Love means letting go

‘True love leaves no traces,’ sang Leonard Cohen in one of his many hymns of praise to ‘free love’. Great songwriter that he was, it’s not hard to see how the free love craze appealed to a male poet who, in his thirties, became a counter-cultural pop star, with wealth, adoring young fans, and no need to stay in one place very long. Like other liberation movements it transpired it was liberating for men at women’s expense. As if anticipating this accusation he wrote a song called Paper Thin Hotel, on the ‘lost’ album Death of a Ladies Man. It finds our protagonist in a hotel room next door to his lover, hearing her having sex with another man. This turns out to be a spiritual revelation for our Len, who sings ‘I stood there with my ear against the wall, I was not seized by jealousy at all, In fact a burden lifted from my soul, I heard that love was out of my control’. Perhaps the burden that lifted was the nagging feeling that he might owe some version of loyalty to his latest conquest (sorry, free love match.)

In later years he practiced Buddhism, (but still considered himself religiously Jewish) while retaining his belief in Free Love. When asked to comment on the heartbreak caused by his leaving of one time lover Marianne Ihlen, (the inspiration for 'So Long, Marianne'), he leaned on his Buddhist perspective to say 'There are no doers, only deeds done.'

Cohen continued to advocate a gospel of Free Love long after everyone else had understood its dark side. The idea that you should have no hold whatsoever on the person you love was, and is, a cruel parody of something that is actually true about love: the great truth that, in the end, love must let go. It’s not an idea exclusive to Judaeo-Christian thought, but we find it beautifully expressed at various points in the Biblical narrative. It’s not an academic or abstract idea but urgently practical for all of us who read the Bible in order to work out how to live, a big part of which is learning how to die.

We will all die and so will all those we love. This is such a pressing issue and yet we suppress our need to find a way to deal with death’s looming presence. Faced with the certain knowledge that we will both be bereaved, and cause bereavement to others, we are destined to wrestle with two warring passions within love: our instinct to preserve the object of our love, and the necessity of learning to let it go.

We find an extended meditation on the leaving of this life, and the loss of those we love, in John’s

gospel, between chapters 13 and 17. This is Jesus’s long speech to his disciples once he knows that ‘his hour had come’. These four chapters are bittersweet, beautiful, and profound, somehow combining deep theology with raw emotion. All I can say about them is that you should read them, then read them again, and don’t be in too much of a hurry to draw conclusions on the absolute meaning of what you encounter within the text.

It’s in this passage that we come across words made famous in so many funeral readings:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also."

These words hit the spot regardless of the mourner’s beliefs. In that moment of raw grief we respond to them from our gut, without the deadening intervention of the intellect. To be sure, there is much to be said about what these words actually mean, but that can wait for another occasion. In grieving we simply need to hear these words, and to feel their impact.

Notice how, in these verses, it is a dying man who offers words of comfort to others about their own future deaths. To be comforted by the dying is a reality that many of us experience, and a ministry that many of us will offer to others when our time comes.

For Christians, John 13-17 is the ultimate text about letting go of those we love. Within the Easter cycle these verses correspond with Maundy Thursday, part of Holy Week, the day before Good Friday, which commemorates the crucifixion. I have, in the past, held Maundy Thursday services with a focus on bereavement, not just the loss of Jesus, but the way in which all of us are fated to live out the long goodbye with loved ones, or to be deprived of it when tragedy strikes suddenly. Congregants brought photos of loved ones that they have lost, and it was always a deeply moving, and profoundly helpful act of worship.

Love has to let go. That is the painful truth that all grieving rituals gradually impress into our hearts and minds until the day comes when the burden of grief is not so heavy. Societies where death is less private and more common are better at grieving than we are, so being more open about death would do us good.

But it would also help if we could acknowledge that letting go is part of love throughout life, not only towards its end. When Jesus says that ‘whoever loses his life for my sake will gain it’ he isn’t just talking about martyrdom and resurrection. The ‘life in abundance’ that he promises his followers is not to be read simply as ‘eternal life’, but a quality of life that comes in a life that makes sacrifices. In its original Greek the New Testament uses two different words for life: bios meaning biological life, and zoe which means divine life. Zoe may be experienced in part in this life, but it comes at a cost. Something substantial must be given up to attain it.

Jesus’s disciples talk of those things they have given up to follow him, and this must mean separation from those they love, as well as the painful loss of some relationships, as a result of their calling. We are not told what it was like for the families of those who left everything to follow Jesus but it’s not hard to guess. And this is the other side of the coin. When young men and women do extraordinary, selfless things with their lives, sometimes moving into harm’s way, they are not the only ones making a sacrifice.

It brings to mind the famous Judgement of Solomon, in 1 Kings 3: 16-28. Two women come to him, both claiming ownership of the same baby. King Solomon, who prayed for, and was granted wisdom from God, rules that the baby will be cut in half and divided between the two women.

One of the women immediately gives up the baby rather than allow this to happen. There’s a variation on this story in The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, in which the two women go into a circle and lay hold of a hand and foot each, and the baby is to be given to the women who successfully wrenches the child from the other woman and out of the circle. As with the judgement of Solomon, the true mother reveals herself by declaring that she would rather lose her child than harm it.

Many parents will recognise the truth of this. Loving your children means letting them go. Not just when they leave home, but time and again when they change as they grow up. True love lets the sweet child go and learns to love the complex adolescent, and so on, throughout life, until the child, now middle aged, learns to accept the decline in their parents, to let go of who they were in order to embrace who they have become. Until one day they must let go of them completely.

One of the finest phrases used in funeral prayers is the pledge to God, ‘We release XXXXX into your arms/presence/care…’ This is the final letting go of a life of sacrificial love, in which we learn again and again that love - true love - holds, and treasures, the other, but also lets them go. True love leaves wounds, but wounds that heal, until finally all we are left with are the traces of true love.