Two Liturgies: Control or Surrender

“Cast all your anxieties on him.”  

— 1 Peter 5:7

There’s a command hidden inside our anxiety.

Peter doesn’t merely tell us that God understands it. He tells us what to do with it.

Cast it.

Something carried is to be thrown from one set of hands into another.

Anxiety often feels like something happening to us, and sometimes it is. The body tightens before the mind knows why. We wake at three in the morning already halfway through an argument that hasn’t happened. Some forms of anxiety become deeply lodged in the body and imagination and require patience, wise counsel, perhaps professional care.

But anxiety also raises a spiritual question: Who’s going to carry this?

And beneath much of our worry, the answer is often: I am.

Peter gives another answer.

Give it to God.

Even that can be misunderstood. We may picture God as someone stronger standing nearby, willing to take a load we can’t manage. There’s truth in that image, but Christianity makes a deeper claim. God isn’t another being alongside us, only bigger and more capable. We don’t occupy neighboring pieces of reality.

“In him we live and move and have our being.”

Before we surrender anything to God, we’re already being held by him.

Responsibility and Control

We do have responsibilities. Christianity doesn’t ask us to become passive observers of our own lives. There are children to raise, bills to pay, decisions to make, promises to keep, conversations we’ve avoided, work that needs doing.

The useful distinction is between responsibility and control.

Responsibility asks: What has God given me to do?

Control wants something more. It wants to know that my doing will secure the result.

The difference can be difficult to see because the outward actions may be identical. The responsible person and the controlling person may both plan carefully, save money, make the call, prepare for the meeting, check the details twice. The difference appears somewhere inside the act, in what we think our competence is finally supposed to accomplish.

There comes a point where prudence begins quietly trying to become providence.

And this is where our usual picture of dependence on God can mislead us. We often imagine God and the creature as though they were competing causes. If God does more, perhaps we do less. If everything finally depends upon God, our own agency starts to seem less substantial.

But God isn’t one cause among others. His action doesn’t displace ours because it isn’t happening on the same level. God gives creatures the very actuality by which they exist and act at all.

This means our dependence on God doesn’t make us less real.

It’s why we’re real.

A creature doesn’t receive being from God at the beginning and then somehow carry on with a metaphysical supply of its own. Creation isn't merely something God did. At this moment, whatever exists does so because God gives it to be.

That doesn’t make the creature a piece of God. A tree is genuinely a tree and not a divine fragment temporarily wearing bark. You are genuinely you. Creation is other than God, with its own integrity, form, powers, causes, and history.

But it is never independent of him.

The more radically a creature depends upon God, the more fully, not less fully, it possesses its own created actuality. God doesn’t have to step back for the creature to become itself. His presence is what allows the creature to be itself in the first place.

We’re used to dependence meaning deficiency. Here it means something closer to participation.

Creaturehood

Most of us have been trained to regard dependence as an embarrassment.

Children depend on adults. The sick depend on caregivers. Maturity seems to move in the other direction. You become competent, accumulate resources, learn how things work, and gradually need less from other people.

There’s a legitimate human maturity in that. A forty-year-old should be able to do things a four-year-old can’t.

The trouble begins when we turn that practical maturity into a metaphysics.

Then the ideal human being becomes the self-contained one: financially secure, emotionally invulnerable, professionally indispensable, prepared for every contingency. Need no one. Owe nothing. Keep enough options open that circumstance can never quite trap you.

Christianity cuts across that fantasy at the root.

There is no self-sufficient creature.

Not because creatures have failed to achieve self-sufficiency, but because “self-sufficient creature” is a contradiction. To be a creature is to receive existence.

A stone receives being according to the small, strange perfection of a stone. An oak receives being as oak, sends roots into soil, takes water into itself, produces acorns. Its dependence upon God doesn’t interrupt any of this. It is present within all of it, more intimate than anything we usually mean by dependence.

And so with us.

Our freedom is real. So are our intelligence, choices, loves, failures, bodies, histories. Grace doesn’t require any of these to become less real so God can become more present.

God’s presence isn’t purchased by our disappearance.

This is one reason surrender is so difficult to understand. We hear surrender and imagine diminishment. We picture ourselves becoming less active, less responsible, less fully ourselves.

But surrender to God isn't surrender to another creature whose will must expand by shrinking ours.

The God who asks for surrender is the God in whom our freedom exists at all.

The Future in Your Hand

Control rarely announces itself dramatically. Usually there’s just a problem.

So you think about it.

You make a plan. Then you run through the plan again. You anticipate what might go wrong. You check. You check once more because perhaps something has changed in the last six minutes.

You send a message and put the phone down.

Then you pick it up.

Nothing.

A few minutes later you reread what you wrote. Maybe that sentence sounded harsher than you intended. You imagine how the other person might take it, prepare an explanation, then prepare a response to the response you haven’t received.

There’s nothing unusual about any of this. That’s partly the problem.

At some point you’re no longer simply tending a situation. You’re trying to get ahead of reality.

The phone is in your hand, but what you’d really like to hold is the future.

Anxiety tells us that something important remains uncertain, and control suggests that uncertainty might yield if we give the matter enough thought. Sometimes thinking helps. Sometimes another spreadsheet really is useful. Sometimes we genuinely forgot something.

But eventually thought reaches its limit. Another pass doesn’t produce more wisdom. It merely repeats the wish that reality could be made safe in advance.

There’s probably something in your life that invites this.

A child you love.

Money.

A relationship whose future you can’t read.

Someone’s judgment of you.

A decision you’ve already made and keep remaking in your head.

Something you keep asking God to fix.

We may even call this trust. Yet sometimes what we mean by trusting God is that we trust him to arrange the result we’ve already decided is necessary.

That leaves God in a strangely subordinate position.

Two Liturgies

There’s a liturgy we learn without ever entering a church.

Secure yourself. Protect yourself. Anticipate trouble. Keep enough in reserve. Don’t become too dependent. Stay useful. Stay informed.

None of these things is always foolish. Prudence exists for a reason. The problem is what repeated habits of self-protection can teach the imagination about reality.

Slowly, self-sufficiency begins to look like maturity.

The Lord’s Prayer begins somewhere else.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Not: teach us finally to need no bread from you.

Give us.

The Christian life returns to those words over and over because we forget what kind of beings we are.

At Mass we receive. We receive the Word. We receive mercy. We receive Christ himself. Even our offering is made from gifts already given: “from your bounty we have received.”

Then we go home and spend the week trying to establish ourselves on some ground that is simply ours.

That contradiction can survive quite comfortably inside a practicing Christian life. We can kneel before God on Sunday and spend Monday trying to become our own providence.

We may never say that, of course. We call it being responsible.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Worry and Care

Someone has to be responsible.

Yes. Perhaps that someone is you.

But your responsibility is real precisely because God creates a world in which creatures genuinely act. Christianity has no need to protect divine sovereignty by making human action pretend.

Care can prepare for the meeting, tell the truth, make the appointment, apologize, save for retirement, call the child.

Worry has a harder time knowing when its work is finished.

It keeps going after there's nothing left to obey.

This is where the language of “letting God handle it” can become sloppy. It may suggest that God takes over once we reach the edge of our ability, as though most of life belongs to us and the difficult remainder belongs to him.

But God was already there in the part we called ours.

When I act, I act. My decision is mine. My effort is mine. The consequences of laziness or courage are real.

And the whole of that created action exists from God.

This isn’t a division of labor.

It’s participation.

Because God acts as Creator, I can act as creature. There is no rivalry to resolve.

That's why dependence can actually free human action rather than suffocate it. I no longer have to load every decision with the impossible requirement that it secure the world.

I can do what is mine to do.

Enough Light

There really are situations where we don’t know what obedience requires. Discernment isn’t always disguised avoidance. Life is complicated, information is incomplete, and sometimes two genuinely good obligations pull in different directions.

But sometimes the next thing is clear and we keep asking for more clarity because we don’t like it.

Make the call.

Apologize.

Wait.

Stop checking.

Tell the truth.

Go to bed.

Pray.

We often want God to show us what'll happen next when what we have actually been given is enough light to act now.

Perhaps that’s part of why creaturehood offends us. A creature never possesses the whole. We live from one moment into another. We act within histories we didn’t begin and among other freedoms we can’t control. Much of what determines the shape of our lives arrives from outside us.

Yet Christianity doesn’t describe this condition as abandonment.

The creature is finite, but finitude isn't distance from God.

Quite the opposite.

“In him we live and move and have our being” means that our contingency is held within a deeper actuality. We don’t hover over nothing by our own strength. At every moment, the gift precedes us.

The Gardener

The gardener helps here.

A garden requires work. Soil doesn’t prepare itself. Someone has to put the seed in the ground, water it, pull weeds, notice the aphids.

Neglect matters.

So does skill.

But no gardener mistakes these things for the power of life itself.

No one goes outside at midnight, digs up the seed, and improves matters by checking whether germination has begun.

The gardener acts precisely by respecting a life he can serve but can't manufacture.

Paul’s line is almost embarrassingly simple:

“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

It’s easy to read that as a sequence. Paul did his bit, Apollos did his, then God supplied whatever was missing.

But that isn’t deep enough.

Paul’s planting is already a creaturely action sustained by God. So is Apollos’s watering. So are the seed, the rain, the soil, the hidden chemistry by which a root begins to push downward. God’s giving of growth doesn’t compete with any of these created causes. It is the reason there can be causes at all.

The plant really grows.

The gardener really gardens.

God really gives the growth.

All three statements remain true without being divided into percentages.

There’s something wonderfully sane about that.

I don’t need to choose between dependence and action. My action is already dependent, and its dependence doesn’t make it unreal.

Mine to Do

Take whatever has been occupying your mind and separate two things that anxiety prefers to blur.

What is actually yours to do?

And what are you trying to make happen?

The conversation may be yours. The other person’s conversion isn’t.

You can prepare well. You can’t guarantee success.

You can apologize. You can’t compel forgiveness.

You can love your child, teach her, correct her, pray for her, remain available when she'd rather you weren’t. But her freedom is real too. So is God’s relation to her. You were never asked to become the author of her soul.

This distinction doesn’t make responsibility smaller. In some ways it makes it more severe. Once I stop pretending that worry is useful, I’m left with the thing I can actually do.

Sometimes that thing is difficult.

Do it.

Then stop demanding that obedience come with a receipt guaranteeing the outcome.

And when you discover tomorrow that you’ve picked the whole thing up again, cast it again.

That’s probably closer to how surrender actually develops. Less a heroic act than a repeated correction of posture.

The hand closes.

The hand opens.

Open Hands

We don't stand outside God and occasionally hand things over to him.

There’s nowhere outside God in which a creature could stand.

This doesn’t mean the world is God. It means the world is creation. Its difference from God is real, and so is its complete dependence upon him. God gives creatures something astonishing: not an imitation of reality, not a temporary lease on divine substance, but their own created actuality.

A creature really is.

And it really is because God gives it to be.

This is why surrender needn’t make us smaller.

The branch doesn’t become less alive because its life comes from the vine.

The creature doesn’t become less itself as its dependence upon God deepens. It becomes more itself because there's less fantasy mixed into the way it possesses its life.

I can act without imagining that I’m ultimate.

I can love without possessing.

I can work hard without making an idol of the result.

I can receive even my own agency as gift.

The seed is still underground.

There’s work to do tomorrow. Watering, weeding, paying attention.

But tonight there’s nothing to be gained by digging it up.

God gives the growth.