Letting Go of What We Don't Have

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Oh, letting go. Every so often a minister has to preach on something that is absolutely not a personal strength. And this is one of those times. I’m not a letter-go; I’m an attacher and a holder-on. I hold onto people and relationships I love. I hold onto to souvenirs and mementos. I hang onto old things from my parents or grandparents, even when I have no place to put them. I hold onto and reread beloved books—some I have read 10, maybe 20 times. I have transplanted plants from one house’s garden to another, clung like a vine to bad boyfriends and outworn securities, cherished broken knickknacks and topless treasure boxes and coverless books—sometimes even books with pages that keep falling out.

When I grew up I put away some of my childish things, but plenty of them are in bags and boxes rather than gone, and some are front and center on shelves in my office, including ridiculous things like a plastic Bambi from an ancient Happy Meal. Even now I have just gotten a puppy because I never again want to go through losing one dog without having another.

But the title of this sermon is “Letting Go of What We Don’t Have,” and you may have noticed that in my list of what I’ve held on to in my life were indeed things I’d already lost, yet still couldn’t let go of. You may have noticed I mentioned transplanted plants—obviously the plant was a symbol for a whole home that was lost and hard to let go of. I also held on to the friendship of a good friend from college long after it was obvious that she wasn’t a friend I could depend on. I held onto illusions of people I loved because it was painful to acknowledge their flaws and failures.

I lived in Greece for three years and loved it. Loved the place, loved the people, loved my impoverished, fun, challenging, erratic life. I rode a motorcycle with a leaky gas tank, froze in my tiny apartment in the winter, knew my way around most of Athens, spent summer weeks in the beautiful and cheap rooms for rent in the Greek Islands, learned to understand and love the impulsive, outspoken, fascinating, passionate Greek people of the villages and cities. I could only stand to leave by promising myself I would always return. But in leaving, I lost that place of my heart, and though I always return, it will never be mine, and every time I leave I have to let it go again.

But even that was volitional. I had a choice to make and I made it. The hardest letting go is when it isn’t a choice. We’ve simply lost something or someone we loved, against our will, and now we have to let it, let them, go.

Perhaps we would all like to be like the woman at Grand Central station in Jane Rzepka’s reflection. Can’t you just see her? Well-turned out, ready for anything. And then—her one glove, unreachable. Hers is such a great, cavalier gesture. A moment, a realization, a shrug, a toss, a gift to some stranger who will find both these lovely gloves (somehow they are always lovely in my imagining), then look around, also shrug, and take them home for themselves or someone else. Maybe they’ll tell the story: “I found these gloves, just lying on the seat, like someone put them there.”

Or wait—think about it: subway cars are never empty. Someone was probably facing the door, maybe sitting near the seat with the single glove. They saw the moment unfold, saw her fling the other glove into the car. Maybe they looked at her, took the gloves, raised them in a salute, and then the train slid off and the woman turned away and the day moved on.

The woman’s shrug is key to the story. She doesn’t stand there frozen in dismay or indecision. She reads the loss for what it is and in a single gesture, accepts it, deals with it, and moves on. The shrug represents all that. But a shrug is unrealistic, even unnecessary, for a lot of us in our letting-go situations. She is, after all, only letting go of a glove. It’s a metaphor, not an on-par example of many of the things we work hard to let go of. Another difference from much of life is that in the story it’s immediately obvious she’s going to have to let go of a glove: it’s her decision to let go of the second glove that holds the surprise.

In real life, it’s not always easy to know when we need to let go. But there are often signals. One signal that we may need to release something is that we actually find ourselves wondering if it’s time to let go. Some part of us knows, because if we’re in the act of wondering…well, then it’s time to consider whether we need to let go of this thing, this hope, this person, this experience we’ve lost, or maybe never had. This isn’t to say we always need to let go—some of my best blessings have come with persistence.

But no one’s life ever goes just as we would wish it would, and for most of us letting go takes a lot more than a shrug. It’s almost always work. But the shrug still applies, because it also conveys acceptance, dealing with it, and moving on—three elements that are always part of letting go.

What does the work of letting go look like? It has as many forms as we can imagine.

It looks like thinking about things we’d rather duck. It looks like imagining the future with a reality we need to accept, and letting ourselves anticipate what things will be like, what we will be like, when we have let go. It looks like letting in wisdom about what or who we need to let go, wisdom that may be coming to us from others.

It looks like dealing with the details: objects, mementos, situations that keep us hanging on to what we don’t have. It looks like letting those who love us know how hard this is for us, and letting them help us when they can.

It may involve other tasks, like writing a letter, or making a phone call or a visit. It may require a trip to the dump or a visit from the Purple Heart organization that picks up old clothing and household items. It might mean a garage sale or a gift to a neighbor.

It might mean not doing something: leaving an email or a letter unanswered, a phone call or visit unreturned. It might mean writing something on a piece of paper, screwing it up tightly and sending that piece of paper down a stream, or tying it to a tree with a piece of thread. It might mean making a confession to a family member or friend. Just one letting go may take a number of different forms, all of them important.

Those tasks of letting go apply under many circumstances. But there is a particular feature of letting go of what we don’t have, which is that the work is uniquely ours. If someone dies, then the work of loss and letting go belongs to us and everyone else who cared about that person. If we are hanging onto something others don’t even know about, then the work is indeed ours alone—perhaps in releasing a secret we have clung to. If we have a long-cherished alternative reality, then it is surely on us to let go of that reality when the time comes.

And the truth is that the work of letting go is never truly done. Things happen and we are reminded of what we let go, and suddenly we need to do it again. We have to reaffirm our decisions, our choices, the path we’ve taken and the realities we’ve dealt with.

But when we do our work of letting go, there are always grounds for gratitude. In fact, gratitude is critical. I don’t believe the work of letting go is possible without it. Because usually when we’re stuck about what we don’t even have, it’s because whatever that thing, that person, that circumstance, that yearning is has become so big for us that it gets in the way of our ability to appreciate the other things.

Even when we are struggling with really big things, we always have really big gifts to help us. People who care about us. Opportunities to do meaningful work. A safe home. A strong faith community. Beauty around us. Beauty within us. Hope for the new good things in our lives. And more gifts in each of your lives that I can’t begin to know. Those good things are important to value. The things and people we can lean into during hard times deserve our appreciation, including the hard times of letting go.

In the end I love the story about the woman in the train station because of what it represents—the acceptance of letting go, the ability to do it so cleanly and even with flair. Letting go doesn’t actually require flair, but it does require doing. And while it’s often painful work, it’s also work that frees us and keeps us grounded in reality. We all have something to let go of to free ourselves up for all the good around us and before us. And knowing that we have goodness around us and before us can give us hope and strength to move forward.

The art of losing, the flung glove, whether done with or without flair, will almost certainly be work, but let not one of us doubt that we can let go, if we can let ourselves bear knowing when the time has come.