A bright cloud flying over Tañon Strait. Viewed from the hills of Oslob town it rises in thick bellows, bright whites and yellows with a bit of orange right before it blends softly into its shadows of green, dark blues and violets. It leaves a cast over the sea. It hangs heavy this way for a while before it breaks into rain, a soft grey column bending softly into the sea.
From the distance, it is a thing of magnificent beauty. It is only rain falling into the bay of Bais. Soon the sun will set into its hills. But for now, everything is a golden summer afternoon.
And yet, one might think differently if one were riding a small boat under the rain cloud inside this column of thick rain. Here the world would be dark, perhaps even menacing. Rain always carries the wind with it. And the sea itself will rise in waves high enough to sow fear into the traveler’s heart. It would seem as if the world itself has grown dark and stormy.
And what else can one do in the midst of any storm? One waits its passing. As all storms must. Since there is no storm that is permanent. And from a distance away, one might see that the storm itself is only a small dark spot inside a bigger and brighter world.
From a distance, the storm is only illusion, at best only a point of view. From the distance once removed one sees the storm is only a beautiful cloud. Which if only it could speak to us, caught as we always seem to be under the rain, inside a storm of some sort, or other, the cloud would have softly said: Surrender.
It is good advice. Especially for us who grow up in fear of our own vulnerability. It is vulnerability which becomes metaphor to everything we find fearful in the world: our lack of money, one problem after another that must be solved, age, ill health, even death itself. These are grown-up fears. Which at some earlier time may have been only a fear of the dark or of being alone in a place we have not come to until now. The fear only mutates inside the cycles of our single life time. It never disappears. Unless we surrender to all of life including death itself. After we have done that, what else can we be afraid of?
To surrender is to affirm there is something bigger than life itself though we may not see it. Life is only a shadow under a fall of rain. The cloud from which the rain falls is invisible to us. To see it at all, we must have to surrender to that which we cannot see and therefore do not know. We surrender to that which must be there.
We surrender to that which is beyond the reach of our eyes. We surrender to things beyond our control. We surrender to the unknown. It is only by doing this that we find ourselves moving backwards away from the rain into the vantage point of a small hill far enough so that we might see the rain for what it is.
It is only a small shaft of grey falling from a cloud which flies over a sea, benevolent and beautiful. And watching all these, we might come to realize the world is bigger still than even this world consisting of us, these hills and this rain, that cloud flying over that sea. It is to this bigger world that we surrender.
Like one God saying, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
We surrender to death itself. We surrender to the fear of it and by that lose all fear. We surrender as if to die finally to begin to come to life.