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.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.
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]
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.
