Flight of a butterfly

The experience of truth is not found in the distance that is the modern paradigm of knowing:  an object seen from afar, possessed (or made) through "subjection" by a subject.  Is is,

rather something that happens to us and in which we participate, as when we get caught up in a game.  Truth happens when we lose ourselves and no longer stand over against it as a subject against an object.  When we are caught up in the game that is played with us, it is then, even before we are aware of it, that we have joined in the continuing event of truth.

 V. Stanley Benfell, The Biblical Dante, at p. 10 (quoting Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of 'Truth and Method', 258).

There is an irreducibility about Truth, of which Christ is the paradigm.  One cannot dominate Truth; one must give it play and surrender (give oneself over) to it.  Truth is found through docility, being led, taught, mastered, by Truth's maestro. True transcendence is true delivery of self to the Other.

Surrender is difficult, so has many simulacra. We have a bag full of tricks to avoid true surrender, so we can have our cake and eat it too: a pseudo-transcendence of immediacy and control.  Our passions abetted by fantasies cook up all sorts of tasty morsels to be claimed and digested while we give truth lip service. "Lay off, I'm Hungry!!!" is the refrain from Chris Farley's famous skit of the fat lady on a diet scrambling for french fries.

Surrender (giving of ourselves over to Truth) or submission (accepting a lesser role in a larger mission) lies at the heart of matter: do we claim our birthright or sell it for a mess of pottage?  As Julian Carron asks in 2012 Exercises, p. 55, do we "barter[] belonging to Jesus for a love relationship or our career[?]"

Wendell Berry has much to say about this question.  In an essay "Poetry and Marriage," he compares the discipline of each and the proper "form" to which each must submit to find free and fulfilled expression.  Form is the "bed" in which the stream of life runs, if we allow it, rather than to let our life flow everywhere or anywhere.  Form is determined by culture and tradition, and gives life and freedom.

 It is precisely the form of marriage with its constraints and boundaries, according to Berry, that necessitates the development of such excellences of character which liberate married persons to make of their marriage the full-bodied, loving communion of bodies and souls that it can be. Here again it is form, the form that "enforces freedom" which enables them to discover the crucial "unforseen belongings" of their lives. 

"Cultural and Natural Forms in the Thought of Wendell Berry," lloyd W. J. Aultman-Moore, p. 122.

Thruth and freedom, by this way of thinking, are not found in releasing oneself in a river of passion or emotion, but in careful and sometimes painful adherence to the given forms of truth through which true freedom is realized.  This is the true surrender, submission, giving up, that leads to freedom.  What is gained? the Irreducible Truth, whose form is Christ.

As Dante expressed it, the flight of a butterfly is only possible if the grub undergoes chrysalis.