lessons in non-attachment

This has been a week of loss in our household.

Not big losses, in the grand scheme of things.

But still, it has been a week of loss.

A week ago, our youngest fell off the bed when we were up at Camp Stevens for our parish retreat. We found out Thursday that his bone was indeed fractured, and he got a hard cast put on his left arm.

Also on Thursday, we took both our kids to the Ear Nose and Throat doctor, who said they both need surgery to remove their tonsils and adenoids.

On Monday, we realized we had lost our oldest son’s beloved stuffy that he has carried everywhere with him since he was born, and still haven’t found it.

And then, Friday I realized I’d lost my wallet. 

You see - nothing huge; all small inconveniences that can be handled. We have a plan for the health issues, the surgeries are common and no big deal, I’ve canceled my debit card and will go to the DMV this week to get a replacement driver’s license.

People deal with bigger losses than these. I have dealt with bigger losses than these. 

But the emotional weight of the week has been heavy. And telling myself that other people suffer more, or that these losses aren’t really that big of a deal - just isn’t working. I feel bereft, adrift on an ocean of loss. 

Like despite my best efforts - and truly, I am trying my best - I can’t keep track of anything important. 

Like it’s just one thing on top of another: so many doctor’s appointments, and sick kids, and now we have to keep his cast from getting wet for three weeks, and how are we going to keep him from climbing, and then I remember that we can’t find the beloved stuffy and this bottomless pit of despair opens up in me.

None of these are huge losses, and yet I have felt paralyzed by loss this week.

I had a moment this week when I wondered - what am I supposed to be learning here? Is all of this a lesson in non-attachment?

And then I read our this passage from the gospel of Mark: Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Lose your life and you will save it; save your life and you will lose it. 

Growing up, I always thought this statement from Jesus was more of a directive - an instruction to give up physical things in order to gain spiritual things. Deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me.

Those all seem like things I can do, right? Deny myself, take up suffering, make choices to follow Jesus.

Losing my life seemed to be about rejecting parts of myself that were not good, not pure, not spiritual, so that there would be more room in my life for Jesus, more room for godly things.

Sweep out the corners where the worldly desires lurk, so that the light can shine. 

Losing my life seemed like something I had control over, like I could decide to put down my selfishness and sinfulness and brokenness and leave it behind somehow.

Like I had a choice in the matter.

But this story sounds different if you’ve ever actually lost your life, if your life actually has fallen apart - through grief, or trauma, or sickness, or any number or things outside of your control.

What is it like to hear Jesus talk about lost life when you are in a season of loss? What does it mean to save your life, when it feels like everything is lost?

What if Jesus’s words are less of a command or an instruction manual on how to make ourselves more right, and more of a mirror we can look into when everything feels lost?

In my experience, the kind of lost life that Jesus is talking about here never comes when we want it to. It doesn’t happen by choice, or by our own design. It happens to us.

We lose our life when things fall apart, when despite our best efforts we can’t keep it all together, when we realize that the life we have isn’t worth saving.

What if what Jesus is offering isn’t a list of tasks - take up your cross, deny yourself, lose your life - but the promise that when life is lost, there is still more to come?

And he doesn’t just offer this to us in a pithy phrase: save your life to lose it, lose your life to save it - he offers it to us with his very life.

Jesus’s own life is the promise - that suffering will come, that rejection will come, that death will come - and that there is life on the other side of it.

We don’t put our faith in the words Jesus said - he wasn’t just a profound teacher. No - his own body is the promise that through suffering, through loss, comes new life. 

This is the body of Christ that we are baptized into, as we drown beneath the water and come up on the other side. Our hope is not in Jesus’s teachings but in his very life, this mystical and yet earthy reality that we participate in.

And maybe, just maybe, this will give us enough hope to peek into the bottomless pit of despair in us, when all is lost. 

And maybe we’ll realize that it’s not a bottomless pit after all - it’s a tunnel, with light at the other side.

This week of little losses in my life has felt insurmountable, each loss piling on the one before like a little mound of crumbling sand. I’ve found myself saying - I can’t do this. I can’t go on. 

Each loss touches bigger losses in me, each small grief or worry touches a deeper grief - we’ve lost our oldest son’s beloved stuffy, and haven’t I also lost his babyhood? He’s in first grade now, and he’ll never fit in my arms again the way he used to. All the griefs of parenthood seem to be wrapped up in the loss of this stuffed animal, and it’s too much to look at.

A voice says to me - what a silly thing, to weep over a lost toy.

But a wiser voice in me knows that every loss, no matter how small, has the potential to rip us to shreds. We are fragile, we humans, our hearts just soft tissue beating by some magic of blood and Spirit, and we have to hold onto our lives for dear life or else who knows what could happen?

Everything we hold on will fall away; big and small, important or seemingly unimportant, and when they do, what will be left of us?

Whether you are drowning in loss, or your grip on life feels firm, Jesus’s message is the same: suffering will come. And his very life is the answer: that there is new life on the other side.