“Minding Our Own Business”

Sunday, 21 January 2007

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

My heart is full with that list of sorrows and joys in our community this morning.  And sometimes when my heart is full I turn to a poet who many of you have heard me turn to before, to a poem that some of you will find familiar, a poem that ministers to me when my heart is full, and a poem that I think will lead us into the difficult sermon that I have to preach this morning.  It’s by Mary Oliver and it’s called “In Black Water Woods.”

            Look, the trees are turning

               their own bodies into pillars of light

            Are giving off the rich fragrance

               of cinnamon and fulfillment,

            The long tapers of cattails

               are bursting and floating away

            Over the blue shoulders of the ponds,

            And every pond, no matter what its name is,

               is nameless now.

            Every year everything

               I have ever learned I my lifetime

            Leads back to this:  the fires

               and the black river of loss

            Whose other side is salvation,

               whose meaning none of us will ever know.

            To live in this world you must be able

               to do three things:

            To love what is mortal;

            To hold it against your bones

               knowing your own life depends on it;

            And, when the time comes to let it go,

               to let it go.

Frederick Buechner was living a parent’s worst nightmare:  His child was dying and there was nothing he could do.  “What happened was this,” he begins in his memoir, Telling Secrets.  “One day, one of our daughters began to stop eating.  At first there was nothing scary about this.  It was just the sort of thing any girl who thought she’d be prettier if she lost a few pounds might do:  Nothing for breakfast, maybe a carrot or a diet Coke for lunch.  For supper, perhaps a little salad with low-calorie dressing.  As months went by, it did become scary.  She got more and more thin ‘til she began to have the skull face and fleshless arms and legs of a victim of Buchenwald.  No rational argument, no dire medical warning, no pleading or cajolery or bribery would make this young woman I loved eat normally again, but only seemed to strengthen her determination not to.  Finally, when she had to be hospitalized, a doctor called one morning to say that unless they started feeding her against her will, she would die.”

Frederick Buechner is careful in his memoir not to tell his daughter’s story because it’s not really his to tell.  What he does share, though, is his own story, the story of how his daughter’s illness affected him and what he learned about love from living through it.  I share his story with you because I believe his lessons offer us a difficult but necessary piece of wisdom.  Listen to what he says.

“My anorectic daughter was starving to death, but without knowing it, so was I.  She had given up food.  I had virtually given up doing anything in the way of feeding myself humanly.  To be at peace is to have peace inside yourself more or less in spite of what is going on outside yourself.  In that sense I had no peace at all.  If on one particular day she took it into her head to have a slice of toast, say, with her dietetic supper, then I was in seventh heaven.  If on some other day she decided to have no supper at all, I was in hell.  I choose the term ‘hell’ with some care,” he adds.  And I should add here that Buechner is a minister, so he is particular about his theological terms.  “Hell,” he says, “is where there is no light and only darkness, and I was so caught up in my fear for her life, which had become in a way my life too, that none of the usual sources of light worked anymore, and light was what I was starving for.” 

Buechner had lost his sense of inner peace.  He’d lost his center.  His soul was starved and he’d begun to depend on his daughter to provide for him what his soul no longer could.  This may sound familiar to some of us.  How many times have we relied on the love of another for our own sense of love and inner peace?  Yet in Buechner’s case, his dependence on his daughter proved a deadly combination for her illness.  Anorexia nervosa, you see, is the complicated result of a young person’s conflicting desires to be, on the one hand, secure and loved and, on the other hand, free and autonomous.  Buechner and his daughter were caught in a deadly spiral dance; the more his daughter refused to eat, the more Buechner clung to her.  The more he clung, the more she sought autonomy by refusing to eat.

Buechner himself couldn’t see this fatal pattern, so finally the doctor stepped in and said to him, “We know this is hard for you, but you need to stay away.  You’re making things worse,” they said to him.  Can you imagine saying that to a child’s parents?  The doctor’s words were like a slap in the face to Buechner, as if they’d said to him “Mind your own business, Pop!”  But his daughter’s business was his business, thank you very much.  At first Buechner was offended, but later came to hear the doctor’s words as a prophetic teaching to him.  Soon, the phrase, “mind your own business” became for Buechner a kind of shorthand for the lessons in love that he learned from his daughter’s illness. 

Now I know that “Mind Your Own Business” is a strange title for a sermon about love.  Generally, speaking, in common parlance, the phrase means “don’t stick your nose into matters that don’t concern you.”  And at first glance, this secular proverb seems to have no religious leg to stand on.  After all, the word “religion” means literally “to bind together again.”  Over and over the great religions of the world affirm the unity and the interdependence of the human family.  In such a world there’s no such thing as one’s own business.  We are our brother’s keeper; our sister’s business is our own.  Certainly our daughter’s is.  Yet, ironically, when he looked back on his daughter’s death struggle, Buechner found wisdom in these words.  “Mind your own business.”  They became for him a mantra of sorts, an encouragement to pay attention to his own soul, to be mindful, in the Eastern sense of that word, if you will.  To pay attention, to be attentive, to the quality of his spirit.  It became a plea for groundedness and centeredness.  Looking back, Buechner realized how his lack of attention to his own inner life left him with few resources to support his family when their lives began to unravel.

“Minding your own business,” he writes, “means pay mind to your own health and wholeness, both for your own sake and for the sake of those you love.  Take care of yourself so you can take care of them.  A bleeding heart,” he said, “is no help to anybody if it bleeds to death.”

“How easy it is to write those words,” Buechner reflects; “how impossible it was to live them.”  Many of us, I’m afraid, find it difficult to attend to our spirits when things are going well.  Too often, and I can speak from experience here, spirituality falls further down on our “to do” list than even going to the gym.  And that’s not even that high for me at least.  Yet the quality of attention we pay to our souls in the good times becomes an invaluable resource for us when the going gets tough.  I define spirituality as the cultivation of a relationship with the source of love in our lives.  For some of us that source is God; others of us call that source by a different name.  Regardless of what you call it, that source is our center.  It’s our home, our rock; it’s what grounds our lives in love no matter the trials and tribulations of our lives.  It is an ever-replenishing fount of love.  Without it we don’t have any to give and, especially in a crisis, we find ourselves wanting.

So yes, mind your own business.  Tend to your soul and to your spirit.  You know, Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love our neighbors as ourselves.  I think that’s an interesting formulation of his teaching.  It’s a curious way of putting it.  He could have just told us to love our neighbor, but I think he realized that a healthy self-love is a prerequisite to loving others.  “A bleeding heart is of no help if it bleeds to death.”

So tending to his own spirit was the first lesson that his daughter’s illness taught Fred Buechner.  He could understand that; after all, he was a minister.  The second lesson, however, he found harder to take, and I found difficult too.  When the doctors told Buechner, in effect, to mind his own business, to step away from his daughter, part of what they were trying to suggest was that his love for his daughter would be better expressed in this situation if he restrained that love, if he pulled it back just a little bit.  Just at the time that she appeared to need it most.  How do you tell a parent to do that?  “To live in this world,” writes Mary Oliver, “you must be able to do three things:  to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends upon it, and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” 

For most of us, I think, the holding on comes easier than the letting go.  I know because I’ve heard enough of your stories to know that many of us struggle with this very question.  Like Frederick Buechner, we have a loved one who is in dire need, who is calling out for our help.  Yet something deep within us knows, or believes deep down, that perhaps what they need most is for us to step back just a bit, to give them a little bit more space to find their salvation on their own.  This is, perhaps, the hardest form of love that we can imagine, to step back when everything about our instincts for love tells us to rush in. 

I see this especially with parents of adolescents and young adult children, trying to discern how much freedom and autonomy to give their children.  I see this struggle also with people who live with those suffering with addictions, who struggle with whether their love for someone itself becomes a form of enabling.  Frederick Buechner calls the kind of love that he’s talking about here the kind of love that he learned when he struggled with his daughter’s illness, “a passionate restraint.”  A passionate restraint.  It takes a great deal of strength and self-differentiation to love with such restraint.  Because our loved ones will often see that restraint as a form of abandonment and it may even feel like that to us, too.  Furthermore, we might discover, as Buechner did, that our love for the other is not wholly self-giving, that we depend on that love for our own sense of inner peace and wholeness.

So what does letting go look like?  Well, it doesn’t mean withholding one’s love from the other.  It doesn’t mean that.  It means continuing to love, but restraining that love.  The best image I can come up with is not particularly eloquent, but it seems to work, at least for me.  I grew up spending a lot of time around lakes and swimming pools and as a kid we were taught that if a person was drowning in a pool or in the lake, we were not to jump in to try to save that person because the likelihood was that the struggling person would take us down with them, that we would both drown.  Instead, we were to stand firmly on dry land and to reach out to the person with a strong arm, or with a life preserver, or with a lifeguard’s stick and then, because we were firmly grounded, we could pull them to safety.  I like this image because it emphasizes both the necessity for our own groundedness, our own centeredness, and also because it recognizes the truth that sometimes when we create a greater distance between ourselves and our loved ones we’re actually loving them more.

Buechner’s daughter was saved.  What saved her, he believes, is that when she was finally hospitalized for her anorexia, it happened to be in a hospital three thousand miles away from her father, where he couldn’t overwhelm her with his love, where her doctors could lavish upon her a more appropriate and restrained form of love.  “Little by little,” he writes, “the young woman I loved began to get well, emerging out of the shadows, finally, as strong and sane and wise as anybody I know.”

“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:  to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends upon it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”  I often wish that the poem had another line, a line that explains for us when we should hold and when we should let go.  In the absence of such hard, fast rules, we are left with our faith and with our wisdom, our faith that just as we have within ourselves a replenishing source of love, so too do our loved ones who struggle, a faith that they, in partnership with that replenishing love, can discover the means to their own salvation when all our efforts have failed to help them.  And wisdom.  For if loving means holding on and letting go, it is my wish that, when it is necessary for us to hold on, that we have the strength to hold on.  And when it’s necessary for us to let go, we find the courage to let go, and that all of us, with prayer, discover the wisdom to know the difference.

Amen.