When Therese discovered that she was simply not able to obey Jesus’ command to love others, she turned to Jesus for help, and as she puts it, “ And Jesus has deigned to point out to me that the only way which leads to Love’s divine furnace is the way of self-surrender. And then she gives us a beautiful image to capture what she means by “self-surrender”.  She says, “ It is like the confidence of the little child who sleeps without fear in its’ father’s arms”. Because the child has complete confidence in its father, the child is completely, without fear and rests in peace in its father’s arms. We are to have this same complete confidence in God the Father, Jesus, and, or the Holy Spirit. This is self surrender in complete trust, faith, belief and confidence that God will provide all that we need, as Jesus promised in MT 6:19. It is interesting that Therese is pointing out the very important interrelationship between fear and confidence in God. Complete trust in God drives out all fear, but less than complete faith gives rise to fear. As we have seen before, fear occurs in the bloom of the weed, while confidence and trust are required to actually believe the truth, the roots of the flower. To drive out all fear, one must totally believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life; and further believe that all His words are true (for example, that God will provide all that we need.) Such total faith in God heals all painful emotions, and roots us solidly in the heavenly world of the flower.

This call to self-surrender to God, echoes Brother Lawrence’s call to complete abandonment to God in all things, issued two hundred years before Therese. As Brother Lawrence noted, complete self-surrender to God includes complete acceptance of everything that comes into our lives, as we trust God to get us through all of life’s ups and downs. And not just get through but get us through without fear, and with a feeling of peace, and even a certain measure of enjoyment, because whatever we do with God is by its very nature enjoyable.

Furthermore, complete self-surrender requires surrendering every part of ourselves, as we have seen in the transformation from the weed to the flower. We must surrender our faulty thinking, and replace it with the trueful thinking of Christ, (the roots of the weed and flower). We must surrender our excessive and disordered desires, which is acceptance, and take on the holy desires of Christ (the stems of the weed and flower). Once we have surrendered our disordered thinking and willfulness, our painful emotions are surrendered automatically, because they can not live without the presence of excessive or disordered desire, just as the bloom of the weed can not exist without the presence of the stem (and the roots). And when our afflictive emotions are surrendered, we receive the peace of Christ, a peace which the world can not give; and we receive the joy of Christ, so our joy may be complete; and we receive the love of Christ, a peace which the world can not give; and we receive the joy of Christ, so our joy may be complete; and we receive the love of Christ which surpasses all understanding. And finally, now automatically and effortlessly, our abusive action is surrendered in favor of Christ’s loving action in every situation (the fragrance of the weed and the flower). For the weed is now completely uprooted and destroyed, and its fragrance with it. And the only thing that can come from heavenly world of the flower is the intoxicating fragrance of loving action.

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