Letting Go, Moving On
Today’s theme of ‘letting go’ that Sonya and I chose is a theme I’m drawn to in life, perhaps because it’s something I don’t always find that easy to do – on the holding on / letting go spectrum – I’d place myself towards the holding on end.
Mind you, I reckon you can make a pretty good case for certain kinds of holding on. I appreciate all the people who’ve held on to me when I felt myself going under in life. There’s a kind of holding on that can, quite literally save lives, and I wonder if there are times in your life when you’ve been helped by another person’s holding on to you in such a way?
I appreciate all the people who’ve held on to causes that they knew to be right – that kind of holding on – against the prevailing messages of their day – allows a society to move on and develop – that kind of holding on abolished slavery, ended capital punishment, gave women the vote, and in our own time is seeking, for example, equal marriage for people in same sex partnerships – a right which our Unitarian General Assembly is campaigning for. I wonder what causes you are glad people have campaigned for in the development of our society?
There’s an inner kind of holding on that gives you the strength to continue even when it seems like everything is against you – this is the tenacity that climbs mountains, wins races, overcomes obstacles in seeking your life path. As I look around our congregation I know some of the fights that some of you have had to battle over the years.
And there’s a holding on that you might call commitment – to a friendship, a marriage, to a church community even – a holding on that keeps relationships going when the going gets tough, a holding on that gets you up in the morning to come to church or to help a neighbour or the myriad other ways that we might be involved in life.
So we’re not saying that holding on is bad and letting go is good because life as we all know tends to be more complicated than that. But …. of all the spiritual teachings I’ve been given over the years I think it is the key teaching of Buddhism on the letting go of attachment that has challenged me the most. This challenge is partly to do with my nature, but it’s also to do with the era in which we live. Here in the western world in the 21st century we are living in an age where most of us simply have too much … to much of just about everything. Too much stuff. We, and our storage cupboards, are the product of capitalism’s endless search for new customers. It is hard to resist its subtle message that happiness will be ours when we own the next best … fill in the gap for yourselves with whatever it is you yearn for in the material realm.
The Buddha spoke of our human desire to cling, to hold on, as the source of our suffering in this world and taught the value of letting go. But in 5th century BC the Buddha could not have dreamt of the possessions we now take for granted, nor the struggles that result because of them. Sonya and I have both had to clear the possessions of someone who has died in recent years as I know some of you have too.
You will know the poignancy of such a process and how important it can feel to honour the person who has died through carefully parting with their possessions. It can be a process of recognition and of love but for some it can become a source of family friction and pain. The Buddha would remind us too that letting go and holding on relate both to the material world and also to the world of ideas, the world of our minds – our thoughts, our hopes and our wishes, they relate to our feelings and emotions, to our relationships, to our physical bodies and to our spiritual lives.
According to Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, “letting go means just what it says. It’s an invitation to cease clinging to anything – whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them…It’s akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.”
You might like to try that simple physical act of holding your hand clenched and then simply, slowly opening your palm, as if you are releasing a tiny creature you have carried to a safe place. Feel the lightness of that simple movement of release, of opening your hand. To let go in this way is like releasing a heavy burden. It offers a way to live and to love more lightly, in the present moment without expectations. Important though these Buddhist teachings are, there are I believe no rights or wrongs when it comes to letting go – the ‘I have no possessions approach to life – I am unattached and free’ may be right for some people but not probably for most of us. We are rather creatures who can and indeed must work in, and work with, the material world – but perhaps with an awareness of when to hold on and when to let go. Words from American poet Mary Oliver often come to mind for me – from her poem In Blackwater Woods when she has described the light-as-air seeds being blown from the reeds in the autumn – floating off on the wind. The poem ends:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones like your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Those few lines perhaps says all that needs to be said about holding on, letting go, and moving on. Amen.
Rev. Sarah Tinker
Sermon – 12th May 2013