Letter #165: The Family Garden

On Letting Go

Spunch!

Wonderful to be with you and everyone for Thanksgiving. It’s poignant to me, having grown distant from most of my family of origin, to see our new family gathering and growing in love and good will.

I couldn’t help but ponder: what makes the difference between a family in which the members can blossom into themselves and a family from which one has to break away in order to become what he was made to be? It is not so strange that these thoughts echoed our recent theme, Christ vs. Christianity; the salvation of the individual vs. the church that carries that salvation to all.

I think the secret lies in a principle that I see everywhere throughout the Gospels, but many others don’t see anywhere at all: the principle of letting go. When I rattle on about the command to “judge not,” people seem to imagine I’m calling on them to become some kind of moral idiot, blind to the nature of creation and its human imperatives. But no, it’s a question of how to exist within those imperatives while in relationship with others.

Haven’t you noticed this? The man who tries to keep too tight a grip upon the world is bound to end up with a fistful of dust. “How can I convince my wife to believe so-and-so?” “How can I get my child to become such-and-such?” “How can I make the politicians do this and that?” These are not bad questions. They’re simply the wrong questions. When Jesus tells us to remove the plank from our own eye rather than worrying at the speck in our neighbor’s, he is not telling us to let our neighbor be damned. He is actually describing the best way to make everyone around us see a little more clearly.

Try this. Re-read John 4, about Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman. People often tell me the woman feels guilty or that Jesus convicts her or commands her to sin no more. None of that is there. He simply tells her what she's done and who he is. There is not a single passage that indicates her guilty feelings or her repentance — yet the result is the epic conversion of an entire town and maybe a nation.

Every family has its rules and its conventions and even restrictions on what can be said and done and how. But those conventions and restrictions must be elastic enough to grow and change as each individual soul takes its unique shape. Today’s idiot world searches for identity in idiot things: skin color, sexual desires, class, and other mere incidentals to the eternal image of God within. But that doesn't prove identity is meaningless. It proves that idiocy is idiocy.

A family — or a church — should not be a graveyard in which to bury individual identity, but a garden where it can grow.

On to Christmas.

Love, Dad