Let it Go

A Sermon delivered by Reverend Marlin Lavanhar, Senior Minister
At All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK
Sunday, March 4, 2007

Has anyone here ever walked on a tight-rope?  I read a story about a man who used to walk on a high-wire strung between two skyscrapers.  And he never used a net.  He did it several times while onlookers watched from many stories below.  The man became quite famous for his daring and acrobatics.  One day he decided to perform even though the wind was stronger than usual.  And on that day, despite all of his experience, he fell to his death. 

Apparently, for tightrope walkers who perform outdoors, when they’re out on the wire, the long pole that they use for balance is their lifeline.  If they drop their pole they will almost surely fall.  So these tightrope walkers learn that when they’re out on the wire they need to hang on to their pole at all costs. 

However, there is one time when a tightrope walker needs to let go of the pole.  And that’s if he slips and completely loses his balance and is going to fall.  At that point, all he can do is let go of the pole and try to hang on to the wire.  It goes against everything he’s been taught and all the instincts he’s developed.  But sometimes letting go is what is needed in order to survive.

The skyscraper tightrope walker died, in part, because he hung on when he needed to let go.

It’s not that different in our own lives.  There are things that we need to hold onto for our very survival, but there comes a time when we need to know when to let go to save our life.  Buddhism is a religion that talks a lot about letting go.  One of the things I appreciate most about Buddhism is the idea of non-attachment.  Buddhism teaches that to live well is to fully appreciate every moment.  The Buddha taught that we must learn to accept the fact that change is constant, and so we must not hold on to anything as if it were permanent.  In some ways it seems like a simple and obvious truth, but it’s very hard, and most people misunderstand what the Buddhists mean by non-attachment.

One of the best descriptions of this Buddhist concept that I’ve heard is found in a wonderful little book called Tuesdays with Morrie.  It’s a true story about a man named Mitch who returns to visit an old college professor, Morrie Schwartz., who is dying of A.L.S.  Mitch recorded Morrie’s wise words about life with a tape recorder during his visits.  One day Mitch explains:

The small horrors of Morrie’s illness were growing, and when I finally sat down with him, he was coughing more than usual, a dry, dusty cough that shook his chest and made his head jerk forward. After one violent surge, he stopped, closed his eyes, and took a breath. I sat quietly because I thought he was recovering from his exertion.  “Is the tape on?” he said suddenly, his eyes still closed.  "‘Yes, yes” I quickly said, pressing down the play and record buttons.

"‘What I’m doing now,” he continued, his eyes still closed, “is detaching from the experience.”

"‘Detaching yourself?”

"‘Yes. Detaching myself.  And this is important – not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy.”

“Learn to detach?”

He opened his eyes.  He exhaled.

“You know what the Buddhists say?  Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent.”

"But wait,” I said.  “Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life?  All the good emotions and all the bad ones?’

"Yes.”

"Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?”

"Ah. You’re thinking, Mitch.  But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you.  On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.  That’s how you are able to leave it.”

"I’m lost,” Mitch admitted. 

Morrie explained, "Take any emotion – love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.  If you hold back on the emotions – if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them –  you can never be detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.  But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely.  You know what pain is.  You know what love is.  You know what grief is.  And only then can you say, ‘All right. I’ve experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I’m ready to detach from that emotion for a moment.’"

What Morrie understood, and what many people don’t get, is that non-attachment from a Buddhist perspective is not emotional aloofness.  It’s not about rising above our emotions.

It’s about sinking down in and through our emotions. 

One of the Buddha’s four noble truths is translated in English to read: “The path leads to the cessation of suffering.”  Many American’s read this to mean that to be Enlightened means to feel no pain.  But the Buddha was not saying that we can live without physical and emotional pain.  What the Buddha means by suffering is the pain we put on top of our pain.  Suffering, in this sense, refers to the unnecessary layers of emotional anguish that people often put on top of the pain of living.  In other words, the Buddhist path does not claim that you can live your life with no pain.  Instead, it teaches the difference between pain, which is considered the most universal aspects of being human, and suffering, which the Buddha realized comes from not knowing how to live in a world that is filled with the inevitability of pain and impermanence.

So, for example, it is natural to feel the pain of sadness when someone we love dies or gets very sick.  But it is suffering, when we feel guilty for feeling sad.  The guilt places unnecessary suffering on top of life’s natural pain.  It puts a wound on top of a wound.

The guilt comes from misunderstanding sadness and life.  Buddha taught a way to approach life so as to overcome unnecessary suffering.  Buddha never claimed to be able to create a life that is free of pain. 

We should be wary of any religion or guru that claims you can have a life without pain.  One of the lessons of Buddhism in this regard teaches us to detach from our ego.  Letting go of the ego involves letting go of our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, and our expectations of what our lives are supposed to be like.  Once we learn to release ourselves from these mental constructions we begin to find out who we really are and what life is really about.

That’s why so many sacred scriptures teach that, “…you must lose your life in order to find it.”

They are not saying we need to die physically in order to find our life.  Rather, we need to let certain ideas and expectations die so we can embrace our life more fully.

For example, the person who thinks she’s unlovable or worthless or dumb because of certain things she’s been told or has experienced, must let go of these ideas about herself so she can find out who she really is.  Or the person who thinks he’s better than others because of his skin color, gender, religion, social status or career success has to let go of those ideas that separate him from others so he can find out who he really is and who others really are.  Or the alcoholic who thinks AA or other treatment won’t work for him because he’s special, or different from other alcoholics, he must let go of that so he can get the help he needs.  That’s the ego – those thoughts that separate us from others and from our true selves

Yet letting go of our egos can be extremely hard.  I had a vivid experience of it that I will never forget.  It came during the most intense grief I’ve ever known.  It was soon after my daughter Sienna died.  I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling sad and helpless and afraid.

Our 5 year old son Elias had started sleeping in our room.  When I’d wake up, I’d watch him sleeping there and I’d begin to feel an overwhelming helplessness, as if I didn’t know how to be a good father.  I’d turn and look over at my wife Anitra as she slept next to me and I’d feel completely unable and ill-prepared to be a good husband to her in her grief.  I’d inevitably start thinking of you, and my ministry, and in those moments I could not imagine how I could ever be a good minister again.

The feelings of helplessness and despair were so intense and so out of character for me that at first I’d try hard to push them away.  I’d do anything to change my thoughts and feelings and to get back to sleep until morning came.  But with the help of some good mentors and friends, some of whom are in this sanctuary right now, I came to let go of my fear and resistance to these difficult feelings.  What I came to understand was that what I was feeling was a strong and visceral sense of life’s pain and powerlessness. 

As an achiever and a doer I was not accustomed to feeling powerless.  I had lived my adult life with a good dose of confidence in my ability to live well and love well and do what needs to be done.  But my experience of loss had forced me to reckon with the truth that there are major aspects of life over which I have no control.  Of course, my ego resisted the idea that I wasn’t all I had determined myself to be.  My ego had spent decades building up illusions about my agency and ability.  My identity was tied up in feeling in control.

What I came to realize, was that that identity and orientation no longer worked for me as it had been working.  The world looked very different now.  But my ego fiercely resisted the change.

When I say ego, I’m talking about the way I’d always seen the world and myself up to this point.  I associated the powerlessness I was feeling with specific parts of my identity.  But, what came to light was that I was feeling a raw, existential human experience of powerlessness among life’s uncertainty.  And it is very frightening to feel how much is beyond our control in this life.  At least it was for me, as I sat with this reality in the middle of the night.

The hour of our death is beyond our control.  Our children’s health, and our spouses’ and our own health, in large part, are not in our control.  Natural disasters, like the storms that killed many this week – including small children in their school – beyond our control.  Evil perpetrated by humans, like the man who murdered the Amish children in their school a few months ago – beyond our control.  Terrorists and people who harm others indiscriminately, and even honest mistakes with painful outcomes, are all things that we must live with that we cannot control.

We saw a lot of this this week, across our nation.  The devastation of multiple children and youth dying when the weather destroyed a school, the bus accident that took so many young lives...  there is so much in life that is beyond our control.  Most of us spend years subconsciously building up defenses, to keep ourselves from having to deal with the overwhelming ramifications of the uncertainty and powerlessness we face.

During my dark night of the soul, with the help of the people around me, I began to allow myself to trust that I could endure the free-fall into the painful emotions I was feeling.  I began to let myself fall into the darkness that surrounded me.  Soon the intense fear went away, and I came to realize I could handle the pain and the uncertainty of life that remained.  And I came to see that neither one had anything to do with my ability to be a father, husband or minister.  That was the pain I placed on top of the pain.

Parts of my ego were dying and being reborn.  What died were unrealistic illusions of control, expectations of how life is supposed to unfold, and old fears about what I had deemed to be negative and destructive emotions.  Born was a more realistic sense of life, its uncertainty and preciousness, and a greater compassion for the pain, fear, and anxiety of others.  I developed more compassion for all who suffer and I developed a greater appreciation for all who love.

Remember the stream in our children’s story this morning that had spent its life cutting through stone and earth and mountains?  When it came to the desert, it had to realize that its old ways wouldn’t work anymore.  The stream had to learn to trust the wind to carry it over the desert.

The stream learned to let go of what it had been.  And with faith that the wind could carry it, it made it across the desert to be born again, on the other side, in a new form, raining down on the mountains to become a stream once more.

Like that stream, YOU may someday find yourself running into a desert in your soul.  When it happens you can choose to hold on to what you have always been, and what you have come to expect for your life, but if you do, you will most likely get stuck in the desert.

Or you can chose to let go of who you thought you were, and what you expected for your life, and trust that you too will be carried – on the winds of spirit.  Trust that you too will be transformed in love.  And you too will be born again.

Poet Mary Oliver writes:

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 life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to let it go –   

To let it go.

In this time of Lent in the Christian calendar, as we prepare for the rebirth of spring, not only outside but in our souls, may we all be blessed with the age-old wisdom of learning to let go.

Amen.

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