Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, March 17, 2002
When I first came across Daphne Merkin's article I read it through twice, resonating with her words on a number of levels. To begin with, I recognized easily that tendency to count up rather than cut one's losses -- to keen over them, as she says, no matter how relatively small. And I also recognized the tone of voice, so to speak: the thread of self-deprecating humor that allows us to honor our rage over some loss and admit, at the same time, that it's a little silly to let so much feeling rest on the loss of a mere object.
But the thing that kept drawing me back to this short essay was the way it provoked questions that seem to me very central to how we live our lives, especially questions around how we deal with losses, large and small. Where do we fit, in the two categories of people Merkin names: those who cut their losses and those who keen over them? Which kind are you? Which kind am I? And right on its heels, which kind do I want to be? Or on a moral or religious level the question might be, How do we believe we ought to respond to loss in our lives?
It might loosen up the questioning a little to admit that all of us live on the spectrum somewhere, and that all of us slip around on that spectrum as we move through our lives. We were all children once, for starters, and grieved passionately for things we would hardly notice today. And that motion continues: what we care about as central to our well-being today might seem utterly trivial tomorrow, simply because everything is relative, as we were all reminded so starkly after September 11.
Most of us live in a sort of middling area of the spectrum of how we cope with loss. But there are people I can think of who seem to embody the extremes, and who are useful as teachers to me because they help clarify the direction I'd like to move on the spectrum.
On the 'cutting one's losses' side of things is my friend Charlie; for the last seventeen years he and his wife Barbara have lived in and helped run the Catholic Worker shelter and kitchen in San Francisco. Charlie isn't a person of whom I could merely say he 'cuts his losses'. It would be more accurate to describe him as one of those unusual people who seem to walk through life open-handed, touching and honoring people and things but not grasping, not holding on.
Twenty years ago, when we lived in the same community together in San Francisco, I was driving Charlie's car one day, running errands in Berkeley. Both of us, along with pretty much everyone we knew, lived on an absolute shoe-string. I didn't own a car at all, and Charlie was in the process of selling his, the one I'd borrowed, which was an old and tired VW bug. I somehow managed to enter an intersection without realizing it was about to be occupied by another car (which actually had the right-of-way). I ended up in a dramatic rendezvous that left no one injured but both cars seriously trashed.
Like most people who live on shoe-strings, Charlie had only liability insurance, so there was no coverage at all for his poor car. So I phoned him with a certain amount of fear and trembling to tell him of the loss of his only material asset. Even knowing him as well as I did, I was amazed and awed by his attitude. After pressing to make sure no one had been hurt, his immediate second statement was, "Well, I hope you at least managed to total the car so I won't have to worry about selling it anymore."
On the spectrum of how we deal with losses, Charlie resides far down toward the end occupied by those who accept their losses with very little keening. He is Jewish by birth and a sort of Universalist mystic by choice, but his attitudes remind me most of a Zen Buddhist monk.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who may go far beyond merely keening over their losses -- people for whom loss, once felt, can never quite be relinquished or forgiven. It is represented for me by a man I never knew at all but with whom I had a short conversation I don't expect ever to forget. This too occurred while I lived in the San Francisco area. I had taken the subway to Oakland and had just come out into the early darkness, and at the corner I approached to cross the street I realized an unusually large crowd was gathered.
I quickly figured out that the people were by-standers at a police crime scene that looked just the way those scenes always look in the movies: yellow tape staked out around an area, lots of police and bright lights and busyness. And there in the road I could see, as I got close, the chalked outline that had obviously been drawn around a body, recently removed. I got the story from a woman next to me, who explained that a store down the block had been robbed by a young man. As the robber fled he had been shot and killed, though it was unclear whether it had been by the police or the shopkeeper or someone else.
The woman and I, awed by the enormity of a young life just ended in that spot, murmured a little about the chain of events leading to that death -- and then suddenly the man next to me whirled on us both. With fury contorting his face he declared that the young man had deserved to die, and that if he'd been there and able to, he'd have shot the thief himself. I was astonished by his vehemence, and asked him whether he was saying, then, that robbery was a capital crime -- that it was, in other words, the equivalent of taking a life.
His response then is what has stuck with me so vividly. He said, with the same angry passion, "The things I own are not just mine, they are me! My things are me! And anyone who invades or damages what I own has damaged me, and any way I want to respond to that violation is my right."
It seems to me that this represents the logical far end of the spectrum, the place where we hold fiercely to our losses. At that far end, there may no longer be any separation between who we are and what we have. If we cannot separate our deepest being from what we consider to be ours -- whether things or people -- then every loss, from the smallest to the most profound, will be akin to the loss of our own lives. Every loss will shake us to the core, and therefore every threatened loss will make us coil in on ourselves more tightly, cling more fiercely, close our hands into fists.
I don't know whether Daphne Merkin had individuals in mind like my friend Charlie and like the angry stranger in Berkeley when she spun out her own thinking about loss and how we greet it. Her focus was more on the way in which our love for things as well as for people keeps us anchored and secure through the storms, 'moored in the largeness of the world'. We know what she's talking about, whether or not we allow something like a lost glove or scarf to carry the psychic weight for us. We all long to be moored in our world, anchored and held steady by what we love. But I suspect we also yearn toward the freedom that we know resides on the other end of the spectrum, the place where, at least in imagination, we see ourselves able to love deeply, and yet also letting go and letting be.
Regardless of where I am on the spectrum, I know without any doubt at all where I would like to be. I know I want to move more in Charlie's direction of non-attachment, and away from the end of the spectrum where attachment is so extreme that it becomes all wrapped up in self-hood. This sort of goal could be seen as a simple preference for how to deal with loss. But it gathers a sort of weightiness for me in considering again this notion of what it really means to be "moored in the largeness of the world."
The trouble we face in the search for such a mooring is that we simply know too much. That is to say, we know one central thing: we know that all of our attempts at mooring to people or things or places are, as they must be, illusory. As much as we want the steadiness, the sense of roots and groundedness and stability in our lives, deep down inside we know that the nature of all our loves, as the nature of our very lives, is transience and impermanence.
And so the question becomes a little more complicated, and perhaps also a little more intriguing: rather than asking how we can deal with each loss as it impinges on our security, might we instead ask: Is there a different kind of "mooring in the largeness of the world?" Is there a kind of security that is not shaken so terribly by loss?
The Zen Buddhist master Dogen Zenji once said, "The self and the things of the world are just as they are. The gates of emancipation are open." As with most teachings of Buddhism, these words are deceptive in their simplicity, and it takes a little pondering to realize how differently we would live if we were able to take them to heart.
"The self and the things of the world are just as they are." Most of us are light years away from living as though this statement were true, particularly in dealing with the pain of loss in our lives. We rarely accept that a loss is just as it is. Instead we rage against it; we seek comfort or solace, relief from the distress; we seek distraction perhaps, or replacement. In other words, in the face of loss, we strive to find a new mooring.
We hardly ever wonder whether our very ways of loving, our ways of becoming attached, prevent rather than help us toward the only real mooring possible in this large and ever-turning world. What would a different kind of mooring, a different sort of security, look like?
What comes to mind for me is a kind of two-fold attentiveness, in looking hard at this question of loss and how we cope. On the one hand our attentiveness would be devoted toward perspective. Each loss would carry its own weight, would be recognized and honored as real. But perspective means we would not invest each loss with the weight of all the losses, large and small, which might have come before.
The loss of a favorite scarf is, in the light of perspective, not quite tinged with mortality. It does not carry the weight of all the other things we have lost. Because we would be paying close attention to what is, the loss of an object, even the loss of our most beloved possession, would not wring from us the grief it carries when all loss is a reminder that our moorings are coming loose.
And the second kind of attentiveness would be toward truly being in our loss when it arrives, rather than fleeing to the next anchor or security as quickly as we can. A Buddhist teacher in New York named Toni Packer was once responding to a woman who had, in quick succession, lost her husband and her job, and who felt that all her years of meditation and work toward spiritual growth left her as disoriented and bereft as she would have been without them.
Toni Packer responded "When something like this happens, when things one has been holding onto are crumbling, can one go slowly, and not immediately build up something else in their stead? That's what the brain immediately tries to do: build a new structure. Rather, can one remain utterly silent with that state of uprootedness, lostness, not knowing where to go....Can one just be with all of that, wholly, without looking for a result? Just be with it because it's there, like the wind, the cicadas, the cool rain, the...breathing?" And she went on to say, "Something entirely new comes into being when the brain...isn't mechanically engaged in wanting, striving, comparing, fearing, ...attaining....and so forth. It is not a question of getting rid of these movements, but seeing without a shadow of deception what is actually happening inside and out."
It seems to me that the key lies in these two kinds of attentiveness: the ability to let each loss be simply its own, and the ability to be in our grief and confusion when we feel them. Together, they might constitute a new and truer way of mooring ourselves in the largeness of the world.
A little faith is required here, of course. We are neither saints nor Buddhas as we muddle through our attachments and our losses, doing our best to preserve some measure of calm amid the storm. We will keep on surprising ourselves with how unreasonable we can be, how petty in some of our attachments, how loathe to let go of even the smallest things that help define us. It takes at least a small leap of faith to believe we might learn to loosen our grip and relax a little.
The faith is boosted and sustained by the times most of us can call up from ourselves when we managed it, by luck or grace -- when we allowed a loss, whether tiny or enormous, to simply be what it was. I remember a time, for instance, twenty years ago now, when two different friends of mine had died within a week of each other. Both men were young, and both deaths were violent and unexpected.
I felt as never before that all the moorings I generally counted on were cut loose: if such random dying could visit my life, what in the world could be trusted as solid ground? And perhaps because the grieving was so acute, grieving was simply what was, that time. I remember nights when I would wake myself up weeping; and I remember sitting up in the darkness and simply saying to myself, "Oh, I'm crying again." And then I would simply cry, until the crying was finished.
There are very few times I have managed to touch it like that; but I remember that time because I found in that purity of grieving a depth of equanimity I have rarely touched in my other losses. It is that glimmer of equanimity that keeps me trying for this way of living. It is in the equanimity that I think a new and truer sort of security lies for us -- a steadiness or stillness through the ebb and flow of our lives.
Resting in that equanimity we can respond to what is. When it is time for jubilee, then we celebrate; and when it is time to grieve, we grieve. And in that depth of simplicity we begin to be less like boats on the sea, fastened vainly against the tide, and more like islands in the storm: swept over by the violence of wind and waves but steady again when the storm has passed. It is my hope, or my faith, that it's in that sort of equanimity that we might find ourselves finally moored, safely, in the largeness of the world. AMEN.