The Great Surrender: The Paschal Mystery and The Gospel of U2
Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of
My wife, Rochelle, and my coworkers, Asher and Julie, and I are teaching people how to die. And how to receive new life, readjust and grieve, let go, and receive a new spirit. In other words, we are leading a few people through The Paschal Mystery. The mystery is a rhythm for living, which includes, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, The Forty Days, Ascension, and Pentecost.
As Fr. Ronald Rolheiser writes, “in order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit.” As someone else has said, life is a series of surrenders. Surrender is the path of the spiritual life.
Indeed, the story of the scriptures is one of a God inviting women and men to surrender lessor lives and lessor versions of ourselves for something greater, even when that something comes with loss, grief, pain, and heartache. The Paschal Mystery is a rebuke to both the prosperity gospel, as well as the consumer Christianity in both its megachurch and small-group varieties.
A key aspect of The Paschal Mystery is its dynamism. It is a journey that repeats again and again. We are continually invited to allow aspects of our lives to die, grieve them and enter and embrace a new way of living and new spirit. This happens in big a small ways, but it is never not happening.