What does it mean to surrender what we know? Or pretend to know? What does it mean to surrender our internal measuring stick? What are we measuring anyway?

For me, a lot of the time what I think I know is how things are supposed to be. Or how other people are supposed to be. And what I measure is how closely other people are matching what I think they’re supposed to be. Giving that up can feel like giving up on other people sometimes. If I just let people be who they are, it feels like giving up on my hopes for them. If I just let reality be as it is, it feels like giving up my hopes for the world.

And it is, in a way. Surrendering what I think I know about how things are supposed to be is a very uncomfortable way of liberating people from my expectations and demands. It liberates people and reality from my attempts to control things that are not mine to control. 

Of course, my measuring often gets turned back on myself, too. How am I measuring up? To what? Am I comparing myself to other people’s accomplishments? Or some abstract and elusive sense of success? Or what other people think they know about who I’m supposed to be? What is it that we measure ourselves against? And how do we embody a sense of inherent worthiness if we’re so preoccupied with measuring up to some external standard?

By this point in the journey, Inanna probably guesses what’s up. The first gate required a sacrifice, but maybe that was just to prove a point. A gesture of humility. Give up your appearance of having it all together to demonstrate that you really want to reconnect with this exiled sister. (And remember, Ereshkigal is part of us just as much as Inanna is part of us.) 

But by the second gate, Inanna has to realize this is going to be a whole thing. She’s not stupid or naïve. Is this even worth it? is an appropriate question. We’ve wrapped ourselves in very effective protections against this sort of vulnerability, and now we’re considering giving it all up? For what exactly?    

First, an observation: We are often not loving when we pretend to know how things should be. We are often not loving to other people when they don’t measure up to our expectations or demands. We are often not loving to ourselves when we don’t measure up to whatever we’re trying to measure ourselves against. If we’re honest, there might be some other values we set aside when we’re busy measuring everybody and pretending to know everything about everything.

So what do we get in return for surrendering our staff? We get ourselves. We get an opportunity to embrace reality as it is, and we get to determine who we are going to be in honest relationship with reality based on something other than certainty about how everything must be. We get an opportunity to connect with other people as they are, to learn to love people before they fix themselves and get perfect. We get to be free of needing to fix people. 

And we get to be free of thinking we need to be fixed. We get to be holy, sacred, worthy vessels of the divine just as we are. And if we continue to grow and change, which I hope we do, we get to do so from a place of curiosity and wonder and a celebration of what we most deeply value, rather than a fear of not measuring up or a demand to be perfect before we consider ourselves to be enough. 

When I think about it, giving up that staff isn’t really a sacrifice. It’s a gift. It’s surrendering something that hurts me and the world around me more than it helps. Maybe that’s why Inanna keeps going, knowing that there are more gates ahead.

What does this mean for us as a congregation? How do we measure ourselves and the world? What standard do we measure ourselves against? Are we proud of things that reflect our values? Or do we take pride in things that run contrary to what we say matters most to us? What would it be like for us, as a community, to surrender our measuring staff?

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