An Act of Recognition

I thought I was trying to understand kenosis. For months, I approached it as a spiritual principle to be studied, reflected upon, and eventually mastered. I read about surrender, self-emptying, trust, and fiat as though they were instructions for an inner practice. If only I could understand deeply enough, I reasoned, I would know how to let go.

Recently, while reflecting on Cynthia Bourgeault's writings on eros, agape, and kenosis, I realized something unsettling: I already know kenosis, not conceptually, but intimately.

I have met her in moments when every strategy was exhausted, when there was nothing left to hold onto, and something in me, or perhaps beyond me, simply released. I met her while watching my mother die. She clung fiercely to life until she couldn't. Then something softened and yielded. It was not defeat. It was not resignation. It was a profound letting go.

I have met her folded in a fetal position with no striving left in sight. I have met her when identities I spent years constructing were dismantled one by one, and I was asked to remain present to the unraveling. I have known her intimately, but always under conditions I would not have chosen for myself. Always when I was left with no other alternative. Fully prostrated.

While sinking deeper into this subject, I pulled a card from the Chimera Tarot and received the Hanged Man. I laughed when I saw it. Of course, the Hanged Man is kenosis.

In Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg describes the Hanged Man as voluntary inversion. The figure hangs upside down, suspended between heaven and earth, no longer orienting himself according to the values of the ordinary world. What appears to be passivity is actually consent. What appears to be loss is the making of something sacred.

As I sat with the card, a question emerged that would not leave me alone: Why is surrender so difficult before exhaustion arrives? Why do I wait until every strategy fails? Why do I cling until my fingers can no longer hold?

One of my deepest longings is to learn how to love as God loves. Yet every step toward that longing seems to require relinquishing my insistence on how, when, and in what form it should arrive. Surrender, I am beginning to suspect, is not the abandonment of desire. It is the abandonment of control over its fulfillment.

Then something almost comical happened. After writing pages about kenosis, my computer froze. I tried everything to recover the document. When it finally reopened, the page was blank.

Kenosis.

This was not the idea, but the practice.

Maybe the deepest irony is this: my desire to understand surrender may itself be what must be surrendered.

What if the thing I most fear is not suffering but trust? What if I cling because surrender requires believing that I am held even when I cannot see what is holding me? I have surrendered many times when life left me no choice. The deeper invitation may be learning to surrender before the certainty, before the collapse, before the exhaustion. To hang like the Hanged Man between heaven and earth and remain there willingly. I do not yet know how to do that, but perhaps that admission is where kenosis begins.

Then something shifted. I had been writing about what I lacked, the chosen surrender, the trust before exhaustion, the not knowing how. But as I sat with the blank screen, something turned. I began to look not at what was missing but at what was already there.

Throughout the last year, I demonstrated so much surrender and trust.

I trusted enough to leave career paths that no longer fit.

I trusted enough to build something that doesn't yet have visible proof.

I trusted enough to disappoint expectations, including my own.

I trusted enough to stop and listen when my soul said "not yet."

I trusted enough to choose authenticity over security.

Those are not hypothetical acts of trust. They are concrete ones.

When I honestly examine my life, there is a substantial body of evidence that trust has already been operating.

What moves me is that this realization is itself a kind of kenosis. I am someone who has been practicing trust for years and has not fully recognized it. There is a relinquishment there too.

The relinquishment of a story about myself. Maybe “inhabiting” kenosis today was intentional.

Sometimes spiritual growth is not acquiring a new virtue. Sometimes it is finally seeing a virtue that has quietly matured inside you while your attention was elsewhere.

Before asking myself to trust more, perhaps there is a simpler practice: acknowledge the trust that is already here as a way of honoring the woman who kept saying yes, even when she was afraid.

Especially when she was afraid.

I do feel the emptying out. The need to become someone who trusts may finally be giving way to the recognition of someone who already does.