Re-attachment (Matt 6:19-21)

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.” Life comes not from the things of this world that we can see, but from the Giver who is in all things unseen. 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

But 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 simply about letting go of God’s gifts. We let them go so that we might love them anew, more fully, more truly. Not as they are by themselves, but as they are in God. We learn to love our family and friends and all the good gifts of life as 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. 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.

Lent is not about non-attachment, but about re-attachment. We let go of things, so that we might hold them more lovingly—which is to say, so that we might love them in God. We learn to love the world not as a collection of things that stand on their own, for our momentary satisfaction or benefit, but as a slow dance that brings us closer and closer to our Beloved—God, the Giver, the One from whose love nothing can separate us.

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.”

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.