In the love that is objectless and subjectless, there is no ego that loves, and no thing that is loved. This longing we feel, this suspicion in hearts, this sliver in our minds, is the hint of longing on its way to us, longing that is growing, longing that will see the light of day.
Yet it is by longing for material things that we resist the divine longing, standing intentionally, or perhaps intuitionally in the way, Of course we want to feel that weak signal of divinity, for that is what lies behind every moment of pleasure we have. All the aesthetic sources of pleasure—beauty, fragrance, taste, sensation—are also clues to the inner longing for the divine beauty.
That we should resist it, turn away from it, insist to ourselves, for a moment or a lifetime, that the satisfaction of material longing is greater, is somehow necessary in order to set the stage, the play, of the divine longing, the longing that not even God finishes with. ‘The heart asks for pleasure first,’ not to know divine longing directly, but to know that the mystery that makes it possible. Every heart knows that in the smallest pleasure there is the tiny whisper of the voice of the Divine.
This is inner force that wants to take us to the edge of surrender, to the edge of casting ourselves off, an affirmation, a validation, an opening, against which we resist in order to enjoy this moment of longing itself.
Thus just like object-less surrender—we do not surrender something to someone—the ultimate surrender consists of simply surrendering, the experience of divine love is also object-less: when we have given ourselves to the divine through the act of surrender, when we have given ourselves to ourselves as self-giving, there is no thing left to love, and there is no one who remains to do the loving. There is only love. It loves.
If surrender means gifting ourselves to the Divine, surely it also offers a gift back to us, the redemption of the desire we had for surrender. For even if giving ourselves over, it is to something that incites us, invites us, calls us. And yet we resist. We do not surrender at once, we do not indulge, do not give ourselves immediately to this mystery.
Surrender stands before us. What stands between us and surrender? What fills the space between this heart of ours, these thoughts, these wants and reservations and that condition, that space or place in which these are divinely absorbed into the All?
Whatever it may be, it is not indifferent, not passive. It is filled with spirit that touches us, plays with us, invites and denies us, pushes and pulls, wavers and shines. We hear it, it fills the airways of body, our nostrils and lungs, it grumbles in our stomachs and hums in our ears.
This life in-between is the persistence of gentle, loving resistance to surrender, resistance that lets us glimpse the divine without yielding to it, to desire and to, strangely, experience being desired by it.
The mystery of resistance, of the floating pushing pull between this hopeful life and the imagined fulfilled life, is not only the moment and the place where we desire, but also where the divine desires.
Thus we find a kind of surrender everywhere surrendered existence confronts us with its fear, resisting our will to pleasure and our longing to surrender.