(In response to three families moving to other parts of the country this summer) As we say goodbye to even more members and friends from the church, I find myself ornery. I get tired of developing relationships with people -- learning to trust, learning to work with and sing with, setting up programs built on the gifts and graces of, playing with – and then watching them move away. How can anybody build a church or a life when everyone is leaving all the time? God’s answer to this question is annoying. One doesn’t have to look past the first couple of days of the church to realize that the Christian church is built on people moving on. Jesus didn’t build for stability, but for sending forth and changing society.

In order to function in the spiritual journey, we must learn about letting go. And this is a balance because letting go can be healthful and can also be very destructive. But in the arena of relationships, death, and departure, prayer, and ministry, one central tool or barrier is letting go.

Letting Go of Emotions and Beliefs

A destructive way of letting go is letting go of one’s emotions when they get too complicated and conflicting. We learn early that our emotions are hard for others. Don’t cry, don’t be angry. We have learned in church not to make waves, and many of us have internalized this fear of upsetting things so that we edit ourselves out of the picture. We get angry, but anger isn’t a good thing at church, so we let it go – and often pat ourselves on the back for doing so. And the church loses honesty and integrity. Individuals who let go of their emotions often destroy their path to growth because they neither share themselves honestly with their community nor themselves. Of course, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of expressing emotion in a community.

A more destructive form of letting go is when we find that our beliefs are inconvenient and so we let them go. In the last couple of decades as religions from around the world converge, it is getting more and more common to see people who think that the idea of an anthropomorphized God is a little trite and embarrassing. Giving up a personal relationship with God is logical and solves a lot of other sticky faith issues, and makes spiritual discipline much easier. However, even if the cosmic impersonal God was closer to the truth of God’s identity, most of us leave this belief long before our spirits are ready to and we lose much in the process. Spiritual development suggests that we feel what we feel, that is, give space for our real feelings in our lives, but learn to express them appropriately.

Letting Go as Denial

One of the most natural ways that everyone protects themselves from things that are emotionally too tough for us to handle at the moment is denial. Denial is letting go of reality for a moment. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just is. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, observing how people dealt with deaths of close friends of family, noticed that one of the first things that most everyone does is deny the death. They, we, let it go for a time.

It is easy to deny when people move away. It is simpler to just go on as if nothing is happening and as if we didn’t feel hurt; to say a quick goodbye and move on.

Most of the time, there is nothing wrong with denial for a while. It gives our spirits a chance to catch up to a radical change in our lives. Denial over a long period of time erodes the foundation of truth in our lives. This is why it is so important for family and friends to talk with someone who has just lost a spouse or good friend to death or some other profound separation. It is important to use the words, death and divorce, to talk about how a loved one died, so that people claim their real lives and can move on in the grief processes.

It is important for us to love and make strong connections with each other even when it hurts when they must move on.

Letting Go as Abandonment

There are two situations that are epidemics in our moveable-feast society.

The first is forgetting people who move away. In our fear of the pain of separation, and in our distraction within the business of life, we often say fond farewells to departing friends and then just go on with life. This is beyond denial.

The second type of abandonment is when we are angry. We decide that we don’t want to deal with some large negative feeling or situation, sometimes an obnoxious person, so we let it go. It is easy to call this forgiveness, but it truly is not. Forgiveness is not forgetting or just leaving something. Letting go of grievances before they have been dealt with somehow or another is abandonment of the relationship.

There are two difficult discernment points in confronting abandonment

The first is knowing which friends are really important to us. Most individuals don’t have room for that many friends in their lives but we encounter many people. When a person leaves our lives, it is essential to know how close they are because letting go is essential in our moving society, but abandonment of a friend of the heart does great damage to the spirit.

The second is knowing what issues are important. We can simply let go of a lot in our lives. However, there are the really important values and issue that we dare not let go.

Do you know what is important to you?

Letting Go is Grief Work

Letting go is a part of the cycle of grief. We have spoken of the first kind of letting go in grief which is denial, but there comes a time, later in the process when we are ready to let the loved one go, when we really understand that a relationship is over, when we accept the fact that we can’t change something that has happened and we are ready to accept what is.

The resurrection is really hard for the early disciples to accept, partly because they are still dealing with their denial of Jesus’ death – most don’t even show up for the funeral. And then, they have trouble letting go of the fact that he’s dead. But, at Pentecost the disciples at once claim Jesus’ death (this Jesus who you have crucified) and let go of it accepting a world made totally new in this awareness.

Letting go in the grief cycles means finally an acceptance of what is and was, and opening a place for the new (new relationships, new directions in life, new use of time and resources). Sometimes the letting go happens as an organic part of a process of acceptance. At other times, we must simply let go and move on.

Letting go is part of a grief process, the last stage of acceptance of situations that may be far from resolution, and moving on with life.

Letting go is work of Ministry

Each month women’s clothes enter and leave the church.

They leave to go to the Career Closet in San Jose, which provides nice, professional clothes for women seeking employment. At a crucial transition point at which our society sets up a wall which is very difficult to cross, these career clothes provide a bridge across an economic barrier.

The clothes enter the church because the women of the church who have more than enough, let go so that their overabundance fills in where others lack. There is no work more Biblical than this letting go.

Jesus talks about money more than anything else and seems critically aware that the evil in his time was the gap between the rich and the poor. It is not less true now, in a time when in this country and world-wide money is getting more and more in the hands of a few, while the poor get poorer. We insulate ourselves from the consequences of this shift in money and opportunity, but the reality cannot be escaped.

Probably the greatest mission that there is is a reversal of this movement, moving money from the rich to the poor. There are many ways this can and should happen, but the key to this is letting go. There are some exceptions, but any time we can let go of our stuff, and especially when we can let go of our stuff so that it can go to those in need, heaven rejoices.

The discipline of simplicity is the single most needed spiritual discipline in our world right now. And the key to letting go is knowing what is enough. To give away what is essential is co-dependent and to keep more than what is essential is addiction. And these two dance to the world’s destruction. Simplicity is knowing what is enough -- what one needs and what one doesn’t.

Agape (the Biblical word for Christian love) is described most often as self-giving love. Often this love has been expressed in addiction and in co-dependence, but when it is set within the context of knowing what is enough, it becomes a powerful force for individual and societal liberation. The fights for farm-workers rights in this country and almost any forming union, is the fight for what is enough and for justice. People who know what is enough know how to give, and they learn how to fight for justice.

We unload our closets of stuff we get angry tripping over, and another receives a tool for gaining self-respect and feeding their family. This, and other works like it, will heal the earth.

Letting Go is a Practice of Spiritual Trust

"Let go, let God." Most people serious about the spiritual journey come up on this form of advice and it is essential. In a universe as large as ours, we are very small and very out of control, and yet one of the basic drives of humanity is to control as much as possible. Much of our anxiety comes when we try to control the uncontrollable. "We admitted to ourselves that we were powerless in the face of our addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable" this is the first step in twelve step programs. It is the step to which one constantly returns in the process of healing from addiction. The second and third steps are "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand." Thus begins a process of discipleship and a different kind of abandonment than we have suggested earlier in this writing, the Abandonment to Divine Providence.

This means resting in God -- letting God be in charge of a complex universe -- and also moving in that trust.

Letting Go is a Process of Forgiveness

To let it go at the beginning of a hurt between two people can close off the relationship. But to let go at the end of a process of healing is an act of faith and trust. This kind of letting go is an art. It is the ability to turn away from hurt and pain when the hurts and pains have been dealt with – not dragging on old grief forever. And it is the ability to really open up to the future in hope and trust.

One searing problem in relationships occurs when people hold, endlessly, onto old wrongs constantly bringing them up over and over in arguments. This means, either that he or she hasn’t resolved an issue (in which case it needs to be dealt with) or that that person cannot let the hurt go (and this is self-indulgent). This is not to say that everything is easily resolved, and not to say that we need to resolve everything with others. Many times a resolution of a wrong suffered is done completely within our selves and is not worth bringing up to another person. Certainly in child-rearing, one cannot resolve every hurt with a child. The resolution comes in knowing often that what the child is doing is part of a learning process. If we do not learn to let go of the past, we are headed for real trouble as parents.

Once again, the key to this spiritual process of letting go is a question. Do you know when something is finished? Do you know when you have worked through an issue, or at least worked through it as well as you can now?

Letting Go as Compromise

United Methodists face a huge predicament in letting go this year as they face off on a tremendously emotional issue of homosexuality and the church. For one side the very issue of biblical authority is at stake, for the other the very issue of God’s love and acceptance. As two primary values come into collision we face the question: where must we hold our ground? But no matter what we say or do, to stick together in community we must find places where we can compromise.

Richard Foster, in his book, Celebration of Disciplines, says submission is a form of outward spiritual discipline. Submission is so often abused in the church that he hesitates bringing it up. But when people learn the value of spiritual submission, he says we gain the freedom from always having to be in control. That is a very wise thing to say. Compromise is a form of submission. It allows us to work through issues in process but it also gives us the ability to share the load of always being right.

Letting Go is an Act of Spontaneous Faith

We are in a planning society where our date books, phones, and other relational tools are bent toward orderly control of life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that ministry occurs in the interruptions of our daily routines.

Letting go can mean an expectation of meeting God now, not in the plan, but in life itself. This type of letting go is an abandonment to the God in the Present. Awareness is the easiest first step of this and contemplation is the fulfillment of it (or enlightenment, if you are speaking the language of Zen Buddhism). We can let go of past influences and future expectations to be fully present and find ourselves fully immersed in the Presence of God.