Reattachment: Letting Go and Loving Anew (Matthew 6:19-21)

(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on February 14, 2017, Ash Wednesday)

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All Will Be Lost

Life is full of loss.  For every gift that we receive, we will some day be bereaved.  Whether by time or by change: by the slow decay of moth and rust or by swift and sudden theft.  Family, friends, homes, jobs, possessions, whatever we count as ours—all will be lost.

At around the age of twenty-one, Saint Augustine lost one of his closest friends.  For a time, he was inconsolable.  Eventually, the company of other friends helped to repair his soul.  But according to him, this consolation “was all one huge fable, one long lie.”[1]  “The place of one great grief,” he writes, “was slowly taken…by the seeds from which new griefs should spring.”[2]  In other words, he had not defeated grief but only deferred it; not mended it but in fact multiplied it.  For he had exchanged one friend for many.  And one day he would lose these friends too and would endure much more grief anew.

Letting Go

The tragedy, according to Augustine, is that he was looking for life in the wrong place—“where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.”  Writing to his past self, he cries out, “[Do] not cleave too close in love to [other people and things].   For they go their way and are no more.”[3]

In one sense, Augustine was telling himself to “let go” of that to which he grown so attached.  That is part of what Lent is about.  Letting go.  It makes sense.  If attachments are what bring us suffering and grief, then letting go is the solution.

But by itself, that’s a sad solution.  It’s like giving up.  It’s like saying, because love might bring heartbreak, I won’t love anymore.

Loving Anew

This is not what Augustine was saying, and it’s not quite what Lent is about either.  Letting go is only half the story.  Augustine urges his past self earnestly, “The good that you love is from [God].”[4]  “If [other people and things] please you, then love them in God because they are [changeable] in themselves but in [God] firmly established.”[5]

In other words, Lent is not about non-attachment, but about re-attachment.  We let go of things, so that we might hold them more lovingly, more truly.  Not as they are by themselves, but as they are in God.[6]  We learn to love our family and friends and all the good gifts of life not as momentary pleasures but as holy echoes and reflections and revelations of God.  They become handles by which we hold on to God, and when they leave, we find that we are not clinging onto thin air but onto God.  They become the most graceful steps in a slow dance that brings us closer and closer to our Beloved—God, the Giver, the One whose love nothing can separate.

Lent is about letting go, yes—but it is also about falling in love. “Blessed,” Augustine writes, “is the person who loves Thee, O God, and [their friends] in Thee, and [their enemies] for Thee.  For [this person] alone loses no one that is dear…if all are dear in God, who is never lost.”

A Symbolic Lenten Loss

You may have noticed that we have lost the paraments in our sanctuary.  It is a symbolic Lenten loss.  A reminder that the beautiful things of this world eventually decay by moth and rust or disappear as though by theft, but also a reminder that the heaven we treasure here on earth is never gone.  What we love most deeply in a gift is God: the goodness that shines in a gift is God.  So no gift loved in God is ever truly lost, for the God from whom it came and in whom it had life and whom we treasured is always alive. 

Prayer

O Great Giver,

Whose gifts

We love dearly:

Family and friends,

Gardens and tables,

Bread and wine—

Loosen our grip

On the outside of these gifts,

That we may love

The You deep within.

In the name of our Treasure, Jesus Christ.  Amen.

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[1] Augustine, Confessions (trans. F. J. Sheed; rev. ed.; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 57.

[2] Augustine, Confessions, 57.

[3] Augustine, Confessions, 58.

[4] Augustine, Confessions, 60.

[5] Augustine, Confessions, 60.

[6] Storing up treasures in heaven is another way of talking about treasuring the heaven that is here on the earth, loving the Giver whom we discover in the passing gifts.