First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
"The Practice of Letting Go"
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore September 23,
2001
READINGS
From A LITTLE BOOK OF FORGIVENESS Challenges & Meditations for Anyone With Something to Forgive by D. Patrick Miller:
"Do not be misled by the myriad political faces of simple, stupid hatred. Jews and Arabs hating each other, Irish and Englishmen hating each other, whites and blacks, Christian and Muslims, leftists and right-wingers -- there is no reason or dignity to any of it. Every chronic hatred began when someone attacked, someone suffered and no one forgave. Then these insane examples were multiplied and unwisely taught down through the generations, falsely ennobled in tales of crusades, uprisings and martyrdom. But the cycle of vengeance will never solve itself. Someone has to step outside it and courageously say, "I will take no pride in my tradition as long as it teaches murder, sacrifice or revenge."
If we could really forgive ourselves for all the things we think are wrong with us, we would be free.
Forgiving is the spiritual practice of letting go. We can let go of all the ways we judge ourselves
and resist our experience. We can release our guilt and shame about our relationships with our
children, our bodies, our mistakes, our addictions. When we feel betrayed by physical illness, we
can let go of our resentment toward pain. When we forgive ourselves, we reconnect with the
essential goodness of our being.
The greatest obstacle to self-forgiveness is a deeply conditioned belief that something is
fundamentally wrong with us. The story of Adam and Eve is the classic example of what happens
when human beings don't forgive themselves. It teaches that we were expelled from the Garden of
Eden because of our innate sinfulness, that we are outcasts whose earthly task is to redeem
ourselves--just like the primordial couple. But imagine how different our lives might be if, after
breaking the rules, Adam and Eve had reflected, "Ah well, humans will be humans!" or "Seeking
knowledge is normal," or "Eve was in one of her moods."
If only they'd forgiven themselves, they could have
returned to paradise. Instead, believing they were unworthy and shamed before
God, they thought their only choice was exile.
SERMON
The 9/11 attacks make this a hard time to be discussing forgiveness when the lust for vengeance roils in the blood. And then again, this may be an excellent time to be reminded of forgiveness as the war drum is being beaten. I like Oscar Wilde's tongue in cheek comment, "Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much."
My reason for discussing this topic coordinates with the Jewish calendar. This Sunday falls in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days that began last Monday night with Rosh Hashanah and will end nine days later with 24 hours of fasting and prayer on Yom Kippur. For Jews, this is a time of purification, a time to forgive and ask forgiveness, cleansing the spirit of the sins of this past year. The penitent Jew seeks to restore the covenantal relationship with God. Noble as this goal is, remembering every infraction and asking forgiveness for them all is next to impossible. And if you could possibly do it for yourself, could you do it for sisters and brothers, your children and grandchildren too? These Days of Awe end with fasting and pleading for forgiveness from God on Yom Kippur as the sun falls to the horizon. Jews all over the world fervently pray that they will have their names written the Book of Life for another year.
I'm attracted to the Jewish holidays because they have been refined for thousands of years. Their rituals and practices speak to deep parts of our psyche whether or not they actually have any influence on the divine. Most Unitarian Universalists do not conceive of our relationship with the divine as dealing with a judging God who must be appeased. We have inherited the tradition of Universal Salvation that releases us from this concern. Our covenant is with each other and life on this planet in this world, not beyond it.
Without taking a position on the metaphysical benefits of asking for God's forgiveness, we look for the human application of these rituals rather than supernatural ones. I do not know any UU's who expect their next year of life is conditional on their satisfactorily petitioning of God for forgiveness. If we want to find any relevance of the Ten Days of Return, as they are called, to Unitarian Universalism, our focus, I think, will be renewing our commitment to friends, neighbors, our community and our troubled world.
The reason we might want to appreciate and even join our Jewish brothers and sisters in their ritual this time of year is because the process of trying to release the mistakes we've made and harms we've done and beginning again on an annual basis can be quite salutary. Torturing ourselves for our mistakes and missteps indefinitely is just not good for our mental health. Today I'd like to reframe the Jewish tradition of asking for forgiveness from God into a method I've learned over the years from Buddhist meditation that might be called the "practice of letting go."
I don't quote movie stars on Sunday morning very often but Sophia Loren said: mistakes are a part of the dues one pays for a full life. Part of being fully human is making mistakes and harming other beings. I've said words in anger or fear I regretted the moment after they left my mouth. I've hurt people's feelings. I've endangered my body and health with reckless actions. I've lost connection with my highest aspirations and ideals for short-term satisfaction. I expect many of those gathered here this morning share similar regrets and feel remorse at times for their actions.
This is the very first step in the practice of letting go: allowing awareness of "missing the mark" to enter one's consciousness. This may seem obvious but it isn't. It is the nature of the mind to resist that which is painful and gravitate toward that which is pleasant. The things we've done we regret are rarely pleasant to bring to mind. To truly allow thoughts of one's harmful actions to enter the mind requires breaching the barriers we set up to defend ourselves. And mental defenses can cleverly sweep these suspect actions into the back of the mind. We do need these defenses to protect ourselves, yet they can also interfere with seeing the way we harm ourselves and others.
The emotions are not so easily manipulated by the higher brain centers from which our defenses operate. Where I've seen this clearly, again and again, is at meditation retreats and at home, early in the morning, sitting with an intentionally cleared mind. The particular type of meditation I do, called insight meditation, begins by focusing the mind on one present time object and holding it there. The traditional instructions direct one to follow the in and the out breath through noticing the physical sensations of breathing at one location in the body. Watching the physical sensations keeps the mind focused on the present. The effect is to create an open space in consciousness that allows background and suppressed mental activities to come forward and reveal themselves.
The difficulty of holding the mind on the breath is discouraging for many who try meditation for the first time. What is hard for the beginning meditator to appreciate is that the distractions are an integral part of the meditation process. All the distractions are really an experience of mental background activity pushing into the foreground. And sometimes what are buried in the background are the memories of things we've done that we'd rather forget.
I remember my struggles at one meditation retreat remembering long forgotten painful emotions of anger and hurt I felt when a loving relationship ended. I could feel the emotions still present in my body; intense feelings that I had long ago put out of my mind - or had I? Emotional memories endure because they link into the most primitive part of our brain, the survival center. We can push painful memories out of the foreground of our mind, but they don't go away.
So the first step in letting go is being aware of what one has to let go of by making space in the mind for it to enter. With busy lives, many of us don't allow ourselves the luxury of unscheduled time without mental preoccupation. If we have some free time, we watch TV, read or listen to the radio rather than allowing the mind to be fallow for a time.
The second step, once something we want to let go of has entered our minds, is to begin exploring, investigating and understanding. In meditation, when an object arises in consciousness, the meditator seeks the cause of the object arising. Consider the impulse to move one's arm. The impulse may, at first, just appear to be an automatic response to an itch behind the ear. But upon more careful observation of the impulse, there may be observed a flash of irritation and discomfort. Upon even more careful observation of that impulse, without acting upon it, may surface deeper emotions associated with our habitual response to discomfort. In watching one's diverse mental responses to an itch, one can directly witness the universal human responses the Buddha identified. He identified them as a universal human response to the unsatisfactory quality of being that is an unremovable part of human existence. In meditation, the mind is slowed down so these connections and patterns become more recognizable.
A member of the congregation I served in Port Charlotte broke off a relationship with another member who was taking classes out of the area. As a young couple, they were well loved by the congregation so there was shock and distress upon hearing of their breakup. Her time away at school had weakened the bonds of her relationship with him more than his relationship with her. When her commitment wavered, he abruptly cut off the relationship. Cut it off so completely and abruptly that he told me he never wanted to hear anything about her ever again. He especially didn't want to know if she had met someone else.
He continued in the congregation and was starting to adjust to his new single hood, getting involved in a couple of committees and generally pulling his life together. He sent me an email telling me this and I replied to the email that he was very wise to forget her and move on with his life.
The next day I got a call from the fellow. He may have been moving on in his life, but he hadn't forgotten her. In fact, his jealousy had been stimulated by something in my email. He pressed me for everything I knew.
Of course such conversations I'd had with her were confidential and I had no intention of confirming or denying his suspicions. I reiterated my statements of encouragement to just forget, forgive and move on. When asked point blank whether she had been seeing someone else, I hesitated before responding. That was all he needed. He screamed at me, hung up the telephone, sent me a very nasty email and left the congregation.
Needless to say, I felt really bad about this. I went over and over in my mind what I should have done or said. Should I have responded to his email? Should I have just called instead? Should I have immediately told him what he wanted to hear? Should I have called back after our conversation and tried to soothe his feelings? I felt strongly I'd done something wrong even though it took awhile to figure out what I could or should have done. As Cato the Elder put it, "I can pardon everyone's mistakes but my own."
The exploration of causes and effects in consciousness leads to the arising of new insights and connections. As I allowed myself fallow time to reflect on my actions, I recognized how much responsibility I felt for his well being. I felt more deeply the burden and responsibility of words shared in confidence and the importance of protecting them. I recognized the guilt I felt for his feelings being hurt. And finally, I accepted I couldn't fix their personal problems.
There are tremendous insights to be found even in the simplest of experiences. Few people realize how disturbing an itch can be to the equilibrium of the mind until they sit down to meditate and vow not to move during the meditation period. Yet watching the cycle of cause and effect carefully reveals a degree of freedom. While many of our reactions to things are highly determined by our past conditioning, our choices in the present can shape that conditioning and open up new possibilities. By choosing not to scratch the itch, and by watching the itch go away, a new experience of freedom may be created. I do not have to scratch every itch. Sometimes people will be hurt when I do the right thing and protect confidences.
I can choose to let something go.
Fundamentally, letting go is a conscious choice. After the meaning has been wrung out of a harmful action, after satisfactory attempts have been made to rectify the situation and make amends, the action must be released from the mind.
In meditation, this is done by returning to the object of the breath. Once the object that distracts one from the sensations of the breath has been recognized as a distraction and the cause noted, the meditator intentionally returns to the object of the breath. If the same object returns, the process is repeated. If the object comes back again and again, it then becomes the temporary object of meditation noting the present time effects on the body until its energy diminishes and the breath object can be resumed.
Just as we have the power to push things out of our minds, so we have the ability to allow things to pass through the mind and be released in a healthy way that discharges their physiological energy. And if these energies are not released, they can harm us.
A good example of how this works is back tension. Has anyone had a really stressful day and the next day or week had back trouble? Most of us hold chronic tension in our muscles. Our muscles all maintain some degree of tension otherwise we wouldn't be able to sit or stand and our bones would fall out of their joints. Emotional stress can increase that tension. The longer that tension is held, the less noticeable it is until it fades into the background of consciousness. Our emotional habits set up unnoticed patterns in our muscles that build and build until a little extra stress causes an over-reaction and they go into spasm.
The process of meditation lets go of this buildup of emotional and physical tension hidden in the background of our minds. When that tension is released, more energy becomes available for other processes of the mind and body. Our health and well-being improve, even after doing just a little bit of this practice of letting go.
Thus Buddhist meditation is really a moment by moment process of inward forgiveness and reconciliation. This is the core of the awakening of the Buddha as stated in Buddhist teaching: Through letting go of conditioned states and views, and desires which will not be fulfilled, the cause of suffering falls away. Practicing this kind of letting go leads to enlightenment.
It is important to remember that forgiveness is no escape from the consequences of our actions, Bhikkhu Dhamma Aloka says this well as follows:
You too can get a picture of Buddha-mind in just a few hours spread over two days this weekend. We'll be having a mini retreat this Friday evening and Saturday. You are invited to sign up for it in Channing Hall.
Whether, Buddhist, Jew or Unitarian Universalist, we need a way to let go of our past actions. The practice of letting go adapted from the methods of Buddhist meditation is one such way. I have found great benefit using these techniques and I offer them to you this morning for your consideration.
Copyright © 2001 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.