From the Publisher

Imagine God thinking about you.   What do you assume God feels when you come to mind?   In his latest books, Surrender to Love , David G. Benner invites us to vividly envision this.   While many see a disappointed and angry God, Benner offers a different viewpoint: "The truth is that when God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face.   God bursts with love for humans.   The Christian God chooses to be known as Love, and that love pervades every aspect of God's relationship with us."

Integrating spiritual and psychological insight, Benner examines the indivisible themes of surrender and love.   With chapters including meditative exercises, you will be guided into your own journey abounding with love, trust, and spiritual transformation. Surrender to Love will lead you into an unexpected place, where yieldedness to God frees you to become who he created you to be.

Review

This slim little book of less than a hundred pages took me several weeks to read.  Right from the first chapter, Dr. Benner's shared reflections, arising out of his lived experience and those of some of his patients, impelled me to spend hours just sitting, allowing the divine, unconditional love to pervade my being.  Never before had I been able to so accept my sinfulness, my weaknesses, and my addictions and allow them to be before God, knowing that this prodigal Father's love would in no way be deterred by them.  Rather that love would be the healing of them.  And more: that love immediately flowed out upon all others, most especially those whom I had hurt, healing them wholly of all the hurt I had caused, if only they allowed it.   

Dr. David Benner's Surrender to Love brings us quickly beyond all the effort of willful love, all the need for any pretense, and all the shame and self-hate to the open space of an unearned, unlimited, wholly gratuitous love which allows nothing to stand in its way save our refusal to accept it.  It is surprising how we fight against Love's accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves, our defective, wounded, malicious self.  But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!  The subtitle of Dr. Benner's book is "Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality," and I think that this is just that.  At heart, essentially and necessarily, Christianity is a question of accepting a love that went so almost unbelievably far as to sacrifice the Love's own beloved Son for me, for you, for each one of us, no matter how miserably unworthy we are of such love.  

The doctor is perhaps influenced by the Ignatian way as he invites us to allow our imaginations to bring us into the experience of that smelly little tramp embraced by the prodigal Father, all his foulness cloaked over with the Father's own cloak; or that little one who, despite apostolic remonstrance, climbs up and snuggles in Jesus' lap.  Too much feeling, too much emotion, too much sentimentalism?  Then why did God become a man who can feel, can have all the sentiments of the human heart, can give expression in a fully human way to the longing love that impelled him to create us for such love? 

I hope you will be able to track down this little book, published by InterVarsity Press, and that it will be for you the blessing it has been for me.  It is so difficult for us to open to love - because we know in the end we will have to return love for love.  Anything the helps us to open to this, which is the basic fabric of our lives, this interweaving of love, this embrace of divine love, for which our whole naked being longs, is a great grace.  May Dr. Benner's book be such a grace for you as it has been for me.

Abba Dom M. Basil Pennington, OSCO
Abbey of Blessed Mary of Saint Joseph
Spencer MA 01562