When freely for the first time, and aided by His Grace, we surrender to God, as through the Act of Surrender, or Gethsemane Prayer, we give back, in a single act of sacrifice, everything that He has given us, including our freedom, asking only that His Will alone be done. Of course, our gift is imperfect because it is stained with a lifetime of sin. None-the-less, it is through His great Mercy in Christ Jesus our Lord that God accepts and receives our gift of self as is; and it is through His great Love that He begins a living process of transformation - purgation - in us.

God's Love is a Transforming Fire. When we submit to its action in our souls, the darkness of sin begins to be purged through an outpouring of Grace; but it works only to the extent that our surrender of self allows. If we choose, at any time, to draw back, the channel of Grace is necessarily narrowed or even closed - not by any other action of God's than by His Own respect for our freedom of choice. If, however, we carefully persevere in seeking to become open, and remain open, to His transforming Love by making continual daily or even hourly acts of surrender especially when the going gets rough, then His Love begins its work in us, removing our darkness and enabling the Light of His Grace to shine forth, as through a lens, eventually even illuminating other souls along with our own.

The Way of Surrender is a voluntary joining of self to our Lord in the unity of the Mystical Body. As such, it must involve some level of suffering and mortification for the endurance of which His Grace is always sufficient. As members of His Mystical Body, we know that our sufferings are joined to His, and we become instruments of His merciful love in the world for the conversion of sinners and the salvation of souls. Prior to Jesus' Passion, Death, and Resurrection, suffering led only to death, God's Judgment on sin. Now, through God's infinite Grace and Mercy, made manifest in our Incarnate Lord and Savior, suffering also leads through death to resurrection unto eternal life for all who persevere in faith, trusting God until the end.

Let us, therefore, go before the Living God in the Person of Jesus Christ, wholly and entirely present in the most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. Let us kneel before Him, joining with Him in the Spirit of Gethsemane, in which He prayed to His Father, Thy Will be done, and make our own act of utter and complete surrender, Thy Will be done, not only for the sake of our own soul, but of souls everywhere.

Lord, make me an instrument...