It’s all right to let go.

Ministerial Meandering

It’s all right to let go.

The last ten days or so has been particularly challenging, especially in keeping my emotions under control.  This is funny, as I had to give a sermon on ‘Being slow to anger’ - just when I felt least like it.

The essence of my talk was fairly obvious - take a pause between your knee-jerk reaction and your actual response.  Although jaw bones heal, hurtful things cannot be unsaid, and people have very long memories - and don’t we like to nurse our resentments?

There is another way though, and it is best described by the French phrase, ‘Laisse tomber’, which means ‘let it fall’.  Drop it - whatever it is or was - and leave it on the ground; at least for now.  You can come back to it later if you need to, but for now, laisse tomber.  Forget it, if you can, but let it go.

When we are being pushed for a comment or opinion, prodded to express our views on something - and we are not ready, it is best to say nothing rather than make a comment that you haven’t had time to think through, and which you will wish you hadn’t the moment you’ve said it.  I have been impressed by Jordan Peterson who is frequently attacked by critics on news programmes and opponents in debate.  He exhibits a restraint characterized by prolonged silence, during which time he has the opportunity to construct a measured and appropriate response to what are often clearly very personal attacks.  He allows the moment to fall into a constructive silence in which not only he, but also the viewers are able to analyse the question more deeply, and the motive behind it.

Some moments in debates are designed not to make the person think - but rather to make the person feel uncomfortable; to put them on their back foot because that’s what we want to do; we are not really trying to have a debate at all, we are trying to goad our interviewee into some indiscretion or unguarded comment that we can capitalize on.  That’s manipulation - and we are all guilty of it from time to time.

One of the reasons that we use manipulation is that we love to be in control.  Control is about power, and the desire for power is at the base of of our psychology - if you subscribe to Adler’s school of thought, which is all about the ‘will to power’.  I am sure that this motivates some of us, and it is not hard to think of examples, but I prefer the Jungian school that emphasizes the integration of the conscious and unconscious, and the expression of the ‘soul’.

Wherever you might want to go with your research into academic psychology, the ‘reality’ of our lives (that would be Freud’s ‘ego’) tells us that from time to time we need to let go of that control.  The paradox is that in letting go, we actually obtain more control.  Consider Peterson’s silences - they allow him to come back stronger, even though it looks at face value that he has been stumped by a comment or question.  McCartney’s song, ‘Let it be’, has a line that says, ‘…there will be an answer - let it be’.  And so it appears.

Those of you who have spent any time in prayer will know that the answers don’t come when we are bombarding God with requests and demands; they come in the silences that we so often forget to keep - those moments when we drop our need for control, we laisse tomber, we ‘let it be’, and we remind ourselves that  ‘there will be an answer’ - so ‘it’s all right to let go’.

Philip+