Holding On and Letting Go

 

 

This is my third Grace Not for Grace Baptist and Friends. It’s called Holding On and Letting Go.

One of the hardest lessons we have to face, which we try to deny, is that we are in control of so little in our lives. This epidemic is reminding us of what we try to avoid: the human limits of our power, wisdom and love.

There is a verse in Proverbs that caught my eye this week. Speaking of the plagues of locusts that swoop in and destroy the land and human lives, the writer says, “Locusts have no king”. The coronavirus bows to no king. It stops at none of our borders. It listens to no king politician or preacher.

Yes, there are many things we can do to help stem the tide of the virus, flatten the curve of infections and save lives. But there is so much we cannot do. So perhaps we can learn to let go of our illusion of control. This might not be, as the Bible puts it, “the beginning of wisdom”. But it is a good place to start these days.

Faith comes in two forms, the power to hang on, and the willingness to let go. Somedays we need to do more of the first, other days, more of the latter.

We need to fight this disease with all our human capacities, but we need also to let go of the dimensions of this crisis over which we have no control. It may help us sleep better at night; it might help us live more gently with ourselves and others.

The Serenity Prayer, the mainstay of the Recovery Movement, could, should, be our daily prayer these days:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

The prayer is an antidote to what the 12 step movement calls “the control disease”.

Another way to say it, to use the words of Fred Craddock, is: Do all you can, then leave the rest to God. This truth is especially important these days when we fear that we are losing our hold.

In his short novel, Remembering, Wendell Berry tells of Andy Catlett, a famer who lost his right hand in a farming accident. “His right hand”, Berry writes, “had been the one with which he reached out to the world and attached himself to it. When he lost his hand, he lost his hold.”

The world for Andy, then, had become a steep slope and he a man falling unable to reach out and get a hold on a branch or a tree trunk, or root to catch and hold on.

As the days went on, he realized this saving truth: “Though he does not hold, he is held.”

So may we hear these words today, and take them into our hearts: “When we lose our hold, we are held, held in the Everlasting Arms. As the Hebrew scriptures say:

The Eternal God is our Dwelling Place
And underneath are the Everlasting Arms.