Letting Go (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

August 26, 2015

Letting Go

“Fools say in their hearts, there is no God.’”  (Psalm 14:1)

Writer Parker Palmer, a Quaker whose insights on the need to combine contemplation with practice and how to help communities better their values and performance have inspired many of our day, writes the following: 

“A … shadow common among leaders is ‘functional atheism,’ the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.

“This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, [to feel resentment and frustration], stressing our relationships, sometime to the point of breaking. If often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism … explains why the average group can tolerate no more than 15 seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening…

“The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn sometimes that we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only that what we are able and trust the rest to other hands… ”

(Palmer, Parker J. “Leading from Within,” pp. 88-89, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.)

Often we act as if it’s all up to us.  As helpful as this might be in motivating us to do what we are able, there lies in its heart a prideful assertion that we are in charge.  On an emotional and social level we feel and act as if we did not believe God was beneath and behind all things, driving them toward completion and final goodness.  But sometimes our best efforts are fruitless, and prayer is the only thing left for us to do.  Sometimes, we should welcome silence.  Acceptance of things and letting go of control, turning things over to the hidden God, are essential for us to maintain health: in our relationships, in our emotions, and in our outlook on life.  It is foolish not to do so. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+