LETTING GO FOR DEAR LIFE
by Forrest Church
September 14, 2003
Flying home from anywhere, my heart always catches when I look down on New York City, by night or day as beautiful a sight as I can imagine. It is almost impossible to witness the dreamscape of Manhattan from above without being at once awe-struck and humbled, words that, in one sense, are each other’s opposite.
Through my tiny airplane window, I always search for All Souls, the church I have served for the past quarter century. Twice I thought I saw our steeple from my window, a tiny pin in a cushion of needles. On the clearest day with the most perfect angle, you have to know exactly where to look and then believe, not know, believe that you have seen it, one of twenty thousand towers composing the most spectacular skyline in the world.
Now I also look for the World Trade Center, knowing I will never find it again. I try to remember exactly where it was, giving ballast to lower Manhattan and far more imposing than any steeple. The true temple of this commercial metropolis, its ghost remains to haunt our reflections. The Twin Towers are as humbling in their absence as they were awesome when present, as eloquent a symbol of transience today as they once were of permanence and power.
If pride is the number one sin–and medieval theologians were almost surely right about that–then humility must be the number one virtue. It is certainly among the most functional. We have little control over so many of the things that may endanger or diminish our lives. To worry or feel guilty or inadequate about things we cannot change is not only dysfunctional, but also, in a strange way, prideful.
I spent my summer writing a book called Freedom from Fear. My advice in it is simple. To answer fear, we need only do what we can, want what we have, and be who we are. Trying to do what we can’t, have what we don’t, and be who we aren’t will only get us deeper in fear’s debt. Sometimes, the better part of valor is to embrace what is, however unwelcome it may be. I call this, "Letting Go for Dear Life." Even after a catastrophe, we find a way to want what remains and replace the unhelpful question, "Why?," with the more promising, "Where do we go from here?"
For me, the real anniversary of 9/11 took place not last week, but last month, during the East Coast blackout. For all the inconvenience, not to mention the cost–something our city certainly didn’t need–those 24 hours had a dream-like quality. All Souls, by the way, was open all night. Rather than fortifying ourselseves against looters and the like, we provided a place for people to gather and to sleep, if they had no access to other, more comfortable lodging. There was even an ice cream party. The freezer compartment of church refrigerators, it turns out, are filled with ice cream. When I walked by the church at 8 o’clock on the evening of the blackout, about ten people were doing–out of a sense of duty–what they never would have allowed themselves to do at any normal time: pigging out on ice cream. The ordinary rules were suspended, but few that really mattered were broken.
Why did New York turn into a giant block party instead of into a fear driven battlefield when the lights went out? Why wasn’t there massive looting and roaming street gangs as in Cleveland? I can’t help but think that 9/11 is part of the answer. Our city had been baptized by fire. Darkness certainly wasn’t going to throw us.
The fun people were having climbing 17 flights of stairs holding a candle in a cup reminded me of a game I used to play with my friends. Some years back, a point system (used by some as a diagnostic tool and by others of us as a party game) assigned a certain number of stress points for things that were going wrong in our lives–like moving, losing our job, the breakup of a relationship, a personal failure, an illness or a death in the family. During the brief time this point system enjoyed favor as a party game, I can recall joining with a group of stressed-out friends to compete over which of us could tally the most points. When someone broke a thousand–and was therefore, for all practical purposes, dead–we had a winner. Since this unfortunate person not only had lived to tell of her death, but also to laugh about it, the rest of us would raise our glasses in wonder and admiration.
We shouldn’t have been so surprised, either by the raw display of courage in face of life exigencies or by what might easily have been mistaken for gallows humor. What this point system failed to take into account is that we sometimes cope better when our entire world appears to be falling apart, than when only a single part of it has gone awry. The reason for this is quite simple. When everything is going wrong, it is quite impossible for us to blame ourselves. Perfectionism and inadequacy hold less of a purchase on our souls, when it is clear, not only to us but to anyone with eyes, first, that we are innocent of the crimes that life has visited upon us, and, second, that we couldn’t do much about them anyway, even if we tried. That we so often bring greater equanimity to a personal crisis than we do to our daily struggles is perhaps the most persuasive reminder of how heavy a burden we carry when laden down by all the unnecessary fear we carry with us so much of the time.
The freedom that comes from accepting that the best we can do for the moment is to roll with the punches or float on the waves as they toss us may also lie at the root of a slightly different phenomenon. Have you noticed that the aftermath of a shared tragedy is remarkably free of emotional pleading, with surprisingly few individuals acting out or demanding special attention. It is as if everybody’s windows flew open simultaneously and a refreshing gust of wind blew all the petty scraps, all the frets and troubles that before had riveted the world’s attention, off thousands of mental platters at once.
Frank Berger, a nonagenarian in our congregation, told me this summer of how little fear he sensed, within himself and around him, during the six months that he, his wife, Christine, and a thousand other refugees lived in a Quaker refugee camp at the very outset of World War II. In March, 1939, Jewish refugees from Holland, Poland, France, and Czechoslovakia, wearing only the clothes on their backs, were spirited out of danger and housed for six months in Broadstairs, a seaside town in the South of England not far from Dover. Frank contrasts those months to the years he served on the medical faculty at the University of Louisville. In this academic bastion, fear had erected a fortress, students and professors alike struggling daily with professional worries, feelings of inadequacy and the ghost of perfectionism.
Louisville was not unusual in this regard; fear sets up shop on most campuses as it does in hospitals, businesses, even churches sometimes. What was unusual enough that Frank still ponders it with awe, is how 1000 people who had just lost everything short of their lives could live together in such amity and good humor. Fear trades in comparison–in Who has what? and Who has more? In Braodstairs, comparison was not only invidious; it was basically impossible. All the markers of distinction had been blown away. People had nothing left but their freedom and each other. Of things that mattered less or over which they no longer had controlling influence, they let go for dear life.
After an escape from the waiting terror of the concentration camps, or, in our own recent experience, the carnage of 9/1l and its mild echo in the blackout, we should not be surprised to witness a notable uptick in civility and expressions of mutual concern among those who escaped real danger. The most conspicuous evidence that the 9/11 attacks failed is that an act intended to terrify and divide us instead brought us together. This was particularly evident here in New York, which for weeks following became a city of love. The sound of honking disappeared almost entirely; in elevators people asked absolute strangers (such as their upstairs neighbors!) if they were okay or if they had lost anyone dear to them. The moment we begin to see our own tears in another’s eyes, we are no longer blinded by them. At a time of common sorrow, we naturally are drawn to pool our tears instead of wallowing in them; grief loses its isolating power and becomes instead a symbol of our shared humanity. The muting of fear’s refrain in millions of minds at once is another such symbol, one that has its own saving power.
The opposite of love is fear, not hate. When we open our hearts wide to each other, the act of love itself loosens fear’s grip, even when fright has thrown us together. To illustrate this, simply follow the course fear ran in New York City after 9/11. After fright first sounded its alarm, saving some who had been working in the twin towers and piercing the vivid morning with the cries of those who were to perish, common purpose united the survivors, firefighters, police, and rescue workers into a single family. Throughout the city and beyond, dread over loved ones who may have been injured or killed possessed millions of hearts, not an isolating dread in this instance, but a communal one. No one had been singled out for special mistreatment; all within the circle of this tragedy were truly one. Placed in such dramatic perspective, inadequacy, guilt, and other worries paled in comparison and, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Overweening self-consciousness, ineffectual worry, and moral perfectionism are always silly, but only rarely–when we can’t help but be conscious of more important things–do they fully seem that way. As with the loss of electricity two years later, who cares what we are wearing when the lights go out? Who cares that we don’t know what to do next? Everybody’s in the same boat.
The patina of dust that covered thousands of New Yorkers when the towers collapsed obscured all marks of distinction: race, economic status, faith. How much more alike we are than different in every way that matters became manifest, each life equally precious, equally fragile. To the extent that any one of us was inadequate, we were all inadequate. No one could mistake events so completely as to think that what was happening was all about him or all about her! As for guilt, it too had less room to play in our otherwise occupied minds. Remarkably, there was also less reason for legitimate guilt, because, unlike what often happens when a city’s police force is diverted from its regular beat, in New York City crime plummeted during the Fall of 2001. Even the criminals were chastened. As for the kind of guilt that is sponsored by a fussy conscience, in the face of real crime and real tragedy, such guilt was exposed for what it truly is: a luxury for spoiled, self-absorbed people. In the wake of 9/11, it took real work to remain spoiled and self-absorbed; everyone was a part of, not apart from the real action.
We would be masochists to welcome suffering. It does not, as they say, build character. It may invite us to demonstrate character, however–to be ourselves at our best. Also, because what happens to us is far less important than how we respond to it, the very same catastrophe that presents only danger to one person can reveal opportunity to another. Lifelines have two ends. Unless someone is holding on to the other end of our lifeline, we can hold on to our own end as tightly as we wish and it still won’t be of any earthly good to us. Fear can drive us into self-imposed isolation. We may feel safe there, but, unteathered to others, we have placed themselves beyond all help. The very same circumstance that drives one person into hiding may prompt another to reach out for (and to) help. Our lifelines then connect us to each another. Creating empathy, they endow us with strength.
On the other hand, however hard we may try to hold on to things we cannot keep will avail us nothing. Here wisdom teaches us to let go for dear life, in order to move on. At times of crisis, we must take a fearless inventory, holding on to the things we can and letting go of the things we must.
What do you worry about most? Is it your children? Or maybe your parents, suddenly like children in their dependency on you? Is it your health–a disease or condition that you have now or fear contracting? Or the health of a loved one? How about death–or does the pain and possible bondage associated with dying worry you more? Holding on for dear life sometimes permits a display of courage, but letting go for dear life does the same. Precisely because fear always accompanies us on the journey from certainty toward uncertainty, at certain twists in the road, giving up on what can’t save us (and also on what we can’t save) is sometimes the only way to let go of fear’s hand.
To release your father as he is dying–to tell him it’s all right, that you love him and he can go now, freeing him from a hopeless battle by giving him permission to die, requires a kind of saving courage. Letting go of your children, as all parents must, into a frightening world, left to their own devices and to make their own mistakes, that too takes courage, even though we really have no choice. Then, to celebrate them for who they are, not lament who they are not, giving up dreams for them that were ours to begin with, not theirs, this takes courage as well. It requires letting go, ceding control that was never ours to exercise in the first place. We can do this begrudgingly, regretfully, and plaintively or we can do it with grace, wanting what we have, not lamenting what we lack. The results will be almost the same in either case. Our parents will pass on and our children will leave home in pursuit of their own lives and dreams. The only difference is that fear will not preside over each departure and that love will be free to reign in its stead.
Finally, when it is our time to go, we have the same choice. After doing what we can to extend our useful life, we can choose to float on the outgoing tide or thrash about to keep from going under. Letting go for dear life is letting go of fear. In a final expression of love, we accept and bless the one condition that was placed upon life’s gift and offer up our heartfelt thanks.
It is wonderful being back.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.