Holding On and Letting Go

October 7, 2001

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. -- Mary Oliver

The events of September 11, 2001, have certainly added more than a touch of relevance to my topic for this morning. When I originally conceived of it, Sabrina and I were in the first throes of sending our oldest child off to college. It is a rite of passage that many of you have already experienced, or will eventually. Now, that initial act of letting go has taken on an even more poignant feel. What kind of a world is this that we are casting our child adrift in?

For if it was clear before September 11 that we were sending our child off to experience life on his own terms in the great broad world--a world greater and broader, at least, than Newburyport-- how much more savage and real that prospect seems in the aftermath of that terrible day.

We ought to have known it all along, of course. The world, in spite of our best efforts to pretend otherwise, has always been a dangerous and sometimes an inhospitable place, especially, we are likely to forget, for the young.

We are certainly not the first generation to suffer the consequences of despicable acts, call them terrorism or otherwise, and we shall not be the last, though I wish it could be so. We need only read a smidgen of world history to put this reality into perspective.

I spent much of the summer studying up on Balkan history in preparation for my return trip to Transylvania in the spring. There, atrocity has followed upon atrocity for over 500 years, with hardly a generation spared. In the last decade alone, the region has seen multiple conflicts, and even the invention of a new and terrible euphemism: “ethnic cleansing.”

And our own, American history hardly makes a strong case for the world being a kind and gentle place. Consider what we did to the Indians, or the awful legacy of racism, or the horror of our great Civil War.

No, it is a hard and uncertain world into which we send our children, albeit an often beautiful one--even here in the United States. That’s the paradox: it is both an awful and a wonderful world. There are no guarantees in this world, or for that matter in life itself. We can do our best to prepare them for it, but it will never, ever be enough. Much as we would like to protect our children from the world, they must learn about it for themselves, as all of us have had to learn about it before them. If we didn’t know this before September 11, we know it of a certainty now.

We say that we want to give our children “roots and wings.” In my experience, the roots part comes a whole lot easier than the wings part. For one thing, they grow up so fast that we hardly have time to hold them before they are ready to take flight. And we know, or at least we imagine or deceive ourselves, that as long as they are living with us, we can protect our children from all the dangers that exist “out there.”

But when they finally decide to go, they soar irretrievably beyond our control. Once they step over the edge of the nest, there is little that we can do. It is awfully hard to let go, but as poet Mary Oliver has so eloquently reminded us, letting go is what we must learn to do. It is one of the hardest lessons in life, but also one of the most necessary.

After an initial bout of homesickness--“I didn’t know it would be so hard,” he said of the whole experience--Ben has begun to settle into college life. He is enjoying new friends and new ideas and new experiences. Already, we detect a difference in him: a maturity and poise--he actually tells us how he’s feeling and what he’s been thinking about and doing!--but also, I think, there is a new or at least renewed appreciation for his home, and for Mom and Dad and the rest of his family, and for the life he has had so far.

We know, and he knows, that it is still a pretty sheltered place where he has chosen to spend the next few years. But it’s a first flight from the nest, a first step over the edge and into the big world out there. And as such it is scary and exciting and a little bit sad all at the same time.

I grew up during the uncertain days of the Vietnam War and had forgotten what it feels like to have the selective service looking over my shoulder. Fortunately for me, my lottery number never came up in the year I was eligible for the draft. For better or for worse, my college deferment saved me from military service. But many of my friends went, and all of us struggled over the ethics of our decisions and our beliefs one way or another.

I was hoping that my own sons would not have to experience this possibility and this struggle, or that at the least the choice would be theirs whether to enter the military or not. The probability of a broader conflict worries me a lot. I want to keep them safe, but I may not be able to. It’s another kind of letting go that I must learn to do--a very terrible and terrifying kind. I cannot protect them forever.

Part of me would like to hold on forever. My instinct is to hold on for dear life. As Mary Oliver writes, we must hold on, and we must do so “knowing that our lives depend” upon what we love, but also knowing that what we love is perishable. We have no choice but to hold on. But we also have no choice but to let go. The question is, when.

It is the same with our own lives. We know we can’t keep them forever, but we want to, or at least we think we do. Of course, the day may come for all of us when we will be glad to let go of them because life has become so painful or difficult that we no longer wish to hold on. But that day hasn’t come yet, and so we hang on, living for a future that may never come, and all too often missing the loveliness of the here and now, the beauty of this perishable moment of our precious lives.

The trouble is, if we hold on too tightly we will never see things as they really are; we will never see our children as they truly are, or are becoming. Part of letting go is to finally be able to see the thing complete and as it actually is, unique and irreplaceable and whole.

We deceive ourselves that we will always be around, and maybe that’s the only way we can live with our own mortality. It is difficult to look death directly in the face, especially our own, just as it is difficult, oh so difficult, to look in our children’s faces and know that we cannot protect them forever. Indeed, and we hope to God it will come to pass, there will come a time when they are in this world without us. The sooner they have wings of their own, the better.

But letting go is not all about gloom and doom, even though I happen to be pretty good at that, and that is why I need this sermon as much as anyone. Letting go is about freedom and autonomy. It is about freeing our children but it is also about freeing ourselves.

For all of the great religious traditions teach that we cannot reach salvation or enlightenment while dragging around a bunch of things, be those material possessions or purely emotional ones. “. . .A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone,” wrote Thoreau, and we agree with him, at least in principle. This goes for our children as well. How far must we go in sheltering them? When have we done enough? Of course, we shall always love them, but eventually we must let them go, not just for their sakes but for our own.

In India, the ideal path for the householder is to raise his family, and then to set out on the endless search for moksa, or spiritual release. We, too, have other work to do, important work, and perhaps the time has come to get back to it.

Indeed, we must not hold on even to life, for as Jesus and others have said, “In order to find your life, you must lose it.” To hold on too dearly even to life itself can cause us to lose sight of the goal and to miss the point.

Thomas Merton said that the most difficult goal of non-attachment is “self-forgetfulness.” For more than anything else, it seems, we are attached to the idea of ourselves. Letting go is not just a matter of purifying and redirecting our outward lives, but of purifying and centering our inner ones. There is so much to let go of: our egos, our anger, our resentment about past wrongs, our jealously and envy, our need to be loved, our need to control, our destructive patterns of behavior. In some instances, too, our loves, our grief, our dashed hopes, our failed dreams.

All of that said, I am a big believer in selective holding on. I hope that I will always have my childhood memories and that I will never stop loving what is nearest and dearest to me, even that which is gone forever. I take great comfort in memory, though I know that I must be careful not to dwell there indefinitely.

Memory can help us toward an heightened appreciation for the here and now, showing us what we must not fail to hold on to on this day, showing us what we must hold on to as if our lives depend upon it, showing us that it will not last forever, and teaching us how, again and yet again, to let go of it in order to move on with our lives.

All of this is, ultimately, a mystery, but it is a mystery wherein we catch an occasional glimpse spectacular beauty or a moment of truth.

What I guess I want to say this morning is that I never knew how hard this letting go business could be, when it comes to our own children. Until now I had blithely observed as friends and acquaintances sent their children off to college, never knowing the heartrending reality of the empty bedroom, the homesick phone call, the missing of that child of our hearts that comes with this transition in life. I’m sorry about that. Like so many other lessons, it can only be learned first hand, and I apologize that I couldn’t know how painful or how wonderful this change could be.

Certainly, it is teaching me new things about life, and about myself. Just as the events of September 11 have taught us that we must let go of some of our most cherished illusions--the illusions of safety and security and of a benign universe--so letting go of a child is teaching me anew the lesson of transitoriness; the lesson that, as the poet says, “[our] children are not alone [our] children, they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself”; that nothing lasts forever, for all of life is change; but most importantly, that this change, too, is good. It is especially good for our children!

We will still want to hold them, but we must learn to hold them in a new way; at arms length, in a manner of speaking. For if we did not know it before, we know it now: “for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which [we] cannot visit even in [our] dreams” [Kahlil Gibran]. Those words, which I often read during the Child Dedication ceremony, take on an added poignancy now, as do some other words with which I concluded a sermon on Ben’s first birthday, many years ago:

I hurl you into the universe, and pray. (Marya Mannes)

May we always know when to hold on, and when it is time to let go, both for our children’s sakes and even more important, for ourselves. Either way, it will be an act of love.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock