Little Deaths: Surrendering to the Life I Have

When I started falling ten years ago, my doctor told me I needed to use a cane. I bought a purple foldable one, figuring that I may as well try to have some fun with it. I carried it around for three weeks, vowing every day to summon the courage to use it this time. I couldn’t get myself to use it.

I decided to try blessing it, so I took it to worship at my church. In the service, we sang “all to Jesus I surrender.” Do you know that song? With the romping bass line and the waterfall women’s part? “I surrender all, I surrender all.” I looked around in disbelief at people cheerfully singing this stunningly enormous assertion, and I cried. I don’t want to surrender . . . anything! I definitely don’t want to surrender all, not even to Jesus. At that moment in my journey, I was watching all the identities that I thought gave me value collapse around me. Hiking, playing piano, studying, ministering, running, traveling—all of these were dissolving. What would I be left with? Using a cane felt like failure and shame.

I did finally gather the courage to use my cane. I learned about an underground cane club of camaraderie in Boston. I learned that the sincere questions of children were far preferable to the side glances I got from adults. I learned about my ableism—I felt the need to sing or speak on subway platforms to show people I wasn’t stupid. What was that about?!

I will have this disease for the rest of my life, and it will likely slowly worsen. But in coming to grips with this illness, I have discovered a deep well of compassion, strength, and identity that I couldn’t have claimed without my illness.

Remember that surrendering? I came to understand it as the surrendering that mystics seek. The early Anabaptists called it gelassenheit, literally “allowingness,” currently “serenity.” Our ego or false self grips secondary identities as though they were our primary sources of value in the world. In reality, they are idols. All our productivity, intellect, physical ability, memory, beauty, health, those things fade like flowers and wither like grass. Ultimately, what gives me value is not these secondary identities, no matter how precious. What gives me value, my primary identity, is that I am a beloved child of God, and that can never be taken away.

The surrendering of secondary identities is rarely voluntary. When they are stripped away, it feels like a terrifying, head-first tumble into the abyss, into annihilation—as the mystics call it, a little death.  But because our God is love, there at the bottom, when we yield to love, we find our truest self, created in God’s image. That’s all we ever need. My illness taught me and continues to teach me that daily, about myself and others. And that is a pearl of great price for which I would surrender everything I have.