“Let us throw off everything that hinders.”

Hebrews 12:1

If you have not come across Richard Rohr’s writings, I highly encourage you to check him out. I have found his work to be so profound and healing to my soul. I receive his daily meditations and this is one below is one of my all time favorites. It speaks about the importance of letting go. Please read this and may it speak deep truths to your heart like it did mine.

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As you have often heard me say, if you do not transform your pain, you will most assuredly transmit it. Healthy religion on the practical level tells us what to do with our pain—because we will have pain. We can’t avoid it; it’s part of life. If we’re not trained in letting go of it, transforming it, turning crucifixion into resurrection, so to speak, we’ll hand it off to our family, to our children, to our neighborhood, to our nation.

The art of letting go is really the art of survival. We have to let go so that as we age, we can be happy. Yes, we’ve been hurt. Yes, we’ve been talked about and betrayed by friends. Yes, our lives didn’t work out the way we thought they would. Letting go helps us fall into a deeper and broader level at which we can always say “Yes.” We can always say, “It’s okay, it’s all right.” We know what lasts. We know who we are. And we know we do not want to pass our pain on to our children or the next generation. We want to somehow pass on life.

This means that the real life has started now. It’s Heaven all the way to Heaven and it’s Hell all the way to Hell. We are in Heaven now by falling, by letting go, and by trusting and surrendering to this deeper, broader, and better reality that is already available to us. We’re in Hell now by wrapping ourselves around our hurts, by over-identifying with and attaching ourselves to our fears, so much so that they become our very identity. Any chosen state of victimhood is an utter dead end. Once you make that your narrative, it never stops gathering evidence about how you have been wronged by life, by others, and even by God.

Maybe this is why scholars have said two-thirds of the teaching of Jesus is, in one form or another, about forgiveness. Forgiveness is simply the religious word for letting go. Eventually, it feels like forgiving Reality Itself for being what it is.