We, the current congregation of Community Church of New York, have the complicated and emotional task of letting go of our church buildings. We thought we’d have a final vote on the contract today, but it’s more likely in another month.Whenever it is, we are the bearers of this process; we are the ones who will carry the sadness as well as the labor of keeping our congregation alive and well through a period of as many as five years before we can enter our new space. The expected thing for me to preach today would be about the spiritual practice of letting go. It’s well-worn and beautiful in many ways, but it’s not my theology. It would be disingenuous for me to ask you all to practice detachment when my own theology leads me to a practice of spiritual attachment.
It's not that detachment doesn’t work. It can be a powerful tool. In my life, I’ve left some really good jobs, jobs I liked but knew I needed to let go of. Each time, I had the same experience. I decided to leave and starting liking my job more. Has this happened to you? There was one job I had where I actually stayed for another two years, thinking I’d resign in a month, in two months, after the semester, until a full two years had passed and I was still there. The decision to leave let me detach. I was less concerned about the outcome of any of what was happening around me. I could tolerate difficult people or burdensome policies more easily. I wasn’t stressed about other people’s mistakes because I figured I wasn’t going to be the one to clean them up. I spoke truth more freely because I knew the worst consequence was to be fired, which was a perfectly acceptable outcome. It could even means severance pay, which I’d have appreciated.
Detaching was liberating.
The spiritual practice of detachment is well documented. Many traditions offer tools to help. Meditate, watching the world float by. Focus on the moment. Don’t allow yourself to be hurt or caught by thoughts or outcomes. Be Here Now. “Let go and let God.”
It all makes sense and to be clear, I’m not disparaging those or any other spiritual paths. It’s all good. Whatever brings you joy, whatever inspires compassion, is good and worthy and I’m here to accompany you on your way.
But, it’s not my way. I don’t want to separate myself from the world. I want to dive in, I want it to surround me, I want to be engulfed by the intensity of it. I want to feel the air, to breathe it deeply, to worry about the balance of carbon and oxygen, to feel connected to every other aerobic being each time I inhale. I want to witness this world, not as bystander, not as someone who plans to do something else, go somewhere else, but as full participant, touching and smelling and tasting everything. I want to stand on the corner of 35th and Park and hear the traffic, to watch the way a motorcycle can stop a conversation, to observe the rhythm of pedestrians as they cross the street. I want to be part of the pulse of the city, the movement of the neighborhood. I want to make noise as much as I want to find quiet corners. I want all of it.
On the other side of detachment is presence. Witness. Attention. We have a world filled with the neglected, the forgotten, the abandoned. People without homes sleeping on sidewalks right in front of us who we ignore. Animals left in shelters we desperately want to block from our minds. Children without food, elders with dementia, forests being decimated, so much pain in the world that detachment can feel like the only way to get through a day.
Attachment isn’t an easy way to live; compassion might break your heart. That’s the spiritual practice. Letting your heart break open so far, the whole world can fall in. It’s then that we are all in, that we are living fully engaged, feeling and knowing and being with all that life is offering.
Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, urged writer Henry David Thoreau to spend some time in the woods. He told him to “Go out . . . build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive.” So Thoreau borrowed a cabin from Ralph Waldo Emerson and during his two years there he wrote the essay Walden in which he tells us, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”
Those words are seductive.
Thoreau didn’t stay at Walden for too long. He wrote, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps, it seemed to me, that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
There is so much life to live.
And, life is complicated, filled with both pain and joy, prone to violence but also to compassion so powerful that just witnessing it can be transformative. In my life, there’s been real suffering. I know that’s true for you too. Death is real and often devastating, even when entirely expected. There are pains we inflict on one another casually, intentionally, mindlessly, sometimes consistently for years and there are traumatized people bearing the weight of that cruelty. There’s also beauty, equally mindless, often as casual, and profoundly healing whether it’s the intentional acts of one person for another or the natural state of a planet we were just lucky to be born on.
We only live one life. There’s a sadness in that, too. Most of us want more life, we want second chances. Another chance to be a child, to go to college, to make different decisions, sometimes because we could have done better and sometimes because we’re curious about all the other paths we haven’t had a chance to explore. But, there’s only this one, and while we can change course, we can’t go back. So, let’s live this one life, awake. Let’s experience it all, as much as we possibly can. Let’s not miss it. I’m not saying we should all live well. That’s a different thing. We’re all doing the best we can to live well. I’m saying, let’s be present and open to all of it. Any of it. Even those awful parts that hurt so badly the only life we have is lying in bed sobbing. I want to be present for that too. The sobbing. The laughing. The fear. The anger. The joy. It’s all part of this one life.
And it goes beyond any one of our individual lives. It’s about becoming an active and fully engaged part of the healing of the whole world. This is ours, all of it. It’s all worth holding on to.
Annie Dillard, a transcendentalist like Thoreau, has the same impulse for attachment, for leaning in, for being awake to it all. Because theology is really poetry, best told in story, she writes of the weasel. “A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home…One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?...
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”
There is a Spirit in this universe, a heartbeat, a breath. It is part of every leaf, every rock; it’s buried in the soil beneath the city and it’s in the wind blowing between buildings. It is closer to me than I am to my own thoughts, present to you when you were born, and in every breath taken since. This isn’t a god outside myself, but a god of myself, both me and not me, both alive and the quality of living itself. We call her Mother. We call her Wisdom. We call her Spirit. But those are small words in comparison. This is the Way of Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, the Beginning and the End.
We connect with this Spirit of Life by sinking our teeth in, by sucking the marrow from the bones of life.
Which is what many of us have done with this church. For two hundred years, people have belonged here, have donated money and time and a lot of attention. I’ll walk us through a whole history next week, but we’re all part of the story of this church and not wanting to let it go is real and the love we feel even for the bricks and mortar is good. I’m not going to tell any of us to let go, to detach, that these are only buildings. No. I say feel it. Lean into it. Many of us are sad, even heartbroken about losing a space that has felt so safe. It’s a second home, a spiritual home, a place we can own and be known, a place our lives have been witnessed, where we bear witness to each other’s lives. How many children have been dedicated here? How many weddings? How many have been mourned? There are people buried in this building.
I hope you join me in grieving this loss. We will hold on to all it’s meant to us, and all it meant to the hundreds of people who have worshipped here in these last 74 years. The walls hold the prayers of the generations. The music is living in the floors. Important words have been spoken here, and when we’re quiet, we can still feel their power. This is a place to love. Embrace it. Lament its loss. Bemoan and remember and weep if it feels right.
Our next adventure is close by. We’ll want to be the kind of people who throw ourselves into the life we’re offered, who know that loving is never wrong, even if it means we’re going to get hurt. I’m so grateful to be with you all in this. And, I’m grateful for the song we’re about to sing together because if anything is true, if any of this is real, it is love that will get us through.