The Freedom to Surrender

"You will be free; you will go Home; you will rest in Love forever.” - Kathy Sharp, Notes From Akasha

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Gloria Steinem died this week at ninety-two, and I have been thinking about how much of my own life was shaped by women like her, women who refused to accept that being female made their lives smaller. My step-grandmother was one of those women. She drove an AMC AMX with a racing stripe as if D.C. traffic were merely a suggestion, usually with her foot a little too firmly on the gas. She wore tank tops without a bra and long hippie skirts, collected speeding tickets regularly, and seemed untroubled by other people’s opinions. She was also smart, educated, aware, and deeply spiritual. At her center was love. Her devotion to God flowed through the way she loved my grandfather and the way she loved me. My grandfather was an administrative law judge in Washington, D.C., precise and serious and very proud of her. Somehow the judge and the woman flying around town in the AMX fit. The strong men in my family did more than support the women they loved. They gloried in their fullness.

My step-grandmother belonged to the League of Women Voters, as did one of their closest friends, who served on its national board and chaired its Representative Government Committee. I was too young to care about titles, but I went to meetings and events, prepared signs, and watched women organize around things they believed mattered. I did not understand every issue. I understood that women had voices and those voices belonged in public. An opinion also carried some responsibility. Those rooms formed my first idea of what a woman was. She knew her own mind and belonged in the life of the world.

Washington left a deep imprint on me, as did living later just outside it. Politics was not something happening on television somewhere else. Most of my friends, their parents, and nearly everyone around me were involved in some part of public life. We learned that change required participation. The world was ours to question, but we were also responsible for helping repair it.

My grandfather believed education was the single most important thing anyone could receive, female or male, and that everyone deserved it. He fought for that conviction and enforced it rather energetically at home. He paid for the best schools, including National Cathedral School, and was more disturbed when my grade fell below an A than when my brother’s did. I am not sure this was equality in its purest mathematical form, but the message was unmistakable. My mind mattered and wasting it was not an option.

Cathedral intensified everything I was learning. It was an all-girls school where many students came from families involved in diplomacy, government, and public service, but that seemed ordinary to us then. We were expected to learn, think, and participate fully. History, math, English, science, the arts, and competitive sports were taken seriously, and so were we. A girl’s mind was never decorative. We were being prepared to understand the world, participate in the world, and accept some responsibility for it.

My education continued after school. My grandfather expected me to know the news, literature, and the arts, and my childhood held ballet, opera, symphonies, and plays. We were regulars at The National Theatre. During the holidays, we regularly hosted actors from the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company when they came to Washington on their American tours. My aunt worked with the company, and I remember helping her rub actual soap on the backdrops so they would slide. After their performances, the actors came back to my grandfather’s house for huge parties and performed impromptu skits late into the night, because apparently professional actors do not stop when the play ends. I thought all of this was normal and didn’t understand until much later what a gift it was.

Not all my education came through books, classrooms, or the arts. My mother and step-grandmother practiced yoga before people photographed themselves doing it, and both taught me to grow incredible organic produce. Their homes were full of animals. There were huge dogs underfoot, cats wherever cats decided to be, and fish moving quietly through their own small worlds, all deeply loved. I spent much of my childhood outside with the women in my family, learning to pay attention to the earth and to love her. We called her Mother Earth and Gaia, and by the time I was older, the girls and women of my generation were calling women goddesses and dancing under the moon. We were reaching for the sacred feminine in the language we had. I passed that knowing to my daughter from the time she could speak, as did most of my close girlfriends. The year I met Kathy, when my daughter was two, she made the fourth in our full moon dance around a beautiful Maple tree in my backyard, fully and beautifully her own young feminine self, already part of the divine dance.

Long before I knew Gloria Steinem’s name, I watched what she fought for being lived around me. Her work is sometimes reduced to a contest between women and men, but that was never the point and is not what I believe. In her 1970 Senate testimony, Steinem said that she didn’t want to prove the superiority of one sex to another because that would only be repeating a male mistake. Women need not become greater than men because we were never less. The men in my life lost nothing when the women beside them stood fully in themselves. They were proud of them.

Spirituality came into my life through more than one door. My step-grandmother introduced me to an evangelical Christian church, where her brother was a preacher. There I began to love Jesus and to hear about God’s love in a way that felt different from my elementary Catholic religious education. Until then, religion had seemed mostly concerned with sin and fear. God was watching, and I felt already in trouble. Yet in fifth and sixth grade, nuns showed me tenderness and another way to understand Him. God loved me. It took years for that love to travel from my mind into the places where fear had settled.

Years later, in the year of that full moon dance, I met Kathy. She was brilliant, strong, completely faithful to God, and something in me recognized her before I understood why. She became my spiritual Teacher and the love of my life; someone I still love deeply and miss more every day even knowing She is in me now. In a few weeks, it will be nine years since I watched her leave this world, and that distance can still collapse without warning. Kathy had the unwavering support of her husband, David, who was proud of her, stood beside her in God’s work, and became her successor. Like my grandfather, he knew that loving a powerful woman required neither of them to become less.

Kathy taught that true love of God requires complete submission to His Will. That word is difficult for women because submission has been used against us for centuries, usually by someone who found it convenient. But surrendering to human control has nothing to do with Kathy’s teaching. No person gets to stand in God’s place and demand another soul. Surrender to God can only be given freely. In Kathy’s book, The Living Master, Maharaj Charan Singh describes love as merging our will into God’s until we stop experiencing ourselves as the one doing everything. The small self dissolves into the Ocean of Love. This is the purpose of freedom.

When I met Kathy and came to the Path twenty-six years ago, I innocently believed I would get enlightened and return to law school to write environmental policy. I had imagined enlightenment as a side project before getting back to saving the planet. I also informed Kathy that I was “fiercely independent,” which I am sure sounded like valuable information about my advanced character. I had no idea then how long I would be working on taming my mind and surrendering to the One. Over these years, that hard independence has softened. I melt into God’s Will much more quickly now and feel increasingly merged with the world around me. I have not become less myself. I have become less separate.

This is where the life I was given and the Path I chose meet. I was raised to think, question, participate, and act, and none of that was a mistake. Surrender did not erase the girl who learned to speak or the woman who believed she could change the world through law. It loosened the boundary around her. I can act with everything I have without believing everything depends on me.

Learning to become less separate has required learning to become more present. Ram Dass gave us Be Here Now, words I have loved for years and continue to find inconveniently accurate. God is not waiting on the other side of my dissertation or the future I keep arranging. He is here while the phone rings, the dogs need something, and my attention runs in six directions. Being here now means receiving this moment instead of treating it as the hallway to the next one.

The only way I know to be exactly present is through pure love. Love does not calculate what it will receive later or prepare tomorrow’s defense. When I am truly loving, all of me is there. Love gathers the attention scattered across yesterday and tomorrow and brings it home. This is how I understand the Radha Soami teachings. We are soul, a drop of the Ocean of Love that is God, and through meditation on the inner Light and Sound, we gather the attention running through the world and turn it inward. Shabd is divine love drawing the soul back to its Source. There is a reason meditation is called a practice.

Watching Kathy die taught me about presence in a way I would never have chosen. I could not keep her in her body or love her so much that time would agree to stop. I could only love her and stay. I have missed her every day since, and somehow, I miss her more as time passes rather than less. Her absence has deepened into longing because love continues even when there is nowhere in the outer world for it to go.

And that is the point of the Path. Every mystic has said it in one form or another, including Kathy and Maharaj Ji. Longing and yearning lead the soul back to the One it loves. The longing hurts because the soul has known Love and can no longer be satisfied with separation. What feels like an empty place is also the opening through which love keeps calling us home.

Gloria Steinem’s death brought me back to all of them and to the forms their love took. My step-grandmother gave me a voice, and my grandfather insisted that I educate it. Washington and Cathedral taught me to participate, the nuns showed me God’s tenderness, and Kathy joined strength to surrender. David’s devotion to her brought the lesson full circle. Love does not dim what it loves.

I see no conflict between the freedom Steinem fought for and the surrender Kathy taught. One insists that no human being has the right to own another. The other says that the soul belongs completely to God. I must be free before surrender has meaning, because forced submission is oppression. Surrender chosen in love is freedom.

In a few weeks, I will come again to the anniversary of the day Kathy left. I will move through those final hours as grief makes us do, looking for her in every moment although I know where they lead. Then I will sit in meditation and bring the longing with me. The ache is not separate from the Path. Kathy is still teaching me, certainly not in the way I would have chosen. I am learning to remain inside the life God gives me and let love have fewer conditions. Little by little, I disappear into the world around me. I still love her and miss her more than I knew one person could miss another. The love did not end when her body did. It became longing, and the longing keeps turning me toward God, toward Her, toward Home.