Letting Go
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
March 16, 2003

	Where else but a Unitarian Universalist church can you get a Buddhist/Taoist interpretation of a Christian season?  We are two weeks into Lent, which is traditional period of fasting and contemplation before Easter.  I said in the Gleam that it was the Christian equivalent of Yom Kippur in Judaism and Ramadan in Islam, a period where you are encouraged to take sock, to go deep within yourself and retreat to some extent from your everyday concerns.  It coincides with the last blasts of winter, traditionally a time of scarcity, and the custom arose among Christians of observing a fast in various degrees.  In some periods this has been week-on, week-off fast, in others a fast during weekdays and a feast on Sundays.  Fasts, of course, can be of various degrees of intensity.  A total fast, where nothing passes your lips during the fasting period, obviously cannot be sustained for very long without serious compromise to your health.   A more limited fast is not eating during the daytime, as in Ramadan.  
	For most Christians these days, the Lenten fast has become quite minimalist, consisting of “giving up” one specific food or something else that we take pleasure in.  The conventional explanation is that one sacrifices to remind oneself of Jesus’ total sacrifice on the cross.  Since most UU, even those who identify as Christians, do not place much weight on the atonement supposedly accomplished by Jesus’ execution, this rationale for “giving up” something for Lent is less than compelling.
	Yet having a period of explicit winter spirituality is good.  It is good to take stock, it is good to go inside ourselves, to see what values or worthy.  This is why I propose observing Lent by letting go, not by giving anything up.
	Learning to let go is a very valuable spiritual practice.  A month ago, Amanda Neff preached a sermon here titled “We Don’t Let Go Of The Rope.”  Now I’m here telling you that letting go is a good thing.  What gives here?  I want to spend a little time explaining what I mean by letting go and then get back to Amanda’s message and show that we’re on the same page here.
	The Tao Te Ching says, 'Though the sage knows himself he makes no show of it; he has self-respect, but is not arrogant, for he develops the ability to let go of that which he no longer needs.”  To let go of that which he no longer needs. 
	In the book A Walk In the Woods by William Bryson the author sets out to hike the Appalachian trail, and the only friend he can find to go with him is a complete city-slicker who is totally out of shape and forever disorganized.   His friend refuses to spend any time planning his equipment or making hard decisions about what he will put in his pack.  So he ends up with everything but the kitchen sink, a pack weighing over a hundred pounds.  In the first five miles, he realizes what it is going o be like to carry all that weight and simply discards about half of his stuff alongside the trail.
	Letting go.  The Latin word for baggage is impedimenta which coveys they notion that what you carry with you is what keeps you from going very far or very fast.  All of us who travel by air know this; we have to decide as to any particular piece of equipment whether it is worth hauling it ll over the airport and though security.  With me, the big item is the banjo;  sometime you can carry on a banjo, but you can’t count on it, particularly when you switch to smaller planes for the last leg of a flight.  Recently I broke down and bought one of these industrial-strength cases for my banjo so that I could check it with some peace of mind, but it about doubled the weight and trouble of the thing, so now I have to ask myself when I’m going anywhere how likely it is that I will want my banjo.
	Letting go.  The Buddha taught that the root of suffering, of dukkha, was craving and clinging.  The path to release from suffering lies in letting go of the objects of our craving and clinging. As the physical baggage we carry with us slows us down, limits how far and how fast we can travel, so the spiritual baggage we carry limits how much we can grow.
	During one of my stints in as a hospital chaplain, I had occasion to counsel a woman whose mother was in a come that the doctors considered irreversible.  The mother had been a diabetic, and had gone into shock, and had slipped into this coma.  The problem was that death was not an absolute certainty, only a strong probability.  One out of a thousand people in this situation will wake up one day; the other nine hundred ninety nine will continue indefinitely on life support.  The patient’s six other children had all consented to the removal of life support.  The patient, who was indigent and not covered by any insurance,  was costing the hospital $10,000 per day.  This situation had been going on for months.
	As I talked to this young adult woman, I realized that the reasons she gave for not consenting to pull the plug were not the real thing going on with her.  What was going on with her was that she had issues with her mother, things she hadn’t gotten from her mother and things she hadn’t said to her mother.  She wasn’t ready to let go.  I suggested that maybe she needed to say those things directly to her mother. So I took her to her mother’s bedside, offered a long prayer, and then left the two of them alone together.  I told her to speak directly to her mother and to assume her mother could hear everything she said.  Twenty minutes later she emerged and said she was ready to consent to remove life support.  She had been able to let go.
	Letting go.  Our lives collect clutter.  Our physical basements and storage rooms and desktops and dresser drawers and closets and bookshelves are full of the toys and tools and clothes and books we no longer need, if we ever did, will never get around to reading, wearing, playing with or using.  One solution to the problem of physical clutter, happily, is the flea market, which is coming up in three weeks.  If you have the courage and energy to gt down in that storeroom, you can not only clean out your own life, but may enrich someone else’s in the process.
	Cleaning out the physical spaces where we live is a great exercise, but it is only a dress rehearsal for the far more important exercise of clearing our the spiritual places.  What about that old grudge against your ex-spouse, your former business partner, your former best friend, your father?  Is it time to lay that cudgel down.  Can you let go a quarrel?
	Or what about an attraction?  Can you let go that crush on the inappropriate person, the one who will never return your affection, the one who is unattainable?   How much is the pursuit of this person costing you in lost opportunities, in pining, in florist bills, in self-respect?
	How about envy?  There’s a good candidate for something to let go of.  Can you let go of the desire to be that other person you admire so much, to have his wealth or influence, to have her looks, to have the musical gifts or articulation or wisdom or intelligence or background or position of people you esteem?  Wouldn’t we all be happier if we could let go of trying to be someone we’re not and learn to love who we are?  The Tao Te Ching says, When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.
	An equally daunting enterprise is to let go of dreams, hopes, ambitions. Many people reach a point when they realize they will have to let go of a particular life plan.  It becomes clear that architecture is not for them, or circumstances prevent them from becoming a history teacher.  These are letting goes that can be very difficult.   Some of us who are out of work, an accustomed to a good rate of pay for our set of skills find that that set of skills is no longer in demand and face the wrenching process of retooling.  The process begins with letting go of the attempt to find reward in our old field.
	 Joseph Campbell said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.”  This gets close to explaining the why of letting go.  We let go of one thing to make room for something new.  The conventional idea of Lent is we “give up” something that is somehow “bad” for us, such as alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate.  Well, it’s healthy to try to curb unhealthy appetites, but that’s not what letting go is about.  We don’t have to decide that something is affirmatively bad for us to decide to let it go.  We can just decide that it takes up too much room, weighs too much, has become too much of a bother.  It gets in the way of streamlining our life.
	Letting go is not simply a matter of courage or will.  It is also a process of discernment, for we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  We need keen insight to know what needs to go and what we need to hold onto, and timing is important. To get back to Mandy’s sermon title, “we don’t let Go of the Rope,” I agree that when we’re a preschooler and we’re out for a walk with out other preschoolers and we’re in crossing the street in traffic, it’s not time then to let go of the rope that holds us together as group.  When we’re dangling off the edge of the cliff, it’s not time to let go of the rope.  But it might be time to let go of the camera we’re holding in the other hand.  
	I put the extreme circumstance as a thought exercise, like the old challenge to decide which three things of your you would take out of your house if it were burning.  The extreme circumstances help us to focus on what we could safely let go and what we couldn’t.  
	The Buddha taught that one of the most valuable things we can let go is ourselves.  From the Buddhist point of view, the concept that we have a self which persists 	over time is an illusion.  The reality of life is impermanence, that everything is in a state or perpetual change.  But our minds can’t grasp impermanence.   Our minds work from the influence of memory on present sense-impression and concepts which we have learned.  We think in static, discrete ideas, and we form this idea that there is this thing which persists over time called Edmund Robinson or Sally Smith. We cling to this idea, the idea of the permanent self.  We give our permanent selves characteristics.  I’m an introvert; I’m an intellectual; I’m a southerner.  And as we reflect on the world and how we interact with it, we use these assumed characteristics as explanation.  Well, the reason I said that thing to this person was because I’m a narcissist middle child.  
	Can we see how this baggage of our own self-conception gets in the way of growing into different people?  Darwin described a system of adaptation or organisms to their environments over evolutionary time.  Our brains and personalities are much more malleable than our genes and can adapt much more readily to changes in our environment if we will but let them.  
	Darwin first got his idea by observing how the beaks of finches in different parts of the Galapagos were adapted to getting food for the bird in different environments.  But faced with a change in environment, the finch does not have the option of letting go its beak in favor of a better-shaped one.   We do have that option.  With courage and discernment, we can let go of those ideas of ourselves that prevent us from adapting to the new environment in which we find ourselves.
	It is not easy, my friends.  I do not pretend that it is.  We hold on to things, people, ideas because we have come to love them, and we let go of them with a great deal of reluctance.  But it is the letting go that is the path to growth, to change, which is often scary but which lets us enter fully into the moving stream of life.  As Mary Oliver says,
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 upon it; 
and when the time comes to let it go, 
to let it go.
Amen.