Sunday July 2, 2017
Freedom through Detachment
The poet William Blake (1758-1829) said:
He who binds himself to a joy,
Doth the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
Life is a journey not a destination. If we hold on to anything and are unwilling to let it go we cannot move on in life. There is only one thing that is more destructive than binding oneself to a joy and that is binding oneself to a sorrow. Yet this is something that often happens. Everyone knows that the feasting day will pass. They let go of it and look forward to the next. But we seem to cling more to our sorrows and let them stunt our forward growth.
A young woman was telling me how she longed for her family who were far away on another island. I asked her to pause for a while and let the memories of her childhood float to the surface. Her first memory was of being terrified when her father came home drunk and beat her mother. Her second memory was of a time when she as a little child went to the city with her mother. She became fascinated by some dolls in the store and while looking at them, became detached from her mother. Her mother came back to find her, picked her up angrily, took her home and stripped her naked and whipped her. These were her memories and yet she was incapacitated by her longing for her family!
In today's Gospel Jesus tells us that we must detach ourselves from our families if we are to follow him. "Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me." He also says, "anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it." I think that this is the key to understanding what he says.
The child in the womb is one with its mother. Even after its birth it is not conscious for a long time of being a distinct entity. If the child is to mature it must distinguish itself from its mother and develop its own personality. As it develops it needs less control and more freedom. Very often parents see their children as extensions of themselves and are reluctant to give them the freedom necessary to be able to love them back. The relationship can be compared to two hands intertwined and tightly clasping each other. To pull them apart is extremely painful.
When parents allow their children the freedom to detach from them, the relationship could be expressed in the image of two hands meeting palm to palm. The meeting is total but there are no adhesions and there is no excruciating pain in separation. It is only in this situation that there can be true love. It is only when children are allowed to detach from their parents that they can decide to love them. This is love. What is imposed can never be love.
In the Gospel Jesus urges us to detach from all things and especially from our families. Having detached from them we will be free to love them and they will be free to love us. When later our paths in life call us to separation this can be done with mutual approval and without too mush pain.
Prayer should be leading us to this spirit of detachment from past joys and sorrows, so that we can be free to respond to God's call in the present time. Unfortunately much of our prayer is asking for joys or the avoidance of sorrows. Meditation is a way of prayer in which one is present without any effort to control. As one focuses attention on the prayer word, past sorrows and joys tend to arise. The secret is not to grasp them or to get involved in them. Let them go and experience the freedom of the fullness of life that Jesus promised to those who leave all to follow him.
