Marveling at those little acts of surrender

Last week, I attended the Spiritual Direction Symposium in Latrobe, PA. It had a slate of speakers who are the ‘rock stars’ in the spiritual direction universe.  They included Dan Burke of Avila, Fathers Boniface Hicks, Timothy Gallagher, and Thomas Ecklin.  In addition to the talks, I networked with about 200 spiritual directors nationwide.  For four days, I felt like I was drinking from a spiritual firehose. 

Since I was that far north, I travelled to Niagara Falls with my wife.  It’s an incredible sight, the second-largest waterfall in the world.  It certainly expanded my metaphor of the flow from a ‘firehose’. 

With all sorts of affective resonances from both the glorious waterfall and the spiritual flow of the symposium, I juxtaposed the two. 

Dan Burke said that to become holy, some think they must ‘put something in’: more spiritual reading, more praying, more acts of charity. All that is good.  He added that the true path to holiness is to take things out: our disordered attachments, self-seeking ego, and sinful habits and inclinations.  Holy people are not necessarily filling themselves up, but emptying themselves out. 

I brought this ‘emptying’ image to the Niagara Falls, a prodigious emptying of Lake Erie into Lake Ontario.  I usually think of my ‘emptying’ as something that happens little by little.  It occurred to me that to God, even my little acts of self-emptying are like this waterfall:  momentous, powerful, and beautiful.  A whispering roar beneath a noisy, clamoring world. 

Saint Francis of Assisi assigns the attribute of self-emptying or humility to Sister Water in The Canticle of the Sun:

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious. 

He says this because humility, like water, seeks the lowest place. 

Lake Erie is about 300 feet higher than Lake Ontario.  Sister Water travels this ‘path of humility’ descending from one lake to the other, down the Saint Lawrence River, and then out to sea.  “This is the Lord’s doing; marvelous in our eyes.”  (PS 118:23)

Also the ‘Lord’s doing’ is the grace I receive from those moments of self-emptying.  My lesson: don’t minimize those acts of surrender and sacrifice.  They may seem little to me, but in the eyes of God, they are a beautiful sight to behold.