Lent - Surrender by becoming God's violin - by being God's instrument

Fr Wilfrid Stinissen, O.C.D.

Lent is about transformation - a stripping away all the debris that keeps us from being fully alive in Christ. In this my final installment from Father Wilfrid Stinissen, O.C.D. he lists 3 stages of Surrender and Abandonment. In the first two stages we “do” for God; in the final stage God “does” through us.) Here, in the third stage, God does His will through me. This stage "presupposes that we have practiced accepting and obeying God's will for a long time...There ought to come a time in the life of every Christian, when he is merely God's instrument and nothing more... In the third stage, surrender is much more radical and total than in the second. There, I refrained from choosing for myself what I would do. I tried to discover God's will and then carry it out, but it was I who did God's will...Now I offer to God not only my will but also all of my potential, all of the powers of my soul, so that He Himself may carry out His will through me... Before, it was I who played the violin. It was God, of course, who gave me the score, and I obediently played what He gave me to play. Now I give the violin to God and let Him play. One hears that it is the same violin... It has the same characteristics and defects. But there is no similarity between the music I produced myself and what resonates now. God not only makes use of all of the violin's possibilities, but He reveals something of Himself in His playing...It is not that I have become more skilled. No, now an artist of the very highest grade is playing... Being God's violin is something completely different from playing the violin for God. Now He does not content Himself with deciding what I should play, but He Himself touches the strings of my faculties. He can do that only when He has the violin in His hands, when my surrender applies, not just to one part of myself, but to my whole self. 'I abandon myself into Your hands. I offer it to You with all the love of my heart...and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into Your hands without reserve...

Into Your Hands, Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us  by Fr Wilfrid Stinissen

Fr Stinissen leads us in a reflection on this experience of freedom through surrender - surrender by becoming prayer through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.