letting go

Over the past year I have been learning some lessons in letting go. When my Dad died last Christmas I was left with a house full of carefully preserved bits and pieces from their lives and me and my brother's. Any preconceptions which I might have had about how this process might go in terms of memories were felled by the fact that my brother missed both of my parents funerals  - my mother's because he was on the run from the police and my father's because they had caught him and he was in prison - where he will remain for a little while yet.
So I found myself overwhelmed by things I had to let go of and with no one to remember childhood stories with - with all the best will in the world spouses and children can only listen to so many tales of "I remember when". Time is a great healer and this summer I have gone through huge amounts of stuff and felt able to let go of things, the house is sold and the garden, my mother's pride and joy, is in someone else's hands.
Letting go is an essential part of life, not only through death but through all sorts of other things from favourite socks with holes to major relocation and even dislocation.
Often I hear people talk of faith as if it is an act of holding on tightly, but it isn't, faith is an act of letting go, God is already holding us and we have to learn to trust that. That is not to say that faith is passive - if you have had to let go you will know that even when things are forced away from you it often takes a conscious and deliberate act even to begin to let go. In turning to God, we choose to let go and live in a whole different place, a place where home is no longer defined primarily by physical location but in the fact that we know we are surrounded by and rest in God's mercy - it is to this place of being, of letting go of all the things which we often surround ourselves with, that we return when trouble strikes, when we are bowled over by grief or when we simply do not understand.
Too often organised religion makes the act of belief one which is busy and aggressive - the act of faith is much more simple and mystical than that. Letting go is not always about quiet assignation - prophets and activists let go - but they let go of themselves and hand themselves over to God in order that they might more fully take up the mantle of the humanity with which God blesses them.
Jesus on the cross is that very paradox of letting go to which we are called. He emptied himself (as the letter to the Philippians says), taking the form of an indentured servant, letting go of the trappings of royalty but still in the image and likeness of God. To understand our own letting go we will have to enter deeply into the mystery of God made man and Christ crucified and risen - it is not a neat package, another piece of letting go is refusing simple answers, but it is one in which we will, most profoundly, find ourselves.