Living, Loving and Letting Go

Watching Our Children Walk Away

We’re like every parent or grandparent watching their kids grow up and walk away, from the day they go to kindergarten to the day they begin their careers.

Our first-born grandchild recently moved to Miami, a city we don’t know, to begin a career I don’t fully understand. Our second-born grandchild is in college in New Jersey, a place we’ve only visited once. Our third-born is starting high school and our fourth is entering middle school. Our fifth grandchild is still in elementary school.

It’s reminded me of a truth I’ve believed and preached, but which, as I get older, I know to be absolutely true. In his beautiful book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr wrote:

“To go forward there is always something that has to be let go of, moved beyond, given up.”

Jesus said it’s like planting seeds. If we keep them safely in a jar, they come to nothing. But if they release them, they can bring forth fruit. ( John 12:24.).

Trusting and Letting Go

In January, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in prison in Germany. His closest friend, Eberhard Bethge, was in Italy serving in the war. Writing to him, Bonhoeffer quoted Isaiah 42:16: “I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, by paths they haven’t known I will guide them … I will not abandon them.”

Bonhoeffer expressed a feeling every parent can understand.

“It’s a strange feeling to see a person, in whose well-being and fate one has somehow shared so deeply for years, go off one day into a completely unknown future, in regard to which one is practically powerless … As long as we ourselves are trying to help shape someone else’s fate, we are never quite free of asking ourselves whether what we’re doing is really best for the other person … But when suddenly almost all our possibilities to be involved are cut off, there is somewhere the awareness, behind all our fears for the other, that his life has now been placed wholly in better and stronger hands … To give up the genuine joy and fullness of life in order to avoid pain is certainly not Christian, nor is it human.” (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 265)

We let our children go, trusting in the better and stronger hands of the God who loves them even more than we do and promises not to abandon them.

But Then, There’s Minneapolis.

There’s a dark side to all this. We release our children into a risky, dangerous world. There are powers of evil within and around us from which we cannot fully protect them. Everything that happens is not the perfect will of God. Some things are, in fact, the ruthless contradiction of all that God intends for them.

Which brings us to Annunciation Catholic School. Already drifting from the headlines, the 44th school shooting this year is the most recent of our uniquely American ways of death for our children.

Once again we fall into the sickening pattern of “breaking news,” followed by “thoughts and prayers, ” followed by leaders and legislators doing absolutely nothing about the common element in these tragedies — the high-powered weapons whose only purpose is to slaughter as many people as they can as quickly as possible.

Please spare us the hypocrisy of pretentiously pious politicians who blame “mental illness” while slashing the funds and gutting the institutions that might help us deal with it. And save us from the simplistic slogan that it’s not the guns but the people who do the killing. Of course! But why is it so easy for those people to get the guns?

Instead of asking God why this happens, what if we hear God asking us the questions?

How many more children will be sacrificed on the altar of a faulty interpretation of the 2nd Amendment?

How many more families will bury a child before Congress and Legislatures (including Florida!) are willing to pass reasonable gun safety measures which most of your citizens approve?

How many more students will be slaughtered before you decide that weapons of war are not designed for sport or self-defense and belong in the hands of the military?

How long will Congress chatter about “mental health” but not approve funds to help heal it?

How long will the USA be the only nation on the globe to allow this evil to continue?

How long will people who claim to be Christian offer “thoughts and prayers” but do nothing to stop the slaughter? (Read Matthew 7:21-27)

What will it take for you to repent, which means “turn in a new direction”?

“How I wish my people would listen to me!
    How I wish my people would walk in my ways!…
I would feed you with the finest wheat.
    I would satisfy you with honey from the rock.” (Psalm 81: 13-16)

“I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope.” ( (Jeremiah 29:11, the theme verse for the year at Annunciation Catholic School.)

Father, forgive us for we know what we are doing and are not willing to change it.

May the disturbing love of God, the healing presence of Jesus Christ, and the hope-giving power of the Holy Spirit be at work in and through us be give hope to our children and grandchildren.

Jim