Holding Things and Letting Go

Inside the jacket cover of Maira Kalman’s book, Women Holding Things, she says, “You hold in your hands a thing I hold most dear. A Book. If there was ever a time to hold onto something, this is it. Hold on, dear friends. Hold on.” It’s a beautiful and unusual book, illustrated by the author, offering both laugh-out-loud moments and devastating articulations of humanity’s capacity for horror and grace. It was written in 2022, but it feels like it was written for this moment. Every day, we wake up to jaw-dropping news and to ground that we thought was solid splitting apart under our feet. Knowing where to turn and what to hold onto is an ongoing question. 

In response to our global unsettledness, I find myself holding on, not just to this book, but more broadly to the power of words. I crave the poems of Mary Oliver. I listen on repeat to the turns of phrase my favourite songwriters sing, and how they can capture the smallest insight about our human condition, and the truth of what they offer makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. I wait with anticipation for my preferred podcasters to wrestle through the week’s political and cultural events from a variety of deliberately partisan perspectives. When so many of our greatest collective challenges right now are dictated by the made-up late-night ramblings of a man with both far too much power and way too many insecurities, I crave the offering of words that feel honest, real, candid and complex. I want to listen to voices that eschew easy answers and are grounded in the humility of knowing that this one piece of perspective is exactly that, one piece. 

I have a number of very wise and inspiring friends who don’t believe in God and aren’t part of a church. I watch the way that they build meaningful community around them and talk about discerning their direction and a calling to service that sounds like they are speaking about the same Spirit I know and seek to follow. Whatever language they do or don’t use, I am blessed to have them in my life. And also, I only know how to have a whisper of a chance of figuring out how to hold on because of the community of the church, called to be the life of Jesus.  

Our prayers, our songs, our stories, all of those treasured words passed along down the generations, provide a landing place, a centre. It’s these words, and it’s what holds them together and what holds us together. I want our voices raised in praise and honesty, the thunder of the organ, and also the quietest moments—the pinprick sounds of a candle being lit, of knees bowing in prayer, of intentional spacious breathing. It all works together to form our observance, shaping us to be people who observe—able to notice and see and pay attention, not just to hold on, but to live. I want, challenging as it is, the baked-in premise of what it is to be a church (even if we aren’t always perfect in living it out). We’re not self-made designer communities, but rather a patchwork quilt of the walking wounded who have been stitched together only by the commonality of having been touched in some consequential way by God’s love. And if that is true, then we should be able to talk about hard things and to choose to listen more than we draw conclusions. Compassion, rather than condemnation, should be our default.  

The back cover of Kalman’s book offers a final teasing thought: “Along with holding on, you could also LET GO. But that is another book.” There is a lot that we’re all holding onto right now, holding on for dear life. We’re holding on to hope, to one another, to the promise of God’s nearness, to sanity, to peace, to the ability to choose goodness and beauty in the face of the world’s chaos. And at the same time that we need to figure out how to keep holding on, surely we also need to figure out how to let go, how to shake off the heaviness, how not to feel so trapped by the machinations of powers beyond our control, how to be able still to see the glimmers of light on the horizon.  

I am convinced more than ever that God gives us the gift of community exactly so that we can stand in defiance of the darkness and division, and it is in just this, just showing up for one another, that God most powerfully draws close. It will be together, dear friends, that we will hold on and let go and know goodness and be blessed and blessing.