Skip to main content

Detaching

...I'll learn ya!" Brer Rabbit yelled. He took a swing at the cute little Tar Baby and his paw got stuck in the tar.
"Lemme go or I'll hit you again," shouted Brer Rabbit. The Tar Baby, she said nothing.
"Fine! Be that way," said Brer Rabbit, swinging at the Tar Baby with his free paw. Now both his paws were stuck in the tar, and Brer Fox danced with glee behind the bushes.
"I'm gonna kick the stuffin' out of you," Brer Rabbit said and pounced on the Tar Baby with both feet. They sank deep into the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was so furious he head-butted the cute little creature until he was completely covered with tar and unable to move.

We form an attachment when we develop the belief that our happiness depends on a particular person or a particular thing. Once the attachment is formed we are subject to two powerful emotional tangles. On the one hand there is a temporary buzz of pleasure whenever the object of our attachment is attained. On the other there is a sense of  fear that we will lose the object of our attachment. These sensations, in combination with the myriad other attachments to which we are prone dominate and control our lives. When we realise that this attachment is doing us no good at all we quite naturally want to get rid of it and try to push it away, and we learn our first valuable lesson about de-attaching namely, that as it is with tar babies, so it is with attachments. We screw up our reserves of courage, we resolve to deny ourselves, we push and shove. So, along with the pleasure, and the fear there is now a whole set of new emotions concerned with rejecting, disciplining, denying - and of course the inevitable guilt when none of the above seems to quite work. We have, in other words, greatly multiplied the emotional cloud surrounding the object of our attachment and thus increased the degree to which we are glued to it. Rather than the traditional course of discipline, rigour, positive thinking, goal setting, cold showers and all the rest, detachment requires another approach entirely.

In another of his books Anthony De Mello says there are three basic principles of spiritual life: 1) Awareness; 2) Awareness; and 3) Awareness.. Detaching requires the application of all three.

Firstly we need to be aware of ourselves.  We need to be aware that we have developed a preposterous belief, namely that without the object of our desire we cannot be happy. We need to be aware of how this belief has shaped our actions and thinking. We need to be aware of the amount of emotional investment, both positive and negative we have made in this attachment, and the extent to which this attachment has limited and defined us.

Further we need to be aware of the thing or person to which we have become attached. Because habitually we see this thing or person through the lens of our own attachment it will not be easy for us to get a realistic picture of their reality. As we see them as they are the person or thing is seen as incapable of bearing the load of expectation we have of them. As we relinquish our desire for what we imagine she/ he/ it can give us, we are, oddly, free to enjoy them perhaps for the first time ever.

And further still, we need to be aware of the nature of our attachment itself. As we become more realistically aware of the object of our attachment we can sometimes take the step of discerning more accurately what is is that we think we so desperately need. Is it the desired person or the intimacy/ affection/ esteem we imagine we may obtain from them? Is it the alcohol or anaesthesia? Is it money or the security we imagine may accrue to money? Is it the desire to help or a need to be significant?  And understanding the need will help us to the realisation that the need itself is illusory and a product of our own programming.

The attachment can be thought of as a gesture of clinging. To get rid of it requires not that we push and shove and fight, but merely that we open our arms and let it drift away. It is so simple, but so difficult. For me the daily practical practice in the art of release that comes in silent meditation has been crucial but there is no denying the size of the task that lies ahead if we truly wish to take up our cross and follow into resurrection and freedom.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes
Wynston said…
Should be compulsory reading for all within the diocese!
Elaine Dent said…
I remember that a strange thing happened to me while leading worship a year ago (I think it was Lent). I suddenly became excruciatingly aware throughout the one whole service (and only that one) how attentive I was to how people were reacting to me, what they might think of what I was saying in the sermon, or of how I was praying, etc., etc. It was absolutely revealing of how attached I was to what people thought. For one service God lifted the veil from my eyes. The revelation about myself was both humiliating and grace-filled. I now own my attachment, although the same agonizing clarity has not ever been revealed in quite so stark a way. (Thank God.) It continues, however, to be one of things I must pray and wrestle with. I notice how it blocks what God calls me to do (as in 'what will people think?'). But I am more aware. God managed that much!
Kelvin Wright said…
One of the things that I am noticing this lent particularly, is the close coinherence of death and life; how the grace of God comes often as pain, that is a death, but one necessary for our growth into life. Thanks for this poignant and helpful comment.
Kelvin Wright said…
...and also, thanks for this particularly helpful and succinct example of what an attachment is.
Elaine Dent said…
And detachment is a death. Letting go is a death, but for the sake of new life, of course. Just as we struggle with attachments individually, so do our congregations. The second December issue of Christian Century had an article entitled "Dark Night of the Church" which talks about the spiritual growth that can be happening during this in between time when our programs and old ways of doing things aren't saving us anymore. The article goes on to say that the kind of pastoral leadership that may be needed during this time is more of a spiritual guide/director. Good spiritual guides are sensitive to listening for and naming attachments.
Kelvin Wright said…
Elaine, this is such a helpful observation. In fact, helpful is hardly the word. Congregations have attachments! It's forehead slapping, why on earth haven't I joined those particular dots before, YES! Of Course! time.

And the concept of spiritual direction for congregations. It's an idea I have heard before, but why haven't I applied it? Especially when it promises to be such a fruitful model?

So....

What to do next.....?
Elaine Dent said…
You and the Spirit will think of something, of course.

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old