Prayer of Abandonment (And a Discipline of Mind)

Four o'clock in the morning, or thereabouts, when I often have to get up and tend a child, is a dangerous time for my discipline of mind. I get back into bed, and generally, having had enough sleep not to fall back to sleep immediately, start thinking. Thinking about what I should have done yesterday, what I have to do today or this week, what so and so said yesterday and what I should have said in response, etc. And it is easy for these thoughts to chain themselves to other events or thoughts, and before I know it I am agitated or worried, with no possibility of getting back to sleep. And worse still, I enter the new day with those thoughts and feelings in the background. This is not uncommon, and can happen to people during the day or night. There is a traditional spiritual practice that provides an antidote. Pray! At 4AM, once I realise that my mind is spiralling out of control, I say to myself, "I surrender", over and over. The trick is to stop thinking about anything else and saying the word without thinking about anything else at all. Don't concentrate on the word too much because the idea is that the word reflects a confidence in God, to whom you are surrendering. When I do this I am asleep within minutes.

It is the clue for the day as well. Experiencing a rise in aggravation of any kind? Thoughts, feelings building a momentum of negativity? Then say the surrender prayer above, or better still, during the day, try this prayer from Charles de Foucauld.

Father,

I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.

Whatever you may do, I thank you:

I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;

I offer it to you

with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord,

and so need to give myself,

to surrender myself into your hands,

without reserve,

and with boundless confidence,

for you are my Father. Amen.

Hated and Hating (Luke 17:11-19)

Even the oppressed oppress others; the victimized and excluded exclude others. There is always someone else whose exclusion will make us feel better. Hated but also hating. One could imagine that the inner life of this small group of lepers, rather than their leprosy being the great equalizer of former animosities, merely repeated the usual perversions of exclusion. Hated but still hating.

The Samaritan in this reading is unclean for two reasons: ethnicity and leprosy. When he is made whole, is it only his leprosy of which he is healed? No, surely not just his leprosy is gone but also his conformity to the system that makes 'lepers' and 'Samaritans'. The Samaritan comes back to Jesus who is the source of his physical healing and his wholeness as a full human being, united through faith in Jesus with all those entering this new humanity.

Contrast the behaviour of the nine Jews with the Samaritan. They go to be certified clean by the priest; that is, returning to the system of exclusion through an officer of the system (the priest). From the point of view of the system (of ordinary religion) the nine Jewish lepers only required a single cleansing. They were part of the system before they contracted leprosy, and wanted to return to live within the system's confines. It is the Samaritan (he was never part of the system as a Samaritan) who sees that Jesus, by healing him equally with the nine Jews, also offered him liberation from the system itself.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the Samaritan, if he was meant to report to a Jewish or Samaritan priest, didn't bother. He had escaped the boundaries he formerly accepted forced on all of us by the universal human propensity to create boundaries of ex/inclusion. He would still have been hated by many, but no longer hating. His eyes had been opened.