Martin Luther King Jr, War and Peace

I was glad to see so many of you at the Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Shabbat Service two days ago at Congregation Rodef Sholom next door!  As Unitarian Universalists, we have a particular fondness for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is probably a rare UU church that is not celebrating King's birthday today. Many of our members were very active in the civil rights work that King led in the 1950's and 1960's. Perhaps some of you here were active in those times. We lost two of our members to violence in that era. UU martyrs: James Reeb and Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a minister and a laywoman, killed in two separate incidents in Alabama.[1] The death of Reeb energized Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

There is perhaps a deeper motivation for this fondness. Former journalist, the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt related the story of her interview with Coretta Scott King in our UU World magazine a few years ago.[2]

During an hour of wide-ranging conversation, I mentioned to her that I was in seminary to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. What frankly surprised me was the look she gave me, one of respect and delight.

"Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin," she told me, … "And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston." … "We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian."

McNatt goes on to explore what it would have taken for King to be a Unitarian civil rights leader. I simply feel proud and not surprised at the Kings' connection with us.

I think King's words and work resonate so well with us because he was on a parallel path. True, his language and much of his teaching draws heavily on Hebrew and Christian texts and ideas.  He draws especially on the Hebrew prophets who spoke out against injustice in their times. He draws on Amos, "we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream".[3] Or on Isaiah, "that one day every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."[4]

But if we were to examine his writing and speeches, we would find that some of his deepest thinking is familiar to us. There is an undercurrent of universalist inclusion in all his language. King's phrase, "We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" evokes a sense of the interconnectedness of all life -- our seventh principle.  King was fond of quoting Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, "The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice."

But we do well not merely to praise King but to learn from him. This morning I want to explore King’s legacy as a tactician in achieving change in our world. We acknowledge his great success in Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma and his central role in passing the Civil Rights act in 1964.

King’s other great contribution, in my opinion, was to bring home to America the ideas of nonviolent social change developed by Mahatma Gandhi and used successfully in India and other countries. King first put the ideas of nonviolent social change to the test in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. As most of us know, the bus boycott began when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Leaders of the black church community, along with King, a new minister in town, decided to ask the black community to boycott the busses for a day or so, and the boycott mushroomed into a 381-day confrontation.[5]

What I was not conscious of was the degree of planning and organizing that went into the boycott. King describes the planning and the decision-making that this project required in his book "Stride Toward Freedom".  They had to plan alternate transportation using what cars the blacks owned. They had to communicate with the press. They had to hire lawyers to defend legal attacks by the local authorities. And certainly they had to do significant fundraising.

But the most important organizing task was the endless support and training of the black community in the methods of nonviolent resistance that had been used successfully by Mahatma Gandhi.  King very much understood the theology, the moral underpinning of this nonviolent social change.  He had studied Gandhi’s work and his life, and even traveled to India to meet those close to Gandhi.  King said after visiting India, "I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom."[6]

Let me say a bit about non-violent social change as taught by Gandhi.  Rejecting the term 'passive resistance', Gandhi developed a theological idea of nonviolent resistance based on what he called Satyagraha, or 'soul force'. This is the force of truth or of love, exerted in the act of non-violent engagement with the oppressor. It is a courageous act, for it invites suffering on oneself. Gandhi made the distinction this way: "Satyagraha is a weapon of the strong; it admits of no violence under any circumstance whatsoever; and it ever insists upon truth."[7]

King understood this. He summed this up in his peace prize speech: "Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation."So considerable work went into helping black participants understand and practice nonviolent resistance.  In preparing for confrontations on integrated busses in Montgomery, King tells us:

"we ran teaching sessions to school the people in nonviolent techniques. We lined up chairs in front of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver's seat out front. From the audience we selected a dozen or so 'actors' and assigned each one a role in a hypothetical situation. One man was driver and the others were white or Negro passengers. Both groups contained some hostile and some courteous characters. As the audience watched, we played out a scene of insult or violence. … Often a Negro forgot his nonviolent role and struck back with vigor; whenever this happened we worked to rechannel his words and deeds in a nonviolent direction"[8]

Even so, King encountered some who wanted to strategize violence, especially as homes were bombed and blacks were beaten up during the boycott. King described one man from his own church who approached him and said solemnly,  "we need to kill off 8 or 10 white people. It’s the only language they understand. If we fail to do this they will think we are afraid.  We must show them we are not afraid any longer."[9]

King was able to convince most to continue the experiment of nonviolent resistance in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma.  King was less successful in later years, as others in the black community began advocating and using violence, arguing that violence would achieve their goals faster than nonviolence. Malcolm X put it this way:

"If [the white man's] language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun … If he only understands the language of a rope, get a rope. But don't waste time talking the wrong language to a man if you want to really communicate with him."[10]

As King came to understand the 'soul force' power of nonviolent action, he also came to understand that our national tendency toward war, the military and overseas violence had a hidden cost. He saw the terrible linkage between racism and poverty and war, he began to speak in opposition to the Vietnam war as a time when such speech took true courage. In 1967, he tells us:

"A few years ago …it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. … Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."[11]

We have a tendency in this country to reach for forceful and even violent ways to achieve our national ends. Thus, our current wars were originally pitched to us as short-term easy victories against third-world nations. We were told that terrorism could only be dispatched if we were willing to use torture, rendition and indefinite imprisonment.  We are told that the only way to reduce crime is to 'get tough on crime' with lots of prisons and long sentences.  We are told that the only way to deal with addiction is through a 'war on drugs'.

Even President Obama is not immune to attack as a 'wimp'. According to an article by Helene Cooper in last week's NY Times, "here is a president who just ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 troops, … stepped up drone strikes by unmanned Predators in Pakistan and provided intelligence and firepower for two airstrikes against Al Queda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants." And yet this week's Foreign Policy magazine has on its cover a visual comparing Obama with Jimmy Carter.[12]

When we consider President Obama's Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech, we see an apology for war, and an attempt to claim that the current wars are, to use the technical term, 'just wars'. Most disturbingly, at the end of the speech, Obama says, "oppression will always be with us", that "there will be war". My wondering and my fear is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By preparing for war and international oppression, we seem to create the conditions that encourage it. We defend the entrenched powers in places like Guatemala and Saudi Arabia; we enforce artificial national divisions in places like Rwanda; we prop up corrupt leaders through our selective complacency in places like Burma or Zimbabwe.  It's well known that our aid years ago in Afghanistan supported the rise of the Taliban, but we continue to aid the Taliban through military payoffs to support our supply chains, according to journalist Aram Rosten.[13]

Is war our only tool? I wonder if we as a nation could commit to doing more in support of nonviolent social change, both in our own land and in other countries. Could we offer material and organizational support to those being oppressed? Could we reserve threats of force for those situations in which nonviolent resistance is attacked violently by foreign governments? This could require a fundamental rethinking of how we do statecraft. I do not know what this might look like, but I do have a suspicion that it would be more successful and less costly than our current national defense and homeland security system.

To accomplish this change we have to work at a deeper level than policy and platforms. We have to change the fundamental ideas of our national theology, what Robert Bellah calls our 'civil religion'. We need to admit that we are not endowed by God as a God's chosen nation, that we are not separate from others. We need to see the deep reality that we are all interconnected, so that as King tells us, 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere'. We need to recognize, as King did, that violence masks fear, while nonviolence requires true courage.

What can we do at the level of this one congregation? I think we would do well to educate ourselves on the method of 'soul force' that Gandhi developed. I think we would do well to seek situations in which the application of such creative methods for social change may be explored. I think we also should hold fast to the yearning for peace.

Let me end with an excerpt from two of King's speeches, "A Christmas Sermon on Peace", and "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence", both from 1967:

"It really boils down to this, that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality."[14]

So that then,

"We must move past indecision to action.… If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world.… Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."[15]

Notes:
1 "So Nobly Started", UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/2356.shtml
2 "To Pray Without Apology", UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/2527.shtml
3 Amos 5:24 described in Eric J. Sundquist, King's Dream, 2009, p. 122.
4 Isaiah 40:1-5, described in Sundquist, p. 131.
5 M. L. King, Jr., Playboy Interview, in James M. Washington, ed. A Testament of Hope, p. 343.
6 M. L. King, Jr., "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi", ibid, p. 25.
7 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 19, p. 350, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
8 M. L. King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom, in Washington, p. 458.
9 ibid, p. 449.
10 Sundquist, p. 122.
11 M. L. King Jr. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" 4 April 1967, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
12  NY Times, The Label Factor: Is Obama a Wimp or a Warrior? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10cooper.html
13 " How Americans Help Fund The Taliban", NPR Fresh Air, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122563121
14 M. L. King, Jr., M. L. King, Jr., "A Christmas Sermon on Peace" in Washington, p. 254.
15 M. L. King Jr. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" 4 April 1967, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

Grief and Renewal

Reading #1 (721)  They Are With Us Still  Kathleen McTigue
(Reader will read the non-italicized text)
(Everyone join in together for the italicized text)
In the struggles we choose for ourselves, in the ways we move forward in our lives and bring our world forward with us,
It is right to remember the names of those who gave us strength in this choice of living. It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived.
We share a history of those lives. We belong to the same motion.
They too were strengthened by what had gone before. They too were drawn on by vision of what might come to be.
Those who lived before us, who struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us, have not melted into the dust, and have not disappeared.
They are with us still. The lives they lived hold us steady.
Their words remind us and call us back to ourselves. Their courage and love evoke our own.
We, the living, carry them with us: we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.
We take them with us, and with them choose the deeper path of living.


Reading #2  Why Should I Cry For You?  Gordon Sumner (Sting)
Under the dog star sail
Over the reefs of moonshine
Under the skies of fall
North, Northwest, the stones of  Faroe
Under the Arctic fire
Over the seas of silence
Hauling on frozen ropes
Fall all my days remaining
But would north be true?
All colors bleed to red
Asleep on the ocean’s bed
Drifting in empty seas
For all my days remaining
But would north be true?
Why should I? Why should I cry for you?
Dark angels follow me
Over a godless sea
Mountains of endless falling,
For all my days remaining
What would be true?
Sometime I see your face,
The stars seem to lose their place
Why must I think of you?
Why must I? Why should I?
Why should I cry for you?
Why would you want me to?
And what would it mean to say,
That, “I loved you in my fashion”?
What would be true?
Why should I?  Why should I cry for you?


Sermon   Grief and Renewal
I had thought about using paper to write names of those we’ve recently lost and then burning the paper in a symbolic release. But we did that last week, and I have to confess, the two things that I on wrote on my paper that I thought I needed to let go of were stress and perfectionism….

Hopefully I’ve re-set the tone and expectations for this sermon; I really hope people weren’t expecting something along the lines of one of Matt’s wonderful and didactic sermons. I would like to begin with a memorable experience during my freshman year of college. I had just completed my first semester and was very pleased to find myself still academically eligible for the spring semester. Actually, I’d surpassed my expectations and was beginning to think this college stuff was a snap - much easier than High School. Then my academic advisor (an alumnus of the college, but who had no knowledge whatsoever of sciences courses that required laboratory time) suggested that, along with my biology, inorganic chemistry, and calculus courses, I should fill the final spot with a sociology course entitled Death and Dying. My advisor took the course when he was an undergraduate and told me that the course made a lasting impression on him and the professor was one of the best on campus.  He was correct on both accounts – the professor was so good that he turned a simple lecture-style course into a near-death experience! This turn in my fortunes caught me completely by surprise. He skewered my logic and reason, ridiculed my writing style, left the disemboweled carcass of my papers outside of his office door, dripping red with corrections for all to see, and buried my GPA so deep, it took the rest of my college career to resuscitate it and give it a pulse.  But even as I trudged back to my dorm, I wasn’t bitter. His critique, while scathing and without remorse, was accurate. As my academic advisor predicted, that course did make a lasting impression. I survived that semester (just barely). I don’t think it was so much, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” It was more along the lines of a renewal of motivation, a renewal of personal adjustments, re-engaging with intellectual challenge, recognition of strengths and limitations, and an honest self-assessment – do I want to be here.  As our culture so often makes a point of emphasizing in subtle, and not so subtle ways – I needed to dig down deep within myself and see what I was truly made of.  But was that really the answer?  Was that how my academic trial-by-fire and resurrection really happened?

This time of year is very emotionally charged because it is intertwined with a host of holidays celebrate around the world by family and friends, and the holidays that recognize the passing of time: Kwanza, Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice (Yule), the New Year; and let’s not lose sight of those birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries that often get overlooked by the bright lights and blaring commercialism. There is, of course, the anticipated change of seasons which often serves to highlight or elevate a feeling of loss – fewer hours of daylight, severe cold, and the bare limbs of trees that resemble skeletal remains of nature. But occasionally sometimes there is the occasional unexpected event that is a bit more jarring; you don’t get a chance to meet with friends over the holiday break, for the first time entire family is unable to come together and celebrate the holidays, family or friends move away, or even worse, a friend or family member passes away. Even if someone is frail or in poor health, we seem to expect that they will at least make it through the holiday and into the New Year.  A loss at this time of the year still seems to catch people by surprise, no matter the warning signs, making the days seem that much grayer, the nights that much darker, and the wind that much colder.

Has anyone noticed the thriving market of self-help books and motivational gurus these days? Why do we seem to focus on the need to help ourselves? Is it that test of mythical proportions that we read about in so many books or see in movies - digging deep and finding what we are truly made of? “We can’t let IT beat us” (whatever IT might be). Or is it simply the Easy Button for recovery and renewal. Read a book or watch a video and it will all go back to the way it was.  Psychological studies strongly support a need for the individual to recognize life-changing events, especially those that cause grief and/or pain.  But once that loss or dramatic change is acknowledged, then what? Where does one go from there, especially if that loss involved a significant part of our existence, helped make us what we are today, or had the potential to help us to become more than what we are today? The desire to hang on to that memory is obvious and powerful. 

Has anyone seen the recent PBS documentary This Emotional Life? I think it does a wonderful job of introducing us to the complexities of what it means to be happy and the challenges, social and biological, that often short-circuit that pursuit.

One particular part caught my attention; the classic study with monkeys and maternal separation performed in the 1950-60s by the psychologist Harry Harlow. When new-born monkeys were raised in isolation for a few months and then given a choice between two artificial surrogate mothers – one, a wire frame that provided milk (physical sustenance), and the other simply a frame covered in cloth – the infant monkeys choose the cloth-covered surrogate mother over the surrogate mother that provided food! The isolated infant monkeys also exhibited a range of disturbing social breakdowns. Harolow’s conclusion from these experiments: bonding is a basic survival need for animals, especially hominids. Starting at birth, “happiness” involves forming supportive social bonds.  More recent research at the University of Wisconsin indicates formation of social bonds involves the hormone oxytocin – already known to be important during childbirth and for the stimulation of breast milk production; it is now also shown to act as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. Just the physical contact between parent and child soon after birth stimulates increased production of oxytocin in the child. And in most parents, this interaction also stimulates the same centers of the brain associated with essential needs, such as food and reproduction. Children who have experienced little if any social bonding during their early years (such as abandonment) do not show any significant increase in oxytocin. Children who exhibit severe social disorders show this same lack of oxytocin production, even with significant social interaction. 

Why have I digressed from grief and renewal? There is growing evidence of significant biochemical reasons why we form social bonds and why some social bonds are more important to us than others. Early social interactions stimulate biochemical responses that seem to stimulate neural growth and connections. These connections, in turn, enhance our ability to respond to further social interaction, and the cycle continues. Specific types of social interactions initiate chemical signatures that create unique responses within each of us. Now suppose that these social interactions are removed. It becomes easier to understand why it is so difficult to deal with loss or dramatic change. Not easier to deal with, just easier to understand why attachment is so ingrained – whether that that bond had been supportive or antagonistic. 

As you listened to today’s words and readings, I hope you’ve noticed an emphasis on the human element and the importance of human interaction. Some of the most successful approaches to dealing with grief and loss involve stepping out of our selves and interacting with others. Whether it involves struggling with grief caused by the death of a loved one, struggling with grief caused by addictions such as alcohol or food, or struggling with our own biochemical variation, renewal involves a series of steps that begin with recognizing the problem and then taking the very intimidating steps of reaching out to others for help or social bonds. As one very famous animated French chef – Auguste Gusteau – put it (Ratatouille), “If you focus on what you’ve left behind, you will never be able to see what lies ahead.” Successful transition and renewal eventually involves the critical step of turning from inner contemplation into the arms and minds of others. Whether we are cognoscente of a need to move forward, or it is the insight of others who encourage, entice, or cajole us into moving forward – at some point those two forces meet and help with the transition of renewal. I predict that if researchers perform a study comparing those who are successful in their transition to those who become mired in grief, in those who are successful they will find a positive correlation between forming new social bonds and re-establishing the production of critical neurotransmitters such as oxytocin.

Returning to my first year of college. After my out-of-student-body experience with the Death and Dying class, I returned with a renewed commitment to my college career. Was it because of some deep internal desire to prove that I had what it took? Perhaps. But what really kept me going and furthered my development in new and unexpected ways were the interactions I continued to make with my peers and other faculty. The formation of certain social bonds with friends who were experiencing similar struggles, and some who were battling even more complicated issues, cemented a desire to remain and a realization of what it would take to continue.

Please take a moment and look around. Notice the physical differences between each of you; biologist call that variation – height, eye color, facial features, to name just a few. Now try to imagine all of the biochemical variation that could possibly exist within each of us. I included the reading from Gordon Sumner (Sting) – Why should I Cry for You? -  along with examples of children who are born with social skills that deviate from the average child in order to raise a question. Just because anecdotal and scientific evidence strongly supports the need to from social bonds in order to make the transition from grief to renewal, does that mean everyone must go through these stages after experiencing grief or loss? Is grieving a biological and cultural requirement for renewal? What if, do to some extenuating circumstance or biochemical variation, someone simply does not have need or the capacity to grieve. Should we drag them into the process? At what point, if at all, should we engage someone, and break that personal space to ask how they are doing or tell them they need help? Is grieving a right, a personal choice, or a necessity for renewal?  These are all questions I don’t have answers for, but I hope will initiate some discussion during coffee hour or later in the day?



Finally, I would like everyone to think of a person (or persons) who they know fairly well, who you may have lost touch with for awhile, and would like to reconnect with.  (Wait)  Now make a promise to yourself to contact them by mail, phone, carrier pigeon, whatever, within the coming year. Make a point to reach out to those around you, build that social web of interaction and connections, see what lies ahead.

Letting Go

When Liz and I lived in Berkeley, we were awakened one night to the sound of an explosion, and the neighbor screaming at his adult son to get up. We looked outside, and there was smoke, and burning leaves falling around us. Now, wildfire was a constant concern in the summer and fall in the Berkeley Hills. Neighbors were gathering things and putting them in cars, and we immediately did the same. Our dog, Ceili, and her essentials, a few items from our earthquake kit and we were ready to go. We backed the car out of the garage but then realized that this was not the big one, but a neighbors house a half block away that was burning. As the firemen were getting it under control, we went to watch, and met many other neighbors. We compared notes with others: what had they packed in their cars? Photo albums, said one. The family silverware, said another. We said, our laptop computers.

What are you willing to let go of? We were ready to lose our possessions, even photographs, but not the continuity of work and life and connections with others that our computers provided. What, in this life, are you ready to let go of? Material things? Feelings? Connections? Habits? We’ll take a look at some of these today.

You may wonder how we choose these topics for our Sunday Services. Do I just make them up in a rush before the newsletter deadline? Yeah, sometimes. Most of the time though, they are planned in advance by the worship team who works with me to select topics. As an aside, we meet this afternoon at 12:30 to plan services from February through Easter, and you are welcome to join us.

When we plan these topics, we haven’t -- so far -- given much thought to how they link together. So as I began to prepare this sermon today, on “Letting Go”, I’m surprised at the overlaps and similarities this topic has with last Sunday’s topic, “Expecting the Unexpected”. As I thought about stories and poems, I found that many could work with either subject. So I’m making the distinction, a bit after the fact, in this way. “Expecting the Unexpected” explored the stuff that happens to us, good or bad, that we don’t control. “Letting Go” is about choice, however limited, because letting go or holding on is one of the few things that we can actually control.

The Adrianne Rich poem[1] reminds us of our locus of control. She begins with, “Either you will go through this door or you will not go through.” And she ends with “The door itself makes no promises. It is only a door.” The choice to go through or not is ours to make. Going through involves letting go of comfort and conventionality in entering a world of risk and possibility. I see in this poem the choice to move toward personal or spiritual transformation, which inevitably involves letting go of old forms. C. S. Lewis tells us,

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."[2]

So sometimes, our letting go creates new possibilities for us. We give up the egg and obtain our wings. We move to a different level, becoming more mature or wiser perhaps. Often, though, it feels like letting go is just letting go.

There is an ancient Buddhist tale of two monks:

A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her.

The senior monk carried this woman on his shoulder, forded the river and let her down on the other bank. The junior monk was very upset, but said nothing.

They both were walking and senior monk noticed that his junior was suddenly silent and enquired “Is something the matter, you seem very upset?”

The junior monk replied, “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?”

The senior monk replied, “I left the woman a long time ago at the bank, however, you seem to be carrying her still.”[3]

On one level this story is about rationality, common sense, trumping blind adherence to rule or law. On a deeper level it is about not ruminating over past actions and choices. The senior monk made the best decision he could within the moment, and he accepted that. In the best Zen example, when he set the woman down on the bank, he not only let go of her, he let go of his own feelings about the matter.

Another example of letting go is the process of forgiveness. We often think that forgiveness is something we do on behalf of another, but it is in fact something we do for ourselves.

I recall a patient in the mental health program at the hospital who talked with me of forgiveness. She wanted to deal with her anger at her father, who had beat her as a kid. We talked about whether her father had ever apologized for the abuse, and no he hadn’t, nor did she expect he would. We talked about whether he continued the behavior today, and the answer was no, he was very old, weak, with failing mind and body. We talked about why he might have been driven to be so abusive, and she suspected that he too had been treated badly as a child.

She decided to write a letter to him expressing her anger over this childhood abuse. She described her sadness at living a more narrow life as a result and her awareness that she had had to do so much work to overcome her anger at others around her. She did not mail this letter, but it helped her move to the next phase. She was able, over time, to remind herself of the nature of her father’s life, to explore forgiveness for herself, and eventually, to forgive her father. She never told him she forgave him; she did not need to. But her forgiveness helped her free herself of the anger and hatred she had carried for nearly her entire life.

There is also a physical “letting go” to be considered -- that is, how we cling to or let go of our own material possessions. One of the barometers of our feelings about possessions is a business that’s been booming over the past few decades: self-storage. This business has done relatively well even in this recession, partly because people who lose their houses need a place to put their stuff until they can make alternative living arrangements.

But it’s also because we have so much stuff we don’t know where to put it anymore. Our culture with its retailing and consumer debt technologies has made the acquiring part quite easy. It is the getting rid of things that is hard. In a NY Times article called “The Self-Storage Self”[4], one owner of a self-storage facility described his own situation: “My parents were Depression babies [he said], and what they taught me was, it’s the accumulation of things that defines you as an American, and to throw anything away was being wasteful.”

Letting go of things, even if we take them to Goodwill or sell them at a rummage sale, takes work. What is even harder than the physical work is the psychological effort of letting go. Sometimes that means admitting we made a mistake in judgment about a purchase, or that we can no longer fit into a certain piece of clothing and likely never will.

Friends of mine have a practice; I’d even call it a spiritual practice, that if they bring any item into the home, with the exception of consumables, some other item has be taken out of the home. A new pair of pants? Find an old T-shirt to get rid of; or maybe some knickknack. They told me that their house is much more spare now, but the practice has gotten harder. I’d like to try this practice, but I’d need a special dispensation for books.

I just heard about a new reality TV show on A&E called “Hoarding” that explores what happens when our desire to acquire and our reluctance to let go reaches an extreme. I don’t get A&E, but some episodes are on the internet. It’s hard to watch. People’s houses are filled with piles of belongings, to the point that moving around is difficult, kids don’t have usable beds to sleep in, and sanitation is impossible. The show’s creators acknowledge that this is a disease, a form of OCD. Knowing that the people on the show suffer from an illness makes me even more uncomfortable in my voyeurism. As the show’s producer, Robert Sharenow says, “The line between the people on our show, who have very severe cases of the disorder, and, you know, most of the population, is kind of thin.” [5]

Training ourselves to let go, to find a way to be in balance with our possessions may be an important way to keep balance in our lives. The same is true for other things, like our feelings or our habits that we may need to let go of.

However we choose to label them we all have coping mechanisms, habits, addictions, obsessions or compulsions that our best selves recognize aren’t serving us, and we want to release them, put them aside. Many of us are acutely aware of these at this time of year, as we make or decline to make New Year’s Resolutions. We know resolutions to change habits are hard to keep.

I remember when my parents quit smoking. I was maybe eight or nine, I’m not sure, and my mother decided to quit cold turkey. We had been whining a bit as kids about not liking to be in the car with them on long trips, because the smoke bothered our breathing. News was beginning to come out in a steady flow about the dangers of smoking, and my mother, a nurse, understood that. She acted. A couple weeks later my Dad quit, too. Neither ever smoked again. I don’t know how hard it was for them physically or how much they craved cigarettes after that; as a kid I didn’t think to ask those questions. I do know they were luckier than many; other family members tried to quit multiple times and were never successful.

I tend to think of the continuum of substance abuse as a matter of degree. Physical addiction is more difficult to let go of than psychological addiction, which itself is more difficult than habitual use. I believe that quitting is a spiritual journey as well as a physical one. Folks in Alcoholics Anonymous talk of the ‘dry drunk’, a person who has gotten control of his or her physical addiction to alcohol, but who has not processed the psychological or spiritual aspects of their addiction, so in a way, they are still addicted. To the degree that these things control us, we may not be able to let them go without significant support from family, or through a community like AA or with professional help.

One more kind of letting go, often a difficult letting go is when we must acknowledge that a loved one is dying and that there is nothing we can do to change or control that. We can only control how we react. I often saw this in my own hospital experience. A hospital care conference with the wife of a man dying of cancer. Two physicians, a nurse and a social worker talk to the wife. She wants aggressive treatment; there is none left. I’m asked to stay with her afterward, to be with her. Only then does she find small silent tears over the coming loss. I have nothing to offer her but my presence. She asks for and I offer no comforting theories of God. We talk of what will come, and that is enough.

Mary Oliver reminds us in her poem In Blackwater Woods[6], “To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” It is the intensity of our loving that makes the letting go so hard. At the same time it is that letting go that reminds us how precious life and love is.

We must remember that letting go is a choice we make, even though it is not an easy choice in many cases. Sometimes the choice to let go is the only thing we can control. Letting go, in a way, is controlling the time and place of loss. In a world where so much seems so beyond our control, letting go offers some small sense that we do have choices. And simply having the choice to let go is part of what makes us alive.

Mary Oliver tells us that the other side of loss is salvation, that is to say what saves us, what makes us human. The loss, the emptiness we create when we do let go becomes the space for new life and new possibility. May we have the wisdom to choose wisely about what we may let go, so that we have the room to create anew.

I invite you now to participate in a ritual of letting go. The ushers will pass out small pieces of flash paper on which you may choose to write the name of something that you wish to let go of. The paper is small, so these words will not be detailed. Then you may, if you choose, come up and ceremonially burn these to make physical your desire to let go. You can choose to read your paper aloud before you burn it, but you do not have to.

Notes:

[1] Adrienne Rich, "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 1963
[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. 2001, p. 198.
[3] “Two Monks and a Woman” http://workingwithinsight.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/two-monks-and-a-woman-story/
[4] NYTimes.com, “The Self-Storage Self”, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html
[5] “Stuffed: Do Hoarders Have a Disorder?” NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/magazine/20FOB-consumed-t.html
[6] Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” American Primitive, 1983.