To Do Three Things: Love, Hold, Let Go.
In Blackwater Woods, Ezekiel 37: 1-14.
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
The lone wild bird in lofty flight is still with thee nor leaves thy sight. And I am thine, I rest in thee, Great Spirit come and rest in me.
Last Sunday, members of the Lyndale choir joined Shannon, my mom, and me at her assisted living where she is in hospice. Led by Rev. Claire Klein’s guitar, we sang some of my mom’s favorite hymns: You Have Come Down to the Lakeshore, Be Now My Vision, Abide with Me, Precious Lord, What Wonderous Love is This, Amazing Grace. We also sang some Scottish tunes, like the mournful Bonnie, Bonnie Banks O Loch Lomand. She needed a little help finding each of the hymns but she sang along to everything. And, at the end, when we invited her to, she prayed a classic Marguerite prayer—present, poetic, powerful. And then, after folks left, she retreated back into confusion and tiredness.
My mom is 90 and she entered hospice on Feb 1st.
It was only six weeks earlier that the resistance to Operation Metro Surge really began to ramp up. Many of us were going to weekly protests and vigils and setting up mutual aid funds and processes. And then Renee Good was murdered and the protests became daily instead of weekly. And the work of resistance became an invitation for 700 clergy to come to Minnesota to participate in a day of work stoppage and strike. And all of it was happening amidst sub-zero conditions. And we’ve set up Signal chats and patrols and school safety guards and grocery delivery systems and millions of dollars in rental assistance.
The juxtaposition of the intensity of the resistance, the need for urgency and perseverance and pushing back at all that ICE and the American Empire are trying to perpetrate on the one hand… and the slow loss of my mom’s cognitive abilities, the slow silencing of her voice into almost a whisper at times and pure silence at others, the loss of her muscle strength and the need to use a lift to help her transfer on the other is making me spend a lot of time in prayer and discernment. Persistence and letting go, resistance and surrender. To what am I called?
Our scriptural text for this morning is one of my favorite ones in all of scripture. God sets Ezekiel down in a valley of bones and they are very dry. And God asks Ezekiel, “can these bones live?” I was reminded of this story this week when Brian, a dear friend from college who is now a death penalty attorney in Georgia texted me and asked if we could talk on the phone because he was feeling very sad about ICE and Iran and Ecuador. He asked how I was staying in the resistance, how we were doing it here in Minnesota. And as we talked he said his mother, when she was alive, used to ask him whenever he was discouraged, “can these bones live?” We then talked about how God commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones and that Ezekiel obeys the command. But that it takes three separate times of prophesying before the answer to God’s question is, “yes, these bones CAN live.” It takes a third time of prophesying before life actually happens. Persistance, keeping at it, even when the first two times seem to have failed. Can these bones live? Yes, but only if we push through the seeming power of death. Only if we keep following God’s command and prophesy, prophesy, prophesy.
It seems as if it could be an anthem for us Resistance Loons here in Minnesota.
But it’s not what God is speaking to me as I sit with my mom…
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
As I ponder and pray about these seemingly opposite spiritual tasks, I had the chance to talk with several trusted beloveds. And one of them, an English major, said it sounded like the interplay between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Another said it was really important to be clear who and what we are called to resist and to what and to whom we are called to surrender and let go into. They went on to say, it is precisely because we are called to surrender and let go into God’s infinite love, grace, and abiding spirit that we can have the power and the hope and the fortitude to resist evil. The resistance and the letting go are deeply interrelated.
How does that resonate or land on you?
I feel well-trained and ready for the persistent resistance. As someone trained in liberation and feminist theologies, I am deeply suspicious about the ask to surrender. For too long, systems of oppression, disguised as Christianity, have demanded of marginalized communities that they surrender their power, that they acquiesce to their own oppression, that they submit to those who mean them harm. But this is exactly what God calls us to resist. This is exactly the valley of dry bones into which God sets us and commands us to prophesy.
We are never called to surrender to that which would seek our humiliation. Never.
But we are called to recognize that we are mortal. And death is part of life. Knowing when to let go into death is deeply connected to the daily spiritual practice of letting go into God’s love. It is deeply connected to trusting God’s power and presence in life.
This Lent, we are exploring the theme of Solidarity of the Incarnation. And I am struck by how powerful it is that God so loves us that God took and takes on human form in order to make this journey of resistance and letting go with us. Jesus is such a powerful example of trusting and letting go into God’s love that he is able to resist Satan’s temptation in the wilderness. It is precisely Jesus’ letting go into God’s love that allows him to call out Empire’s abuses and resist them with his whole being. It is his surrender into God’s presence that allows him to be a channel of healing.
“and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” ….I still don’t quite know how I’m going to let go of my mom. I can’t imagine a world without her presence. That is the honest truth. I find myself holding tight every time I hug her, every time I leave her. I am already anticipating the grief and sorrow. And I know so many of you have made this sacred, excruciating journey.
And I also deeply believe in the Solidarity of the Incarnation… in life, in death, in life after death. And I know in my bones that God receives that which we release—including each of us.
Amen.
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