True surrender is generosity. We say that to surrender is to be generous with oneself, to give of oneself, to share something intimate with another. But what exactly is being given when we, in our generosity, give of ourselves? What can it mean that we are generous with ourselves, of ourselves, for ourselves, that we give our selves? How can we both give and be given?Who is surrendering and who is surrendered? We are both the giver and the given, we are the giver and the gift. We are the actor and agent of the gift, the object, the thing, the gift that is given. We are divided asunder by the act of generosity. By giving of our selves we give ourselves and thus our selves away, We give away the self that is the giver, the one who gives. We give the giver. To whom?
By giving ourselves, giving of ourselves, by giving our selves, don’t we also give away the power and potential we possess, the prospect of what we could give to others? Aren’t we giving away the possibility of future giving, the possibility of being the one who gives? When we renounce our generosity, aren’t we giving up the will to give, and all the aspirations and motivations that are entangled with it? We are the subject of giving and yet we make ourselves into an object of giving, a gift. But by this giving, by this surrender, don’t we also give away our possibility to take action in the world, to do something of value, to good works, hold good thoughts, speak good words, all by surrendering ourselves as selves who are capable of surrender?
Aren’t we giving away that future horizon of giving? Of the gifts that we might dream of giving? And if one of those gifts is us, our spirit, our heart and our soul, are we closing the door on giving at all? When we surrender, purely profoundly, honestly, it is the last surrender, the last time this ‘we’ will be ‘us’, the last chance we will have to give away anything as we, and the last chance we will have of giving ourselves away, of surrendering. In other words, surrender happens only once, in only one time, one temporality, one place, one story, one history.
By the same token, this same paradox, this mystery of time and self, is the realisation that the authentic self, if it exists, must have always existed and will forever exist. To surrender is to give away all the future me’s I will ever be, and all the selves I have been in the past, but also, mercifully, to dispense with the banal concept of ‘future’ as the moment that succeeds this one, displacing it with a notion of cosmic future as the world that will become from this one. Generosity is the demonstration of the endlessness and the place-less-ness of the soul.
What is it to be generous? It is to posses gifts, talents, resources whose essence is made up of precisely those things that need to be given away in order to be themselves, in order to be generous. To be ourselves, we surrender ourselves When we surrender, we give ourselves away. That’s why generosity acknowledges that we are more than ourselves, that we are excess, that we are beneficence. The soul, to be a soul, must give itself away.