Due to COVID-19, we are living in very different times. We have been forced to let go of many things in our lives, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as I will illustrate in this blog, “letting go” actually opens up space for experiences of “letting come” to happen that often bless us. Let me explain. Sometimes these times of letting go are forced upon us by life like COVID-19. These forced “letting go” moments often arise when we lose our job, or when we lose our health, or when someone we love dies, or when a leader resigns, or when we find ourselves in conflict with someone. Sometimes these times of letting go are chosen by us. These chosen moments of “letting go” occur when we change jobs or chose a new career, like when I chose to leave my computer job at Canada Trust in 1989 and pursue pastoral training. They occur when we choose to move to a new community like my mother-in-law Veronica did when she moved from Canada to St. Lucia in 2017 where she knew no one. They occur when we, as parents, choose to have a child. However these times of letting go happen, whether they happen due to life or by choice, they are always times of unknown, times when we feel we have lost some control of our life. We live in a culture that sees little purpose to “letting go”. How many of us first throw out something before we get something new, that is, throw out old clothes before we buy new clothes, throw out old books before we buy new books, etc. No, the focus in our culture is one of “letting come”, adding more and more things or responsibilities or experiences to our life. As a result, our lives get fuller, and busier, and often more stressful and we have to strive harder and harder to keep up with the fullness of our life. No only can we become attached to things and activities, and a certain way of life, but we can become attached to beliefs. Our minds can become full of our belief system, unwilling to consider new perspectives or take on new attitudes. Our hearts can become attached to our emotions, become so full of them that there is little room for other feelings or experiences to arise. Something happens when we practice “letting go” in our life. This “letting go” lessens the fullness in our life and creates space for something new to come to our life. As we let go of our beliefs, space opens up for new insights to come. As we let go of our attachments to certain emotions, freedom opens up for new experiences to come. As we let go of our attachments to things and pass them on to others or throw them out, there is now space in our life for new things. As we let go of commitments or loyalties, this creates time for us to follow new visions and make new commitments. Letting go allows openness for letting come to happen. Seen in this way, times of letting go are often times when we create space for God’s spirit to emerge in our life in new ways. When we let go, whether it be by force or by choice, we find ourselves in a place of surrender, where our lives are no longer in our control. We find ourselves instead in the hands of life and God. This is the gift of “letting go.” It allows the openness within our life for God’s spirit to minister to us, to even do new things in our life, if that is what is needed. In these times of letting go, we often experience many moments of Divine blessing. To help us understand how Divine blessing arises, I want to explore the Bible story (1 Samuel 1-2) of Hannah who found herself unable to become pregnant. (this was the essence of my sermon at Mannheim Mennonite Church on June 7, 2020) This story begins with Hannah struggling with the way life has gone for her. She finds herself unable to have children despite the fact that she wants children. Children were seen as a sign of Divine blessing in her culture. What makes this barrenness extremely hard to live is that her husband Elkanah’s second wife has been blessed with many children. (It was common in that culture (around 1100-1000 BCE) for husbands to have multiple wives.) So you can imagine how hard this must have been for Hannah, seeing her husband’s other wife bear many children, while she had none. It certainly didn’t help that her husband’s other wife made fun of her because of her barrenness. There was nothing Hannah could do except pray, trust, and wait. Each year she would go to the temple with her husband and his other wife. Each year she saw Elkanah give many offerings to God, most for his one wife and children and one offering for her...a yearly reminder of how Elkanah’s first wife was so blessed compared to her. In the end, we read how she would cry, the sense of rejection and failure being so deep. Then we read that, at one of her yearly visits to the temple, Hannah is very upset and can’t stop crying as she prays to the Lord. In the midst of these tears, she gets to the place of praying that if God would allow her to bare a son, she would dedicate her son to the purposes of the temple and God. In that culture in those days, bearing a son was a sign of divine blessing. The priest Eli witnesses Hannah’s prayer and once he finally understands the essence of her prayer, he responds, “May you go in peace. And may God give you what you’ve asked for.” It seems at this point in the Bible story that something shifted for Hannah with this experience at the temple. A “letting go” happened within Hannah’s soul. We read that “Hannah went on her way, ate some food, and was not sad any longer. The next morning the family worshiped a final time at the temple before going home.” It seems that because of this letting go within Hannah, the spirit of God was able to move in a new way within Hannah. Soon thereafter, we read that Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son and she named him Samuel which means, “I asked the Lord for him.” The next year when the family went to the temple for their annual sacrifices Hannah stayed home. She said she would not go to the temple until their child Samuel was weaning age, sometime between the age of 2 and 4. So, Hannah stayed home with the child and nursed him until he was weaned. When Samuel was finally weaned, Hannah brought Samuel to the temple for the family’s annual sacrifice to God. On this occasion, to celebrate the blessing of her son, Elkanah sacrificed, on behalf of Hannah and her child, a bull, a vessel of flour, and a jar of wine. But this was more than a celebration of Samuel’s birth. It was also, I think, a very bitter-sweet moment for Hannah. Hannah was releasing her son Samuel into the service of the Temple for life, just as she had promised in her prayer. Hannah says, “I prayed for this boy, and the Lord gave me what I asked from him. Now, I give this boy back to the Lord. As long as he lives, he is given to the Lord.” Hannah was saying goodbye to her son. Then, we read in the Bible that they worshipped the Lord. And part of that worship, as it is remembered, includes Hannah singing the words, “My heart rejoices in the Lord. My strength rises up in the Lord! My mouth mocks my enemies because I rejoice in your deliverance. No one is holy like the Lord—no one except you. There is no rock like our God.” Following this song of praise to God by Hannah, we read that Hannah went each year to the temple for her annual sacrifices to God, and part of that visit involved visiting her son Samuel. We are told that Hannah made a robe for Samuel each year to give him. Furthermore, we read that the priest Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife, Hannah, and pray, "May the Lord repay you with children by this woman for the gift that she made to the Lord." They then returned home. We are then told that the Lord continue to bless Hannah for she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters. In this story, we see Hannah practicing the prayerful act of letting go, and in doing so, the letting go created space for the spirit of God to come to her and minister and be experienced in new ways. A new life path opened up. The end result was that Hannah felt blessed by God by not only having her son Samuel but by having many more children. For me, this begs two questions. The first one involves our experiences of blessing in our life. When we look back on our times when we felt blessed by God, did those blessings arise during times when we were practicing letting go? I wonder. The second question is a more subtle question. What does it mean to truly practice the act of letting go? What is happening within us when we practice “letting go”? For many years, we read that Hannah annually went to the temple with her family group, and while there, she would cry to God about her barrenness. Clearly, she had prayed many times before but nothing changed, no letting go happened. She left the temple each year feeling as a hopeless as she came, a barren wife with no future. Often prayers are mental or verbal, words we think or say to God, telling God what we want. Sometimes our prayers are demanding God to respond a certain way. Some people pray with an answer already in mind, and they are only open to God answering their prayers in that way. When we pray in this way, we remain in control of how God will respond to our prayers. There is little to no “letting go” within this prayerful attitude. So what made Hannah’s prayer at the temple different this time from her previous prayers? It seems that this time a “letting go” happened within her prayer to God, a “letting go” that opened up space within her for God’s spirit to minister to her in new ways. I can imagine God’s spirit responding to her openness in various ways. Hannah could have sensed that God would finally allow her to become pregnant with a child, possibly a boy or possibly a girl too for God cherishes equally both boys and girls. Hannah could have sensed that it was not part of God’s plan for her life to have her own child, but that God had another blessing in store for her, maybe adopting someone’s else child or being a special aunt to one or more of her cousins, or maybe a special role or purpose in life, like becoming a prophetess within her faith community. However, what Hannah sensed, in the end, was that God would give her a son, and that this son would need to be dedicated to the temple and God. For Hannah, this perceived response from God was enough for her heart to leap with joy and be satisfied. The sadness lifted. The depression parted. A calmness settled in and she went home a different woman then she came. I suspect at this time in her life she had little to no sense that she would end up having 5 more children. She was just happy to have one boy, even if it meant dedicating him for life to the temple and Lord. When we practice “letting go” in our prayer times, it feels quite different inside us. We often feel a “letting go” occurring within the four aspects of our soul: our mind, heart, will, and body. Rather than our mind actively thinking, we notice our mind softening, moving into a listening, observing mode, noticing what thoughts, feelings, longings, and sensations are arising in the moment. We may notice our hearts soften a little, becoming more tender and sensitive and less numb or hardhearted, allowing ourselves to feel our experiences of life a little deeper. We may also notice the will centre of our soul a little freer as we become more aware of our longings to act or not to act, to speak or not to speak. Finally, when our body experiences “letting go”, we may notice releases of tightness and tension in different parts of our body like our head, eyes, jaw, shoulders, chest, gut, and pelvic areas. When we find ourselves letting go, it often creates openness within our mind, heart, will and body for experiences to come. “Letting go” creates space for “letting come” to occur.
Questions to ponders:
is judgemental feel different than a sensitive, compassionate heart? c. How do you experience “letting go” in your "will" centre? How does a compulsive pattern feel different than when you have freedom to experience your longings, and then act or not act depending upon what you sense is best? d. How do you experience “letting go” in our body? Where are the places in your body you carry tension and stress? What happens when these are released?
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