Practice Dying Every Day

We are Moving

We are moving from Cleveland to New York City to be closer to family. That involves a lot of letting go. Letting go makes us grieve. That grief feels like dying. Moving on means heading into an unknown future with hope. That feels like dying, too.


Letting Go

We have to let go of our house. That will be tough. Henri Nouwen said giving people room to be themselves is the essence of hospitality. Jacquie built that philosophy into the floor plan of this house. This house makes it easy to be ourselves and to enjoy others being themselves.

We will be letting go of our home’s location. We are a seven-minute walk from a five-star library. We are a twenty-minute walk from a theater that shows films you cannot find at the multiplex. That walk takes longer if you stop to look in the window of the Heights Arts store next door. Our community is full of glassblowers, painters, weavers, photographers, jewelers, and other artists. Their work is on display there.

We will be letting go of our physicians at the Cleveland Clinic. It takes longer to walk from our car to the doctor’s office than it takes to drive from our house to the parking garage. My hearing loss has kept us from enjoying America’s best orchestra. But we do spend a day or two each month at the nation’s second-best art museum. (Free admission, by the way). Both world-class institutions are ten minutes away. We live next door to the world’s largest supply of fresh water. Cleveland, unlike New York,  is completely insulated from rising sea levels.

Our home equity will only cover the down payment on a place in Queens with one-third of the floor space we now have. So, we are letting go of books, tools, small appliances, closets full of extra clothes, a table saw (want to buy a table saw?).

Most of all, we will miss our wonderful neighbors. Some of our closest friends live within walking distance.

It is hard to let go of home and our stuff, our neighborhood and friends. But it is even harder to let go of my old self.

A few days ago, I pulled out file boxes that contained sermons and notes from forty-five years of ministry. I have other boxes of mementos from each of the six churches that I served. What to do? This is where I spent my life. It was my purpose, my calling. How could I throw me away?

Actually, if I can throw “me” away, it cannot be me. Who, after all, is deciding to throw it away? If I am the one making that decision, then how can I be throwing myself away?

I may be throwing away what I used to do. I may be throwing away a lot of stuff that I thought was “me” at the time. But I am in charge and I am the one deciding that I will not be moving a lot of this stuff into my new future.


Throwing Away the Old Future

The truth is, I am not throwing away the past. The past is past. I had those experiences, I did those things, I related to those people. I cannot change that past even if I wanted to.

I am throwing away my future, or the future I thought I would have before we decided to move.

One of those futures was based on the irrational belief that the old days would come back again. My father and grandfather sold our workhorses before I started school, but they kept the sleigh and most of the horse-drawn farm implements. I suppose there was not much of a market since all their neighbors were moving to tractors, too. But I also suspect that they wanted to be ready just in case tractors did not live up to the salesman’s promises.

I realize that I had an irrational belief that those sermons would be part of that future. Suppose retirement did not work out for me and I had to go back to preaching every Sunday? Just bringing that thought to the front of my mind helped me see how crazy it was.

We will be giving up another kind of future, however, that was reasonable and probable. For example:

• In July, we almost always camped at a campsite called “Heart’s Content” in the Allegheny National Forest. If we were not moving, I would be looking forward to camping there this year.
• Every August, I celebrated my birthday with friends across the street and from the next block. One of them also has an August birthday. If we weren’t moving I would be doing that again.
• Every Labor Day weekend, our neighborhood holds the world’s best block party. If we weren’t moving I would be looking forward to that party.

Practice Dying

This is where our move becomes a way to practice dying. When we die, we not only have to let go of all our relationships and our stuff, we let go of our future, too.  That’s why letting go of such a large part of my future now feels like dying.

But, I have done this before.

Two years ago, I decided to retire. For forty-five years, I knew where I would be and what I would be doing on Christmas Eve and Easter morning. I also knew where I would be and what I would be doing every Sunday morning. Every week, every month, and every year had a predictable rhythm.

Then I retired. I not only did not know what I would be doing on Sunday morning, I was also asking, what will I do this week? Today? Right now? That change felt like death.

So how did I find the courage to retire? It was because I had practiced other small deaths.

In those forty-five years, I moved from one church to another five times. Five times, I was pastor of one church one Sunday and then became pastor of a new church on the next Sunday. One Sunday, I had looked out on a congregation in which I knew everyone’s name and everyone knew me. A fair number of them even liked me. The next Sunday, I looked out on a congregation in which I knew no one’s name. They did not know me and the jury was definitely out on whether or not they would like me.

I could go through those small “deaths” because I had “died” over and over again as I grew up.

• My preschool-self died when I attended my first day of Kindergarten.
• My preadolescent-self died as those hormones began to kick in.
• My teenage-self died the night of my high school graduation.

Whoever “I ” am made it through those changes to my body, environment, and identity, even when those changes felt like death.

But looking back, they all felt like rising to a new life, as well.

These experiences, I now realize, were a way to practice dying. I was letting go of past routines and relationships, and of the future I thought I was going to have. That is what my final death will be like.

On the other side of those “deaths”, I always found new places, new relationships, and new routines.  This person that I continue to call “me” always found a new future on the other side of all those losses. I hope death will be like that, too.

Trusting the Future

In the end, faith is about trusting the new future enough to let go of the old future. We do not have to let go of our memories.  But we do have to let go of the old future.

This is not optional. Even if we stay put, our bodies change, our relationships change. The world changes and we have to adjust to what we often call the “New Normal”.

I have no idea what the new normal will be for us six months from now. I do not know who Jacquie and I will hang out with, where we will go to church, where we will buy groceries. I only believe that it will be OK.

So also, I have no idea what lies on the other side of the end of my life. I only believe it will be OK.