Submit
a new essay
We are surrounded every day by invitations to submit, to give over, to become somebody or something larger than we could previously imagine, that is, before we learned to be honest, before we learned to look everything and everyone full in the face . . .
Submit
is a word that always lies in wait for us. Submission is not an invitation but a reckoning with something already there but until now denied, something necessary to accepting ourselves as fully vulnerable, fully flawed human beings and something we are almost always brought to against our will. To submit is to pass through a seemingly inevitable door of maturation.
True submission is not the giving in to an abusive partner, a tyrant in the White House or to any form of outside coercion but to what lies between my freedom and your freedom, between my joy and your joy, between me and our shared hidden griefs, between my religious understanding and all the names other human beings have for God: in fact, to whatever terror, physical or psychological we are undergoing in our struggles to mature and survive. Submission asks us again and again, though we try to ignore it, to give up every hard won protection we had before we arrived at its door.
