, he recognizes, corrupts - and power concedes nothing without struggle. Which is not the same as saying that such arrogant pretentions could not be overcome: he was a hopeful political activist. He once said: “the saints are tempted to continue to see that grace may abound, while sinners toil and sweat to make human relations a little more tolerable and slightly more just.” Recognizing that perfection was impossible, he argued for a kind of 'proximate justice.'

Later, one of the grandfathers of black theology, Prof James Cone (whom I got to study with in person, and without whom my with ReMembering would be very different), both learned from and critiqued Niebuhr. Niebuhr did not, Cone argues, bother to fully understand the context of the black folk of the country: his calls for proximate justice did not stop lynching. Niebuhr both recognized white supremacy, spoke loudly against it, but also argued for solving the problems of racism over time... not too quickly. That's just wrong, Cone argued.

The two men had strongly different opinions on what the discernment of the Serenity Prayer might yield.

What can we change? What is in our nexus of control and of influence? What is inevitable? What is done through time - and what must be urgently addressed now?

These questions shape many vexing social and ecological problems.

In asking the question, how could someone who understood so much, who was one of the first ecumenical Christian theological influencers who refused to blame Jewish people for the death of Jesus and saw the attempt at converting Jewish people to Christianity as unethical to Christian tenants... how could that same person miss this critical dynamic of the American experience? Cone's answer: from very different contextual/lived (embodied) experiences.

(That recognition is part of why I do the ReMembering work. It is part of why I teach Origin Stories the way I do. It's also part of what I keep trying to get better at, myself.)

Variations of felt embodied experiences, which en-corporate a variety of knowings, influence what we "know" and "think" we can and cannot change. What we can hear in our prayer life is influenced by our embodied experience. That does not mean it is determined. Many forms of life experience - and grace - can help us change our heart-minds-actions.

Which shifts our understanding of what we surrender to. Of what we seek within our own practices of devotion.

Sometimes we can challenge the stories we tell ourselves. And sometimes we can't, and where and how that happens shape-shifts future possibilities both for ourselves... and for others.

And there are, always, many varieties of grace.

In the interest of offering you fuller expressions of history, here's the original prayer:

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things

I cannot change,

Courage to change the

things I can, and the

wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardship as the

pathway to peace.

Taking, as He did, this

sinful world as it is,

not as I would have it.

Trusting that He will make

all things right if I

surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy

in this life, and supremely

happy with Him forever in

the next.

Amen

Reinhold Niebuhr (1926)

I myself no longer participate in 12 step programs. The classic Serenity Prayer (just the first four lines) often still resonates with me. The language above is language I can translate into my own theological understanding; I appreciate that is harder for some folks than for others.

I don't know where your prayers are taking you, or where your embodied experiences are moving you.

But when you are clear, really clear, about what surrender - from fully pausing to utter devotion - needs to look like, I hope it can be filled with grace.

Blessings on your comings and your goings -