Holding Fast, Letting Go, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, May 30, 2008

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Holding Fast, Letting Go

        I want to give thanks to the members of the Grief Covenant Group for these very deep and tender sharings of your journeys. Many of us could share similar stories, if we would. It takes courage, lots of it, to stand up here, in front of friends who are dear, and friends you haven’t met yet, and share what you have learned from a very great loss. I honor you.

        So much of life is about coming to terms with loss, isn’t it? In our traditional Memorial Day service, we speak about the grief that comes with death, and we call the names of those in our community who have died in the past year. Today we will also speak of other losses, other goodbyes – including ours to one another, yours and mine, as I leave this Ministry of Community Building and prepare to take up a new ministry in Massachusetts.

        Leaving anywhere is a kind of death, a turning off from one path and choosing to take another. There may be joy in the choosing, but there is also grief. Any loss is a rehearsal, in a way, for the big goodbyes we all face –the end of the lives of those we love, and the end of the life we love. We grieve when we end a marriage, even when the end is necessary. When we fall ill and lose mobility or vitality. When our children leave for college or to live on their own, or even when we send them off to summer camp. We grieve when people move away – even though it’s been said that, in today’s hyperconnected world of communications and travel, nobody ever leaves or arrives anywhere anymore. Something in us knows that these sorrows, real in their own right, are also practice for facing bigger sorrows.

        When a minister leaves a church, the usual rule is there should be no contact between the departing minister and members of the former congregation for a full year. Some of you may have a hard time understanding that, but the rule is there for a good reason – so you and I both will have room in our hearts for new ministries to grow. Now that doesn’t mean that I will pretend not to know you, if your vacation plans bring you to Brewster and you come to First Parish. I’ll be ever so glad to see you, but I probably will not accept an invitation to dinner.

        This is what many of you have said to me since I told you back in March that I would be leaving my ministry here: “I’m happy for you, but I’m sad to see you go.” That is a lovely thought, and I thank you for it. There is one other thing that I have heard from many of you, which I would like to lift up this morning. Many of you have told me, “I never even really got to know you. I thought I would have years to get to know you.”

        Those words ring a bell with me; they are the same words I hear, so often, after a memorial service. After I’ve told the rich stories of a life in a eulogy, people say to me: “I had no idea she did all that. I wish I had taken the time to get to know her.”

        Mary Oliver writes this poem about talking to “the god of dirt.”

        The god of dirt
        came up to me many times and said
        so many wise and delectable things, I lay
        on the grass listening

        to his dog voice,
        crow voice,
        frog voice; now,
        he said, and now,
        and never once mentioned forever.

        It’s hard to remember to listen to the god of dirt in a world that is so paved over and built upon. We cover our lives with great structures of accomplishment and creation and busyness. Nikos Kazantakis called this a “gaudy curtain” we construct to hide the chasm, the fact of our own inevitable end. One of the blessings death carries is to remind us that we are, indeed, dirt – the same dirt that makes up the earth and stars. Now, is the message of dirt. Now.

        People, please: don’t wait to get to know one another in this community. You never know how much time you’ll have. Don’t wait until the eulogy to listen to the stories of one another’s rich and wonderful lives.

        When I do a memorial service, especially when I speak to a family and friends wrestling with the raw grief that comes after a death that nobody saw coming, I often say these words: “The time between your loved one’s birth and his death was the time he had, and the time we had with him. This is what we all can do when we remember him: we can hold one another a little closer; and speak today the words of admiration and love we are holding in our hearts for one another. This is a fitting tribute to his memory.”

        I know as I say them that these words can be hard for a family to hear. They may be sitting there in tears, remembering times they did not speak words of love or admiration for the one who now, as far as we know, is beyond hearing them. Yet it is important that I say this. Even in the hardest of goodbyes, there is also a hello, whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not. The purpose of a memorial service is to bring people together, to say to one another what has happened, and to speak together of how they will manage to make meaning of this loss, how they will go on with their lives. When I remind people to “speak today those words of love and admiration you are holding in your heart for those who remain,” I am pointing toward an answer to that question, how will they go on. Pointing toward how we, still living, are going to manage to greet the next day, and the next. Pointing to the “hello” that must follow the goodbye.

        In grief we also say “hello” to parts of ourselves that had been hidden to us before, and we may emerge with new wisdom about life. This is what Forrest Church called “living a life that knows death.”

        As a minister, I advise those who are bereaved that grief will take as much time as it takes; there is no rushing through it. You might think that ministers themselves are good at grieving, whether it be the loss of a loved one or the end of a ministry, but it isn’t always so. In fact, the image we often use for how we say goodbye to our congregations is from Roy Oswald’s little book, “Running Through the Thistles.” The departure is often so painful for ministers that we give the goodbyes short shrift, simply disappearing. This reminds Oswald of the way he and his brothers used to sprint home barefoot through the thistle patch, running so fast they didn’t feel the pain. Problem was, that some of the thistles lodged deep in the soles of their feet, and the pain would be there, if not in the moment of running through, for weeks and months thereafter.

        Now I have been at UUCA only four years, and I am one of three, and I know you already are excited to be saying hello to Rev. Carlton Elliott Smith, as well you should be! Rev. Smith is a friend of mine and a fine minister, and it is balm to my soul to know I will be leaving you not only in Rev. Michael’s and Rev. Linda’s loving and capable hands, but in Rev. Carlton’s as well. I also know that for some of you, my words and presence here have become an important, perhaps even central, touchstone on your spiritual journeys. It has been a very deep privilege to walk with you in this way, and I will miss you, each one of you, dearly. It is important to speak honestly of this, and shed tears, if tears come. Facing honestly the pain of this will help us, help you and help me, greet the new day, the new minister, the new congregation, with the clarity of an open space in our hearts.

        There is something else I say in almost every memorial service I do: The great work of being human is loving and letting go. These words are drawn from Mary Oliver’s poem, “In Blackwater Woods.” “To live in this world,” she writes,

        To live in this world
        You must be able to do three things:
        To love what is mortal,
        To hold it against your bones knowing that your own life depends on it,
        and,
        When the time comes to let it go,
        To let it go.

        This is the great work of being human. Let us practice this work in all our loves and all our losses. Holding fast. Letting go. Amen.

Benediction

My blessing for you is from a Buddhist proverb: “May you joyfully participate in the sorrows of life.” In the midst of the pain, the dark and the strife, may we be … live … sing: Alleluia.

I Believe Statements

• Our loved ones live again through shared memories, Vannessa Hall
• After the cries and screams, a very great gift grows from a very great loss, Sally Determan
• The soul survives, and that is comforting, Linda Donaldson

Photos of The Service

Sources and Inspirations

• Forrest Church, Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow
• Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God
• Thomas Lynch, “Limning the Rites of Death,” in Bob Abernethy and William Bole, eds., The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt and Repairing the World
• Roy M. Oswald, Running Through the Thistles: Terminating a Ministerial Relationship with a Parish
• The work of UUCA’s Grief Covenant Group, Pastoral Care Guild, Parish Nurse Carolyn Menk, and the families at UUCA and beyond with whom I have walked a while in the journey of grief