Give It Up and Let It Go
Lent 2003

Week of April 7, 2003

Lectionary Readings

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-12
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

From the Gospel reading this week we read these words of Jesus:

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life
(John 12:24-25, NIV).

Lent, of course, is the season of the year when many Christians give up something as an outward expression of an inward transformation. To give up something is to relinquish it, to lose it, to renounce or cede it. In this passage Jesus hints at the ultimate loss anyone might experience, to give up all of life as you might normally live it. Quite paradoxically, He warns that to grasp, to clutch tenaciously, to try to control every variable of life, is the surest way to ultimate loss, whereas to give up voluntarily what we cannot keep is to gain what we cannot lose (see Luke 14:33).

As I surveyed a few of my friends it was interesting to learn what they have given up for Lent. One gave up his addiction to evening sweets. Another chose to give up alcohol for a season. A third friend recalled how as a child decades ago his mother was quite strict at Lent; none of the meals they ate during Lent included any animal products. But others go deeper. I remember reading about a scholar whose spiritual director advised him to give up reading for Lent, which made me wonder about giving up running and Mozart. Another friend spoke of his loss of identity as a physicist when, after a long time in that field, he took a job in industry. Another faculty friend who went through the tenure process spoke with unusual candor and insight about how he discovered a sort of idolatry in himself about his position, a sort of grasping that he clearly needed to let go. Since I have not given up anything for Lent, I applaud my friends and thank them for their inspiration.

It is rather easy to extend and deepen these notions of loss, death and renunciation. At our best these losses are voluntary. Perhaps I need to give up a lifelong dream, a bitter memory, a past failure, anger at parents or children, my expectations of others, plans for the future, or a broken friendship. Maybe I need to relinquish my obsessive attempts to control, which are only thinly veiled forms of anxiety, over my time, my financial resources, or even my reputation. I wonder how Peter gave up what must have been almost unbearable self-hatred at denying Christ, especially after he boldy denied that he would ever deny Him, or how Paul somehow moved beyond knowing that he had helped to murder Christians. There are also losses that are thrust upon us that are totally involuntary, like the death of a loved one, sickness, injury, or getting fired from a job.

The Benedictine Joan Chittister has written a fascinating book called Scarred by Struggle, Transformed By Hope.¹ The experience of loss and endings brings great pain, she writes, and that pain, however much one is loved and affirmed, can only be intensely private and personal. The pain of loss also brings a sense of isolation, the effects of which can be both physical (eg, I withdraw) and emotional (eg, resentment). There are also public aspects to pain and loss. Wounded deep within, “our ability to deal with the remainder of our world beings to shudder too.”² In addition to isolation as a sort of attempted refuge, we can also become dependent upon others. In the end, writes Chittister, it is all too easy to take the easy way out and abandon God or blame God for abandoning us.

Chittister acknowledges that deep losses hurl one into a “inner storm” of “strange forces.” God’s call, she suggests, is that we move from isolation to independence, that we recognize that life is far more than any single loss we might suffer. The struggle and pain of giving up something is “an unsparing lesson but a necessary gift.”³ In particular, she counsels Christians to cultivate two virtues.

The first virtue is detachment or indifference, the recognition that there is not only one way to live life, but that all of life and its many stages are gifts with possibilities for joy. In detachment we let go of something; we give up the propensity to clutch and hoard. But when we lose or relinquish something, we remain confident that God is a loving Father who has other good and even better things to give us. Such detachment frees me to grow in the second virtue, that of discernment. In discernment God helps me to see and weigh different options, to exercise judgment. He helps me to understand and choose what is preferable, what is better, what will lead to growth and wholeness.

I think it is important to acknowledge that detachment is not to withdraw from the world or to deny the world as some extreme ascetics have done. It is not the annihilation of the self, or some masochistic hatred of the self, in the sense of some eastern religions. Rather, it is the affirmation of the self and the engagement of the world and all of life, only with the ability to do so with genuine freedom. To give up something is not a zero sum game in which there is only further and further loss; rather, it is to give up one thing, even good things, to gain something greater. I like what Chittister says: “Detachment based on negation rather than an awareness of endless abundance is a not a solution.”⁴ Similarly, discernment is not 20-20 vision about every pain, loss or problem, but the confidence that God’s Spirit will help me to see and act wisely as best as might be humanly possible.

As I reflected on the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John this week about dying as a form of life, the insights by Chittister about finding one’s way through the pain of loss, and the Lenten practices of self-denial, I was reminded of a favorite hymn, written by Judson Van De Venter (1855-1939) in 1869. Here are the first and last stanzas from “All To Jesus I Surrender.”

All to Jesus I surrender,
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.

All to Jesus I surrender,
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power,
Let Thy blessing fall on me.

As he is in so many other ways, the apostle Paul models this for us, writing that he “counts all things as loss” in order to gain Christ (Philippians 3:7). In giving up, letting go, and dying to some things, says Jesus, we position ourselves to live life all the more fully in His kingdom today.

¹ What follows comes from an excerpt of this book called “Finding A Way Out After Great Pain,” in The Christian Century (March 22, 2003), pp. 38-44.
² Ibid., p. 39.
³ Ibid., p. 41.
⁴ Ibid., p. 44.