Faith and Surrender

In an earlier post, I wrote about the song Hallelujah and analyzed it in the context of a love story. As I write this, it’s 3 in the morning and most of the rest of the world is dark, cold and asleep. It’s the perfect setting to contemplate another song that has influenced me.  It is only now, as I have begun to undertake the demanding and painful journey to connect to the Soul within me that the significance of the words has begun to “dawn” on me, figuratively speaking. The song is “Only Hope” from the 2002 movie “A Walk to Remember” based on the book by Nicholas Sparks.  It is sung by Mandy Moore, whom audiences will recognize as the mother in the NBC series “This is Us.” In the movie, Moore plays a teenage girl battling leukemia. She chooses to stay in the background and presents herself as drab and subdued, so she is an outsider to her peers.  She sings the song to the male lead as they are performing in the school play, causing him to see her in a different light and fall in love with her.Jon Foreman of Switchfoot wrote the lyrics, which Wikipedia claims is a Christian-themed song. For those who have not been introduced to the belief systems of any other religion, it is a valid claim. 

As part of my spiritual searching, I have committed to reading and copying the verses of the Bhagavad Gita by hand. The Gita is part of the Mahabharata, one of the seminal epics of Hinduism, the religion I was raised in.  There are 700 verses, so it will take a while to write them all down. In a Tedx talk at the University of Nevada in February of 2016, Foreman says, “the creator and composer of time and space” has given each of us a unique song to sing. Bhagavad Gita means The Song of the Lord and to me, that creator is Krishna.  Through the Gita, He reveals the power and mysteries of the Universe “the song of the stars, of [His] galaxy dancing and laughing and laughing again” to the dejected and despairing warrior Arjuna, who symbolizes humanity and the struggle for an end to suffering.

Only Hope begins with the words, “There's a song that's inside of my soul/It's the one that I've tried to write over and over again/I'm awake in the infinite cold/But you sing to me over and over and over again.” The “infinite cold” is the Universe in which the seeker, the individual soul, feels separated from the Supreme Soul and seeks comfort and solace, which the Lord gives in the Gita. The song referenced in the lyrics is the soul’s desire for liberation, its yearning to be joined with the Supreme. Past attempts have been unsuccessful because the singer has been wrapped up in an identification with the body and the mind, which have limited the capacity for full awareness.

Foreman talks about the inner melody inside each individual that was “pure, honest and free” during childhood but over the course of time that purity has become obscured by feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy. The melody is a metaphor for the soul that is struggling to liberate itself and be free once again. Foreman talks of being silent and still in the present, in order to be aware of all the thoughts, feelings and sensations that can be experienced at that moment, which is the objective of meditation. As he observes, “There is a void in the symphony of life when you are silent. The pain, the anger, the frustration, the dissonance” do not affect us in those moments. Instead, we feel peace and are able to hear that inner melody once again.

Krishna asks Arjuna to surrender, not to him personally, but “to the primordial and mysterious energy that permeates the cosmos.”( http://www.osho.com/iosho/library/read-book/online-library-krishna-arjuna-surrender-6b7f1d49-4cb?p=31b2580e549cd2d89745f659b7fb6644). The lyrics of “Only Hope” and the song’s title symbolize the singer’s decision to surrender in complete faith, trusting in that which cannot be seen. In that spirit of surrender, the singer resolves, “I give you my destiny/I'm giving you all of me/I want your symphony/Singing in all that I am.” The lyrics continue, “When it feels like my dreams are so far/Sing to me of the plans that you have for me over again.” 

God, or the Universal energy has a plan for everyone and it is only in that state of surrender can we begin to comprehend what that plan is. It is a rephrasing of the mandate in the Gita to live in the present, to accept the present situation and not to worry about the future outcome, “the fruits of action.” This in turn will open a pathway for the energy of the cosmos to merge with the individual soul. It requires dedicated and continuous effort over a lifetime to be open to and aware of the power of the Lord’s song, but He exhorts us to through Arjuna to have courage, or as Foreman says, “be brave and sing the truth, one note at a time.”