Renunciation…

3 minute read

Renouncing is far harder than taking your own life or continuing to struggle when fate has been so hostile that even the simplest dream was not allowed to come alive. Yet renunciation may be the most precious choice God has given us.

At every crossroads in life, renunciation is the only escape. We change more by renouncing than by fighting.

Through struggle, it is true, you may still catch a spark of what might have been. Yet you are merely postponing an inevitable result. Nothing we do changes what was or what might be. We may believe otherwise, but the struggle is already lost because the outcome was decided beforehand.

The most valuable weapon against destiny is renunciation, because it alone can change something.

Renunciation has always been the weapon of those who wished to change their lives because they refused to accept what destiny offered. They did not want a simple life. They devoted themselves to a pure life and to an ideal the rest of the world considered a dream.

Yet now everyone prays and believes in that dream, which could never have been realised had those people not renounced.

Renunciation is not an action announced with trumpets and fanfare. It is silent and direct and has no time appointed beforehand. It happens instantly, leaving no path of return.

Renunciation is not the same as an action intended to change your life completely. An action has been considered and contains the outline of a predetermined future. At the moment you act, you have already decided your future destiny.

Renunciation has no future. It is like a guillotine.

At the moment of renunciation, anything is possible because you are making a choice that belongs not to the future, but to the present moment. Everything happens here and now.

An action leaves consequences and affects the thinking and lives of those around you. They can analyse what you did and follow its future events.

Renunciation leaves room for nothing and cannot even be analysed because it has no future. Its action cannot be followed into the future. It is as though everything disappeared instantly.

Renunciation resembles death, yet stands above it. Death leaves room for consequences and analysis: people know that someone disappeared, and that is the end.

Renunciation abolishes analysis. The person has not died, but neither do you know whether they continue living, and above all you no longer know their actions. You may wait for some future information before attempting a verdict.

Illusory renunciation occurs when you announce your actions, what you want, how you intend to proceed and even your reasons. Yet you do not carry those actions to completion because you realise that renunciation, even illusory renunciation, has no future.

It is like a black hole that absorbs your entire life and erases your past. The future always remains a blank page upon which only you can write.

Renunciation is like dying and returning to life.

It removes the "old" person you were and erases everything accumulated until that moment. Above all, it erases your thinking, because renunciation does not belong to thought. It belongs to the heart and the soul.

Only the soul can make this decision, which thought does not desire.

If you examine your life, you were merely a name given to a way of thinking and a destiny that you may not even have wanted.

Renunciation makes your life cease to be a dream and become reality. Above all, it makes your life no longer conditional upon thought, but chosen by you.

Renunciation means absolute freedom. It is the liberation of the soul from the claws of destiny.

First published in Romanian on 21 July 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Renunțarea....