by Martha E. Stortz

Most mornings I wake up with The List: people to call, deadlines to meet, everything I didn’t get to yesterday. I bolt from the bed in a panic, already behind. Everything that follows feels rushed. Even when I finish the day with calls made and deadlines met, I sink into sleep battered. My own schedule has beaten me up, and the first blow came before I was even awake. Life seems out of control and the chaos controls me, pricking my conscience and jangling my nerves. This is not a good way to begin the day.

Then there are other mornings, when praise nudges me into consciousness. Words from the psalmist frame my first thoughts: "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy name!" Of course, The List quickly crowds in, but those early morning blessings permeate all the day’s duties. I receive everything and everyone more easily as gift, and at night I surrender gratefully to sleep. My life still seems out of control, but praise melts the madness away. The morning’s praise whispers a promise of the larger and luminous order that enfolds us all. Praise is a better way to begin the day. I wish it would wake me more often.

Praise is the secret to the Spirit’s self–control. True self-control does not mean a rigid, repressive, white-knuckled discipline manufactured from within. I have a black belt in that kind of self-control. The problem is that everything I try to manage slips away from me, and I run in circles to contain it. Whatever I try to control winds up controlling me. Possessed by my possessions, enslaved by e–mail, driven by deadlines, I am out of control. I feel like the man who tried to chase down a rainbow, greedy for the pot of gold at its end. And you can never chase down a rainbow. If you do, you’ll miss the show. The best way to deal with a rainbow is to stop — and wonder.

That’s what true self–control does: it slows us down to the speed of praise. The Greek word for self–control says this quite plainly: en + kratein, literally, place yourself in that larger order. Bed down in wonder! Awaken with praise! Let God take the reins, and recover your best self.

BEGIN WITH PRAISE
The medieval monks began their days with praise. After the Great Silence of sleep, they greeted the dawn with the words: "O Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth shall show forth thy praise." As they sang the psalms for the day’s first hour of prayer, they tuned their hearts to the One who fashioned them. The chants they sang resolved in the "perfect" harmonies: the octave, the fourth, the fifth. They believed that these intervals echoed the music of the spheres: the sound of the planets in their celestial cycles and the rhythm of the saints’ ceaseless praise. Throughout the day, the monks paused to place themselves in praise, and it oriented them to a divine order.

And — God knows! — the monks needed it. Their lives were completely out of their own control. They did not choose the people they lived with: brothers got on each others’ nerves, pettiness wore thin the fragile fabric of their communities. Thieves and brigands breached the walls to plunder monastic granaries and art. Survival depended on the harvest — and when the harvest was poor, people simply died. An eighth–century Benedictine monk from the north of England, the Venerable Bede (672–735), compared life to a bird blown from a windy, stormy night into the warmth and conviviality of a vast dining hall and then blown back out into the wintry dark again.

As a curb against chaos, the monks regularly placed themselves in praise. Praise tuned their souls; it overwhelmed fear, enmity, jealousy, and just plain pettiness. Throughout the day, they gathered to chant the psalms. A bell tolled, and the monks put down whatever they were doing to make their way to the sanctuary. There they surrendered to the rhythms of plainsong and psalter. As they sang, they immersed themselves in the emotions the psalms evoke. There were psalms of consolation and terror, rage and tenderness, abandonment and peace: all the feelings that community life brought out. Yet now praise brought these powerful feelings under divine control; it situated them in the gracious space of a larger order, the order of love. For just as the monks’ chants found resolution in those "perfect" harmonies, so the psalter itself resolves in love. Taken together, the psalms express the longing of a beloved creature for its Creator.

Do you often feel like Bede’s bird? His vivid image works as well in the 21st century as in the eighth. The monks found that praise was the only curb against outright anarchy, and it rested on the twin pillars of surrender and love. But does their antidote to being out of control work as well as their image does? I have a hunch it does.

SURRENDER TO THE CURRENT
I recall one of those endless summers of childhood when I was body surfing in the gray Atlantic. Always a strong swimmer, I loved being out in the big waves. I swam all through the winter in hyper–chlorinated pools, sporting green hair and red eyes, just so that I would be strong enough to go out in the big waves the next summer. One particular morning, the big waves were rolling in, harbingers of a northeaster churning down the coast. I felt strong and alive, ducking under the biggest swells, bounding over the smaller ones. Suddenly I noticed that my cousins were not with me. I looked for the shoreline —and it was far away and receding quickly. I had been caught in a rip tide.

In the distance I could see my mother and aunt stand up in alarm. They sensed my panic; their clothes were flying; they were coming in. I waved to them, and they waved their arms fiercely, sending me down the beach. Then I remembered the first rule of rip tides: Surrender to the current, don’t fight it. Swim parallel to the shore for a while, and you will swim out of the rip. I surrendered and started swimming down shore. Still waving, they walked me down shore, shouting words of encouragement. Slowly but steadily, I made my way out of danger — and finally stumbled ashore into their warm embrace.

This is not a story about swimming, but a story about surrender and love. A stronger swimmer might have defied the current, but not a young girl, no matter how well she swam. My only choice was to surrender and let love pull me in.

I have thought about that morning again and again, as life’s rip tides continue to try to pull me out to sea. I wish it were always so easy to know when to fight and when to surrender, and I miss those wonderful cheerleaders on the shore. But the first rule of rip tides remains: Surrender — and let love pull you in. When I follow it, I discover that love is gentler than jealousy, more potent than illness, fiercer than death itself. I think the medieval monks sensed this. Tossed about in the currents of community life, they simply surrendered their need for mastery and let love pull them into a divine rhythm of praise.

We all have our Lists, and they haunt us like ghosts in the night. We get caught in rip tides and find ourselves swept out to sea. Sometimes we contribute to the treachery, stirring up undertows ourselves out of a desire to control what simply cannot be controlled. In these moments, it’s worth remembering the first rule of rip tides: Surrender — and let love pull you in.

Martin Luther suspected that our best selves blossom when we fill our mouths with praise. In his commentary on the book of Genesis, he offered an image of selfhood as God intended it. Luther described Adam before the fall, before he knew he was naked or mortal, Adam unaware of the knowledge of good and evil — or the difference between: Adam as God intended him to be. Luther imagined him "intoxicated with rejoicing toward God and...delighted with all the other creatures" (Luther’s Works, Volume 1: Lectures on Genesis 2:9, 1535). It’s a great description. Call him drunk on God: that’s what Adam was in the Garden. Praise tuned Adam’s soul to the key of life, the life intended for him and for all of us.

When we surrender in praise, we let God’s love pull us into abundant life. The Spirit’s self-control works here. So bed down with wonder and awaken with praise.